Dear Diane, I’ve been a teacher for two years. I love to dance and I love watching my students grow. But I am extremely uncomfortable selling dance lessons. Our students are treated like walking wallets. The sales procedure at our studio requires we spend part of every lesson selling set packages of lesson plans, regardless…
Dear Diane, I’ve been taking ballroom dance lessons from “Joe” for two years. I had never danced before but Joe was a kind and supportive teacher, and pretty soon I fell in love with ballroom dancing. Now dancing is my life! I take four private lessons a week and study ballet and yoga as well….
Dear Diane, One of the students in my group class has a very embarrassing problem and I’m not sure what to do about it. Several of the female students in my Beginning Social Dance have told me that one of their classmates, “James”, has an offensive body odor that makes dancing with him very unpleasant….
Dear Diane, I’m afraid my best student is becoming an alcoholic and I don’t know what to do. In the past few months, “Dan” has started coming to lessons disheveled and unfocused. He seems uncharacteristically clumsy and I often smell alcohol on his breath. Sometimes he slurs his words and twice he failed to show…
Dear Diane, I recently had a very disturbing encounter with an instructor at my studio, and I’m not sure where to go from here. The problem involved a student Medal Test. My student was scheduled to take his Silver Smooth test during regular business hours. The studio did not have a Medal Test day scheduled…
Dear Diane, I have been a dance teacher for the past four years. I started dancing in my thirties after my divorce and fell in love with the ballroom world. I didn’t have any formal dance background but I enrolled in a teacher training program and was eventually hired as a staff instructor in a…
Dear Diane, My student is a gifted and attractive young woman who is very serious about her dancing. She takes three private lessons from me each week and we compete Pro-Am at the Open Bronze level. Recently, however, a problem has come up that is threatening to derail our work together. I’m afraid that she…
Dear Diane, I have three gentleman students who all share the same problem. No matter how many times I correct them, they constantly look down while they are dancing. These gentlemen have been studying for a long time, but this one problem will not go away. It’s becoming tiresome to repeat “Look up! Look up!…