Quote:
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Originally Posted by MartinHarper Sorry, my sentence was ambiguous. Let me clarify.
"Fewer advanced men in the beginner class -> less intimidation, less daunting for the beginner men". |
This is piffle too.
Beginner men aren't paying any attention to the other blokes in the class. If they've gone with a mate and are next to them in the class then maybe they'll be aware of how one another is getting on, purely from a competitive point of view.
But beginner men, for the most part, are fully occupied with doing the class, and don't have the spare capacity to be intimidated by someone that knows what they're doing somewhere else in the room.
Learning new stuff is difficult. It requires application. Some people are prepared to 'go with' their feelings of inadequacy while they're still in the 'complete muppet' phase, and some aren't. (I wasn't - I was so rubbish in my first class that I didn't go back for six months
)
So if there's any scope for encouraging people in that very early 'god i can't do this I must be the crappest dancer in the room' phase, it's in reassuring them that it is possible to get beyond that feeling.
As I said, I can well imagine that for a beginner, feeling foolish and uncoordinated, watching more accomplished people
in the freestyle later might make them feel even more foolish, but that's life, unfortunately. We have to do all we can to encourage people through that phase, but there's a limit to how much it's possible - or even desirable - to nanny people through difficult feelings.