[Tango-L] Technical vs Sensual - Where are the Engineers from?

[Bruce Stephens]

"Jay Rabe" <jayrabe at hotmail.com> writes:

[...]

> It's well established that people have their own particular learning
> style.

Is it?

> Educators and psychologists identify visual, verbal (analytical),
> and kinesthetic. A previous post was entirely correct that people
> will learn fastest when the information is presented to them to
> accomodate their personal learning style.

Is that really well established?  My suspicion is that almost everyone
can benefit from a variety of approaches, and that teachers who always
use a wide variety will tend to teach better than those who use a few.
Regardless of who their students are.

Briefly quoting a 2005 Demos report
<http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/aboutlearning/>:
    Third, some teachers, despite the best of intentions, are using
    learning styles in ways that constitute poor professional
    practice. For example, it is sometimes claimed that learning
    styles are largely fixed and innate. This belief – which is
    curiously reminiscent of now largely abandoned notions of fixed
    and inherited intelligence – can lead teachers to label students
    as having a particular learning style and so to provide materials
    and sources that are appropriate to that style. Students may then
    come to internalise this label and think of themselves as a
    certain type of learner who should concentrate on this diagnosed
    style. In our view, this is poor professional practice that can
    damage a student’s learning and development.  Whilst is may be
    true that some learners have a dominant learning style, a good
    education does not limit them to that style or type, but ensures
    that students have opportunities to strengthen the other learning
    styles.

> But the clarification I want to make is that there's a difference
> between Learning style, and Dancing style. Does anyone disagree that
> tango is best done when analytical thought is suspended, for both
> the leader and follower - when everything in your awareness is
> feeling and emotion? I learned tango analytically, learning the
> 8-count basic and progressively more complicated step patterns,
> because that's the way tango was taught here 8 years ago.

The teacher I most admire (well, admired, since she no longer teaches,
or dances, as far as I know), taught in what seemed to me to be a
beautifully analytic way.  But she didn't teach the 8 count basic
(well, not to beginners).  She taught walking, changing weight (so you
could avoid bumping in to someone in front), stepping to the side, the
cross (explaining exactly how it worked), and so on.  Always
explaining why things worked, why they're good to do, using analogies,
demonstrating, demonstrating errors (so you could see why some things
didn't work), and so on.

> But I can tell you I distinctly remember the moment, about a year
> and a half into my tango career, when I started really dancing,
> without thinking about what I was doing. That's the goal, to be able
> to just dance without thinking about it. But everyone takes their
> own path to get there.

Yeah, but I'm not sure that requires a whole lot of difference in
teaching.  I suspect a variety of approaches works best for everyone.
Including analytic explanation, and including concrete "you should
have turned a little more just then, because ..." advice, but I
suspect precise advice like "turn 270 degrees here" and the like isn't
very useful---tango's surely fuzzier than that, where I need to be
depends on the details of where my partner is (not where she "should"
be, but where she in fact is).  

Trying to "make things simpler to begin with" by giving concrete step
patterns and things, let alone trying to make them "precise", strikes
me as unlikely to be the best way to teach anyone---especially
engineers.  

Better to make sure you teach enginners why things are the way they
are, and (when things can be different) why and how they can be
different: teach them how to take things apart, and how to put them
back together.  And, sure, specific patterns of steps that work well.

And, of course, leaders should learn how to follow.  Maybe not
brilliantly, but well enough so that we can begin to understand what
the attraction of following good leaders is (and to try to capture
aspects of that in our leading).  Don't know how to make that happen
more often, though.

It was easy enough for me, because all the teachers I knew recommended
it, and I was mostly learning in regular private lessons anyway, so it
was straightforward enough to start learning to follow as well as to
lead.  Trying to learn in classes (by following other leaders who also
haven't quite got it) seems likely not to work that well.