New Term - No Go

My regular dance partner and I started learning dancing at Adult Ed in September 2006. After a year the teacher decided he’d had enough of the bureaucracy and form-filling that infects the Adult Education system these days and defected with his students to start up the Dance club from a community hall which we were attending until August this year. Much as we enjoyed the Monday night sessions and the social connections we’d made there, we didn’t feel we were making much progress with the dancing, hence our recent decision to sample other classes. Tonight was the first session in the Ballroom and Latin-American Dancing Improvers’ course at the local Adult Education Institute on which we were enrolled. Late in the day I received an apologetic text from my dance partner saying he was stuck at work and wasn’t going to be able to make it back for the start.

I arrived in time to watch the end of the Beginners’ class. It was fully subscribed and appeared to be very enjoyable, judging from the students' faces and the buzz of excited chatter. Different story for the Improvers’ class – there were only four of us enrolled, making the course financially unviable, and of the four enrolled, only two of us were there. The teacher explained that the policy is to run the first class anyway in the hope that more students might turn up to enrol on the night, but in the absence of sufficient interest, the rest of the course would be cancelled. We could either join the beginners or get a refund. The other prospective student, a man, opted not to stay for the lesson. That left me and the teacher, who proceeded to give me a private lesson in Rumba. It felt a little awkward, just her and me. She was a good head and shoulders taller than me, wearing a sleeveless vest despite the chilly evening. Her skin felt as cold as marble beneath my hand. After she had taught me one figure (the fan), I called a halt to the private lesson so that she could go home and warm up. I went to reception to claim the refund and wait for my dance partner who had been racing back to try and make it before the end of class. We talked things through and decided to continue with the Monday nights at the place where we’ve been enjoying the Thursday night classes.