Never Pressure Students About Loosing Weight
Never put the pressure on students to loose weight. You have to be very careful. Do not pressure, punish, or embarrass students about losing weight. Tactics like this will only kill a child's self confidence and can very well throw them into an eating disorder. The best thing you can do as a dance teacher is teach all your students about healthy lifestyles, exersise, and nutrition. Be happy your students are there to move and build their bodies with you. Work their bodies and their spirits hard. In the short time you have these students each week, keep them moving, sweating, and make them strong. Your students will learn to love it. That is a great gift to give them. The worst thing you could do is kill a students self confidence and have them quit and give up on the the physical activity of dancing. Most students do not become the star dancer with a famous career. You can teach them, however, the life long lessons of self confidence, poise, dedication, a good work ethic, and a healthy lifestyle of eating right, staying healthy, making correct choices, and loving their body they have. Any human is lucky to have learned that. As I child, I danced for 8 years with a local dance teacher. She was a good teacher, but very strict and figured dancers learned best if they were yelled at. She also obsessed about dancers' weight when they reached about the 8th grade level. Every week we were weighed in on a scale in front of the class and she kept record in a log book. We even had to tell her when we had or period, which was of course embarrassing when you're a young kid that is horrified to even admit you started having periods. She had good intentions. Her theory was that if she taught us about managing our weight at a young age, than we will do so as adults. She just went about it the wrong way. Now I look back on it and I would love to weigh what I did back in the 9th grade. Her methods did cause stress, obsessions, and eatings disorders. She did teach me great things. Much of who I am today is because the dance training I had. How I take care of my body and strive to stay healthy I can thank to dance. However, I hated that pressure of being thin that I experienced as a child. I would never let my daughters attend a dance school that used those kind of tactics. The point is, as a dance teacher you can help others and change their lives. You just need to do it the right way with love and understanding.
