Heading out to Scotland

Next week Pete & I are students ourselves at the RSCDS Winter School in Pitlochry, Scotland. I am reaaaaalllly looking forward to it. Preparing to leave however has been strangely stressful, giving thought to 3 weeks of dance programmes, (yesterday's + the 2 weeks we are away) preparing the music, allocating 'dance leaders' (so hopefully, everyone still gets a decent chance to dance as well as 'teach'), creating guide sheets for setting up the computer, speaker & an easier to use mic, printing the programmes and whittling down the class 'stuff' to the bare essentials took far longer than expected and wasn't particularly pleasant because it made me realize, yet again, how much we enjoy Tuesday evenings and I don't want to miss any of them! Last night we again had 37 at class - not exactly the same 37 as the week before however and an even larger proportion of 'newer' dancers; this meant that the programme, which actually only contained one 'new' dance - (in fact a very well known 'easy' dance but new to the majority of our class) became a definite challenge - it's very tricky teaching a new dance in the short time we have available, and especially tricky when we have 3 sets up to learn it! Everyone did amazingly well (luckily we still had some great visiting dancers to assist) - next week hopefully everyone will give it another go and it will quickly become a class staple like all the others on the next couple of week's programmes. We also tried having a break half way through the evening, as suggested at the AGM - this seems a good idea although it became over extended by the number of notices I gave out and we ended up having to cut out several dances, in future I'll set a timer so we (i.e. I ) don't get carried away again! I'll be updating this next week from Scotland. :-)