Pay attention to me, I'm fascinating!

My pal P.V., who is a "Dance Friend", teaches thirty classes/rehearsals/private lessons a week at our dance studio. She has recently been unwell, and consequently unable to teach. This created A Situation. A situation that called for substitute teachers.

On Friday afternoon I got a call from the studio director. "Would you be able to teach P.V.'s Intro to Tap class tomorrow morning?"

"Why, yes," I replied. "Yes, I would."

There followed a flurry of texts back and forth with P.V. getting me the skinny on the kids and what they were working on and appropriate music and so on. There were going to be four of them, and they were keen to do things for themselves, like running the warm up. Okay, cool. You just turn that around and make them teach you how to do it, because "I'm new to your class and I don't know it!" (Which was a bold-faced lie. The tap warm up P.V. uses is exactly the same for all classes, ever, it just gets more complex as technique improves. But the kids were six and didn't know that.) P.V. had a handy list of steps they knew, so I basically had a pre-planned lesson. The biggest concern was the fact that the kids would be coming directly from their Intro to Jazz class, and let's face it, back-to-back 45-minute classes is A Lot when you're small. I was warned that they would either be cranky or crazy.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm grateful that they were crazy. Cranky would have been a lot more difficult to deal with. Crazy at least means that no one cries.

So we did our flaps and our shuffles and our cramp rolls and our punches and our regular and reverse rolls and added hopping and stepping and kept our heels up and talked about clean sounds and for the most part they were engaged. There were only four of them, and going across the floor looked something like me as the mama duck with a bunch of ducklings that had decided to form up like an honor guard instead of follow in a line like Robert McCloskey would have had them do. (Side note--small-small humans have no concept of personal space, like, AT ALL. I think this must not develop until they become medium-small humans.)

The had A Lot To Say, and I don't think they stopped giggling EVER, but in their defense, I was only compelled to bring out "Pay attention to me, I'm fascinating!*" once toward the end of class when they were clearly done with dancing and wanted to discuss whatever Important Six Year Old Business they happened to have, thank you very much.

All in all, we had a reasonably good time. They got a class, I got to dust off my teacher skills, all was right with the world.

And then I went home and had to take a NAP, because holy cats, small humans are EXHAUSTING.

 

*Seriously. Try this sometime. It works on grown-ups, too. Everyone expects "Shh!" and "Listen up!" and "Quiet Coyote" or whatever it is they do in school now. Just like the Spanish Inquisition, no one expects you to use that same volume to state that you are fascinating and therefore everyone should be listening to you. I stole this tactic from one of the MFA students at UC Irvine who taught one of my speech classes or something. It has served me well.