Dance teacher´s year is completed

Finally it is here! Summer. I say I love every season as dearly as the next one, the best one is always the one at hand. But there is something about summer and during the last couple of years it has been such joy to have long warm summer months even here in the upmost north.

On Friday I had my last exam of philosophy for this semester so finally school is done for a while. Then today it was the big spring performance of the dance school where I teach. It was good to see with which enthusiasm the dance pupils, from the youngest ones all the way through the adult new beginners were preparing for their couple of minutes on stage, getting ready and remembering their steps and talking exitedly while the time for them to step out on the stage got closer. I am always so exited for my own pupils, I barely get nervous if I myself have to dance on stage, but when it´s my pupils, I feel like mother proud of her little ones trying their own wings...

And sure they were all so good! I was proud to give Jyväskylä its first Irish dancers and what kind of dancers they were! At this point one forgets all the desperate hours of trying to figure out how to fit some 10-20 dancers of almost as many different levels into a two-minute piece so that everyone feels good about it and can show the best they can. Try to do it in an-hour-once-a-week -pace where there is never a time that everyone would be at the same time at class. And try to fit in all the different steps and techniques you have taught them during the year and make it all go smoothly and be a good wholesome performance and even have some energy to think and put some of your own choreographic ideas and ambitions into the dance... It is all possible and every teacher in the dance school I work in had managed to do it once again, many of them numerous times. Best feeling is, when it´s all done and you can just admire your
dancers flying about on stage. They are proud to show what they have learned from you. And you are just so proud to watch them manage on their own the steps they only yesterday needed your help with. The work in dance training is never complete, one can always get better but there are times when one has to stop and see where the road has led so far. Dance school spring shows are exactly those moments. At classes you can correct your pupils over and over again, that is your job after all, but on that day you only encourage them with smiles and "you´ll be fine"´s and you feel relieved. Another piece of your work has been done.

Teaching is lovely work and gives much more than it takes but still... thank you for the summer holidays of dance schools.