Delaware Valley RSCDS: Teacher Candidates in the Making
A report on the 2000-2001 Candidate Class experience by Sarah McCullough
What does it take to become an RSCDS Teacher Candidate? Why does one become
a Teacher Candidate before becoming a Teacher? In 2000-2001, seven members of the Delaware
Valley Branch learned some of the answers to these questions.
Jim & Lee Reynolds, Bree Humphries, Jesse Ball, Eleanor Mulhern, Seth Major and Sarah
McCullough comprised the Branch's Teacher Candidate class, led by
Geoffrey Selling and Alfred Hurd.
What happens at a Candidate Class?
The class met two Sundays a month starting in September, to learn advanced dancing technique and how to brief dances, as well as teach the 5 dancing steps and umpteen formations required for the exam.
Class begins with a warmup and dance lesson, wherein Geoffrey focuses on shaping up the dancers' footwork, phrasing, handing, and teamwork while working on the finer points of the exam dances.
During a short tea break, Alfred leads discussion about the written homework assignments, which are based on readings from the RSCDS Manual of Scottish Country Dancing and Geoffrey and Cecily Sellings' Handbook for Scottish Country Dancing.
After tea, each dancer takes a turn at teaching
an assigned step and formation lessons to fellow classmates and
"stooges" **. Alfred and Geoffrey act as examiners for the lessons
and provide comments and suggestions after each lesson. Susie Petrov
graciously donates her time to accompany the mock lessons and
impart some of her skill at preparing dancers with a "READY...AND!"
** Stooges are the very kind folk who come to the candidate class and act as
students. At this stage, candidates desperately need people besides themselves to
practice on! Stooges can help to create a lively atmosphere and provide
opportunities for faking dancing faults that the candidates must
learn to recognize. Any level of dancing is welcome.