ACJ’s First Dance Class

Happy Leap Day everyone! I have learned a lot about this weird day. Apparently this is the one day deemed acceptable for women to ask men to marry them (who knew?) and if you’re pregnant and you’re due for February 29 you have to decide whether your child’s birthday will be February 28^th or March 1^st. Again who knew? Because I sure didn’t. Anyways useless information for you.

This post is really about the start of something new (cue High school musical soundtrack). Too bad it’s starting less than four weeks before I leave. Oh well, at least it’s starting. I think I’ve mention this before but last term we were supposed to start dance club. I honestly can’t remember why it didn’t start but for whatever reason it didn’t. Then this term rolled around and I gotta be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. I was afraid of failing and also not sure if I wanted to put more work into the school. That sounds incredibly selfish but with the load I already have I’m exhausted. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it, let alone be good at it.

Today proved that all my concerns were unwarranted (sorta). I was exhausted especially since I also had Nia today but the class itself rocked! Now let me first say that I had help, A LOT of help. On Sunday when I was trying (yet again) to choreograph the moves to at least one song (how hard could it be?), I asked Nadia one of the teaching volunteers to help me. She agreed and then I found out that Megan another teaching volunteer took dance in high school. Hello, I think we have a dance team. We spent the next hour or so choreographing an awesome dance routine to Michael Jackson’s Beat It. We didn’t end up choreographing the entire thing but we got halfway through it and the routine is amazing

So today was utter chaos which is to be expected with anything connected to the school. Two of the dancers showed up on time at 1:30 which was impressive. We had to go around to all the Grade 7 classrooms to get the learners. We have 10 learners in all (2 from each class). I wasn’t sure if we were going to have any guys but we have 4 so I think we’re going to try to do a fight scene or do something cool for them.

The dance class itself went really well. Megan was amazing. She’s taken classes before while my history with dancing is very informal. I’ve only taken a few YMCA dance classes (zumba) and then of course Nia which I’ve been taking for a while now here. So basically it was all of Megan. She lead us through a warm-up and stretches and when the kids heard Waka Waka, they went crazy. We may have to do a routine to that too. We taught them a few of the moves from the Beat It dance and we got through a good portion of it before it was time to go. It was kind of hard to do because we were in the GVI classroom. We were supposed to be in the staff which is much bigger but they were doing some presentation in there so we couldn’t. Hopefully next week we’ll be in the staff room and be able to spread out and really move! We have three more weeks to get a routine down and we might even have a performance. Stay tuned for pictures and video updates.