Coca-Cola and the Tasmanian Devil

Growing up, I was what you might call "academically inclined". At the end of the '88-'89 school year, on her report, my Primary 2 teacher had written something like "Good luck in Primary 4" - my parents thought she'd made an error, but she had faith that I would be better challenged by an additional upgrade. I attended a very competitive secondary school and I continued to place in the top 5 of my class most of the time. I was the typical "good" student: I did my homework, studied, and passed the exams. (I wish I had a school photo of me here, but my mom hasn't yet figured out how to transfer files from her camera to computer and she doesn't own a smartphone...yet)

But...Maths was never my best subject - I managed to scrape by. It wasn't until secondary school that I realised I had a much easier understanding of math when I had a visual representation - imagine my surprise when I excelled in Geometry and Trigonometry, but had difficulty with abstract stuff like Algebra and Calculus. It was the same story in University. It's kind of ironic for someone who majored in Computer Science, whose world revolved around writing software using things that you can't see or touch, yet aren't imaginary. Go figure.


My parents weren't "academics" in the traditional sense, yet they're a couple of the smartest people I know. And my siblings finished secondary school with satisfactory marks. My father was never the booky type - he quit secondary school and always excelled at techy, hands on things like building and repairing machines. He could never fathom how I could curl up in bed with a 300-page novel without pictures. My mom, however is a creative people-person who goes into a major panic if she accidentally hits the wrong button on something and generally shys away from technology. Luckily I inherited their best skills..a creative nerdy tech-loving bookworm Salsera :)

Learning Styles

Of course, there's more than one way to be "smart". Being "book-smart" is the way that schools tend to want us to be. We all know about Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, a standard topic in most secondary school health studies class, which says that "students possess different kinds of minds and therefore learn, remember, perform, and understand in different ways." Similarly there are theories that suggest different styles of learning exist too: verbal, social, physical, etc. It was in secondary school I realised that I retain information the best by writing and re-writing notes - time-consuming but effective. Others preferred to listed to the teacher (but their lack of note-taking was seen as a bad thing), some preferred to read to themselves, some preferred to read aloud, and others preferred to read aloud while pacing the room. Of course, our then-traditional school model was learn what you need to pass the exams - most of it rote knowledge. Proof, because I spent five years with excellent grades in French but can't speak it; I could read, write and conjugate verbs like a beast during a test, though! So, we have all these cool shapes that get squished into standard square holes.


Teaching and learning a social dance, I discovered, is no different. There's good essay about this here. Almost as soon as I started teaching salsa 13 years ago, I encountered adult students who understood and learned things differently. I had students who learned the patterns by watching while standing still, others watched and copied my movements, other liked to listed to verbal cues while going through the movements. There were some that needed to physically be moved into position (I tell them to pretend they're a Barbie or Ken doll), some needed to count because numbers made more sense to them, others hummed the patterns with nonsense sounds (we all have that one instructor that sings the Tumbao: do-do-bap), and a few liked to "sing" the names of the movements using the timing of the movements (for a right turn, they would say 1,2,3...turn, right, around or something like that).


Then, what started as a joke became a foundation for my teaching style today: using analogies drawn from real-life everyday situations to help students understand things. Of course, I explain the hows and whys with lots of clear demonstrations and plenty of opportunity for repetition. But sometimes an analogy is all it took for a room full of lightbulbs to switch on, and provide some comic relief for a potentially confusing situation. For example, when introducing the concept of leading, I use the example of driving: you would turn on your blinker before you make the turn, not during the turn and certainly not after the turn. And if you're too late, you drive around and try again. Again using the driving example to explain a cross-body lead: the ladies are luxury cars - give her the lane (get out of the way by count 3), or you'll crash her into a wall (ie. another couple, or literally a wall). When leading, I tell the guys to hold their frame but be fluid as though you're moving through water. Most of the time it helps, sometimes it doesn't, but at least we can all have a laugh. But...sometimes my analogies are SO random I do wonder where they come from.


Sooooo what does all this have to do with the sticky sweet paint-stripping soft drink and a loveable animated whirlwind of destruction? Unrelated, right? Not in my mind! I was teaching a private lesson recently, and we were working on Coca-Colas (here's an example - we see it at 0:16). My student - let's call him Bob - was getting it slowly but still struggling with timing and footwork. He was getting it slowly, and during the last 20 minutes of our 90-minute lesson, I asked him if he knew about the cartoon Taz from the Looney Toons cartoons. Of course he did! So, I told Bob to imagine that he needs to be close enough to be swept up by the tornado of the spinning lady and use her momentum to help him move into position. Just like the Tasmanian Devil would run around and suck up anything that wasn't bolted down. And just like that (snaps fingers) Bob understood and was able to execute Coca-Colas consistently. Hurrayyy for analogies!


So let's raise a glass of Coke to all the teachers in our lives who used random, funny and often cringeworthy comparisons to help us learn, and all the students who show us that there's more than one way to teach :)

Caramelo Ladies Salsa Student Performance Team
who were constantly subjected to my random analogies