What do you as a caller to help people on the floor who clearly
have no sense of the flow of the dance? (Sometimes you see people who will absolutely fight the flow of the dance to go the wrong way / do the wrong thing; there
are others who are just sufficiently tentative about every figure that they've arrived at this figure late or with no useful momentum, or maybe they take so long to process a prompt that they'e dumped all their momentum by the time they're ready to move. )
How do you help those people?
Who goes through the middle first in a Mad Robin was
the example that made me think about this , but there are also questions like "coming out of the circle left which direction do the larks orbit while the robins allemande and which hand do the robins allemande with?" where answers seem inevitable but aren't.
If you see people who are confused about the answers to these questions where the flow of the dance should answer them there's certainly always the possibility
of continuing to prompt with the answers, but that's not really helping to develop an important skill I think is central to satisfying contra dance.
-- Alan