[Tango-L] 6 months

[Stephen.P.Brown@dal.frb.org]

Dear Manuel and others:

Let me clarify that I didn't send students away after 6-8 weeks.  (I have 
more to teach than that.)
I also never taught them everything I know.  I taught them everything that 
I was comfortable teaching, and they could learn.

There is a point at which any true student-teacher relationship must come 
to an end.  The teacher can take the student to the doorway, but it is up 
to the student to step through that doorway and become a dancer.  Perhaps 
taking such a philosophy to an extreme in the few lessons and classes that 
he taught, jazz pianist Bill Evans refused to show his students the chord 
voicings and progressions for which he was renown because he did not want 
to deprive them of the opportunity to discover the knowledge on their own.

By the way, I don't consider someone whose instruction consists soley of 
demonstrating step patterns to be a teacher.  Of course, one can take many 
workshops and classes from StepMeisters, but they aren't really teaching 
tango.  They are simply demonstrating patterns within tango that they 
enjoy using.  Such classes can be an enjoyable diversion, but anyone who 
wants to convert what is taught in such classes into skills useful for 
dancing tango will have to work at it.

With best regards,
Steve

"The greatest ideas you will ever have are the ones that other people 
don't understand."  Craig McCaw