And since I'm on the subject. I spending a lot of time thinking about how to teach dance moves during a workshop and during a walk-thru (they are different.) A couple guidelines: 1: Make it concrete. "Gents look at each other." That's concrete. Look at the place your neighbor is standing -- that's concrete (ish) Imagine a slice of pizza. Nope. 2) Avoid analogies like the plague (you are thinking of a swarm of locusts, but I meant a rat-borne bacterial infection) Ricochet hey is just like a slice of pizza as long as the pizza is six feet in diameter and sliced in fourths rather than sixths or eights. 3) Try to serve up the teaching in bite-sized chunks (ooh--an analogy). Teach half a hey, not a full hey, first, then put two of them together once they've made it through the simpler version. 4) If you've got an unusual mental model of a particular move that really helps you get the feel for it --- FORGET IT! I once watched a caller try to teach a swing by explaining that it's playing air-guitar while riding a skateboard [I am not making this up!] Needless to say the new dancers were confused. 5) Don't teach advanced techniques to new dancers. Forget the buzz step. Forget the twirls. Teach the simplest moves that get the dancer from point A to point B facing the correct direction. Other dancers will take care of adding the refinements (give's them a chance to show off (er... I mean be helpful)) Dale ​

On Jun 18, 2015, at 6:43 AM, Dale Wilson via Callers &lt;callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net&gt; wrote: So do I. And I think Dale says some good stuff. [Dale, I'd be interested if you'd care to amplify on the remark "they are different" and particularly if you have specific examples of what you might do differently when presenting the same figures in a "workshop" situation vs. a walk-through.] Even more concrete would be "Gents *point* at each other". If they point instead of just looking, then * you (the caller) can visually confirm that they have heard and understood your instructions; * dancers who didn't catch your instruction might see what's happening around them and maybe figure out their part in it ("The people around me are doing something; I guess it's time to start paying attention. Oh, someone's pointing at me; I guess I should point back."); and * dancers who did catch your instructions can see whether there are other dancers nearby who aren't on track (e.g., someone who's woolgathering instead of pointing, or someone who's pointing in the wrote direction) and perhaps manage to wave at them and get their attention. [Alas, the idea of "point at <designated person> and *keep pointing* so that the caller and your fellow dancers can see" can be a difficult sell to some dancers. They seem to think that it's enough that they have mentally identified the designated person and to see no value in giving a visual indication of that fact. We've all seen the similar situation where some dancers seem satisfied with mentally identifying their own minor set and don't bother to take and hold hands four for the benefit of those below them.] Despite having heard the pizza slice analogy recommended by a caller whose teaching I generally admire highly, I nonetheless share Dale's skepticism. Dancers who already understand how to do a ricochet hey may recognize that their path vaguely resembles the perimeter of a giant pizza slice. But the ones who need help are the ones who don't already understand--the ones who want to "ricochet" directly back on the same path they came in on or who want to "ricochet" their way to the far side of the set. And I think those people will have no idea what "pizza slice" the caller is talking about. Possibly if you do a demo, and if you can get all the people near the demo set to hunker down or back away so that everybody in the room has a 100% unobstructed view of the action, and if you point at the floor and describe the edges of the imaginary pizza slice as you walk them, maybe that will put the idea across to the people who didn't already get it. (Or maybe not.) But if you just stand on the stage and tell people to imagine a pizza slice, I'm not convinced it will do much to help the dancers who need help most. Yup. In Dale's previous message, he wrote: [that is, you will meet the other gent, not your neighbor] For new dancers, and even for some experienced dancers learning a new figure, the description above is already approaching the limit of how much you can reasonably ask them to visualize ahead of time without moving. In this case, I don't see an easy way to ask for much less visualization into the future, but it's a good thing not to be asking for more. The total amount of action people can hold in their heads goes up if the action can be grouped into familiar chunks. Experienced dancers who already understand heys and ricochets could likely cope with being told something like When I say 'GO' (not now) men will start a hey for four by left shoulder, but when the men meet again in the center, they'll ricochet and swing their neighbors. They might not visualize where everybody would end up as a result of those actions, but they'd understand enough so that you could say "GO" and then prompt them through the actions. If you tried having a typical group of brand new dancers stand and listen while you described the same action by enumerating all the little pieces of the hey, they'd of course be hopelessly overloaded. --Jim

On 6/19/2015 4:04 AM, Tom Hinds via Callers wrote: Why should you be limited to only one way of explaining a move? Demonstrations are incredibly powerful teaching tools. I use demos a lot, mostly for moves that are a little out of the ordinary, or when there's a particular thing in the move that I want to stress. And when the caller is demonstrating, say, a ricochet hey, they're also demonstrating a lot of other things in the process -- good eye contact, hand connections, tracking on the other dancers... Kalia