Thank you to my dance teachers
By MOLLY THOMPSON – mmtthompson@ucdavis.edu
It’s no secret that our childhood experiences shape who we become as adults. The way we were raised, where we grew up, the friends we had, our elementary education and so many other factors cumulate to create who we are now. Perhaps one of the most influential elements of this equation is the extracurricular activities we were most heavily involved in.
Especially in middle school and high school, it’s hard not to equate personal identity with after-school activities (at least to a certain extent). You’re a football player, a theater kid, a tennis star, a horse girl, a mock trial nerd, a volleyball athlete, a roller skater or a dancer. That was me: I’m the dancer.
My mom put me in ballet classes as soon as she possibly could — which ended up being when I was three. So, as long as I’ve known myself, I’ve understood myself to be a dancer. It’s safe to say that dance had a massive influence on who I grew up to be. I studied ballet the most, but I also practiced jazz, contemporary, modern, Latin and hip-hop. By my fourth year of high school, I was in the studio for 20 to 25 hours a week.
We dedicate so much time and energy to organized sports, so it’s only natural that they have a heavy hand in crafting our characters.
Perhaps the greatest value instilled in me from my time at my home studio (shoutout to Dancenter in Santa Cruz) is the value of true commitment, especially to a team. In a piece of choreography, each dancer is vital to the integrity of the performance; commitment is crucial because we all rely on each other. It’s impossible to move forward or productively work on choreography if not everyone is present, so it’s heavily stressed in the dance world that you show up to rehearsal. Always.
This notion of “showing up” is true for a majority of team sports, and it’s also true in our society at large. Commitment and reliability are important in the workplace, in friendships and relationships, in hobbies and in higher education. Those skills pay off beyond the studio, field or court. That instilled sense of responsibility to a group has made me a very dependable person. I can thank my dance teachers for that.
With any demanding extracurricular, you need elite time management skills. On any given Wednesday, I was at school from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. (or something like that). Then, I did a little Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus homework at home before going to the dance studio at 3:45 p.m., remaining in dance classes until 9 p.m.; Then, I’d drive myself home and make a quesadilla or a bowl of pasta (my parents had eaten like three hours earlier), and finally I’d finish up my AP Government assignments, shower and fall into bed. On top of other extracurriculars like mock trial and working on the weekends, I genuinely can’t fathom how I stuck to that schedule daily. But this schedule gave me some serious time management skills, and most people who were involved in sports and any number of other activities can say the same. Balancing all of those commitments requires meticulous planning and efficiency, which is still how I operate (okay maybe not always, but at least I know that I can). Collegiate schedules can be similarly demanding — those skills have to come from somewhere.
Growing up in dance studios has also manufactured the way I respond to critiques. As in any sport or extracurricular activity, dance involves a lot of constructive criticism and mentoring. To be successful, you have to learn to use the corrections you get from teachers to your advantage and to not take them personally. It can be so challenging to keep criticism from getting to your head, but once I learned to take it as an opportunity to grow, I started to improve significantly. Instructors aren’t going to give you constructive feedback if they don’t think you’re ready to take it — if they don’t think that you can handle more difficult elements. Through dance, I learned to take corrections as testaments to my abilities: they meant I was ready to grow.
Physically, dance has given me a more thorough understanding of my anatomy and how my body works than any health class I’ve ever taken. I have a relatively solid grasp on human mechanics (at least for someone who has never formally studied it) and, while I’d never claim to be an expert, it comes in handy sometimes.
Dance also heavily influenced how I exercise. For instance, I know not to static stretch before a workout because holding a stretch for more than a few seconds can temporarily deactivate the muscle, causing other muscles to overcompensate at the risk of injury — so I save those for after I finish. I know that strengthening the muscles around the shin can help prevent shin splints, and you can do that by flexing and mobilizing the foot (a former Rockette once told me to spell out the alphabet with my toes to work those muscles). Dance, with its heavy emphasis on being “even” and always exercising both sides of the body, has also instilled in me a need to have a well-rounded workout — I’m incapable of doing the “splits” that avid gym-goers do, where they focus on one muscle group per day: I just do a little bit of everything.
Long story short, we are products of our extracurricular activities. We dedicate ourselves to them and we get a lot in return. We gain teamwork skills, independence, reliability, time management skills, the ability to fail and bounce back, the ability to apply feedback, compromise, attention to detail and so much more (I could write an entire sequel to this article). Each individual sport is going to yield slightly different values, but we all have a lot to thank our coaches for — they truly made us who we are.
Written by: Molly Thompson — mmtthompson@ucdavis.edu
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