Teaching Advanced Step

Only about half the usual number of people showed up today at the Palo Alto Family Y for basic step. I asked participants whether anything was going on, and they replied, "Mother's Day!" Doh! Good thing I remembered to send Mom an e-card in advance.

After class I had planned on moseying on over to Japantown to have lunch with hubby, but I decided to check out the sub board first to see who was teaching Advanced Step that day. Nobody was listed but since Ying was teaching the Hi-Lo class just before that, I assumed she was just going to do back-to-back classes. But when I spoke to her, it turned out that nobody was scheduled to teach the class. She was prepared to do it, but could only stay for part of the class so we decided to team teach!

This was a very interesting arrangement because I've only team taught in the past with Terri where I did only the warm-up. This time however, we split the class in half: Ying taught the first half hour, and then I took over midway after she did an interval and put participants in a holding pattern. Side note: at this point, I must rave about Ying. She's an awesome instructor, and even though she had nothing planned, she was able to pull off some amazing routines out of the air. Nobody could tell she hadn't prepared anything in advance. Fortunately, I had subbed an intermediate class at the Embarcadero Y the day before, and just happened to have some more challenging choreography in my back pocket. Actually, I had used this same choreography for my basic step class that morning: the difference was while it took 45 minutes to teach two 64-count combos in the basic step class, it took all of 10 minutes for the advanced steppers to catch on. I'm so glad Ying suggested we team teach and took the first half - otherwise, I would have ran out of material.

In summary, the class worked out surprisingly well, especially since our planning had consisted of a 1 minute discussion just before class. Now that I know I can do it, I'm going to sign up for the Sunday Advanced Step rotation. Yay!