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This is the podcast for us dance teachers balancing our teaching job with other jobs, commitments, and just life in general! We don't need to know how to run the whole studio, work with students 20+ hours a week, or win big at competitions; we just want practical advice and real conversations about how to be the best dance teachers we can be with the little time we have with our students. Join Maia on the casual dance teacher's podcast and in the casual dance teacher's network on Facebook.
Welcome to the Casual Dance Teachers podcast. I'm your host, Maia. Right now, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about who I am and why I started this podcast and hopefully what you can also learn from it yourself. To tell you a little bit about myself, I started dancing when I was just 2 years old with a Mommy and Me class, and I just fell in love with dancing from such a young age. It wasn't until I was around middle school age that I really convinced my parents that I was serious about this, and they let me start to take more classes in more styles and also sign up for summer programs and occasionally travel to the larger cities around our area to take master classes, guest classes, workshops, and things like that.
Maia:I was really lucky to have awesome dance teachers growing up and that my parents were willing to work with me to give me as many opportunities as possible, but I always attended what you would call recreational studios. Most of the other students that I was dancing alongside were fairly casual in their approach to their dance classes, and we never had a competition team at all at any of the studios that I attended, so I knew nothing about the competitive world and didn't even attend my 1st competition until I was in my twenties and already working as a dance teacher. Now I was lucky enough to be able to go to college for dance and attended Goucher College where I got my BA in dance with concentrations in choreography and dance administration, And it was during that time that, as much as I loved the act of dancing, I realized that my passion really was in education, the process of choreography, not so much in the performative aspects of dance for myself. So after I graduated, I've worked in actually a number of different fields. I've worked with arts organizations.
Maia:I've worked in a whole bunch of different industries completely unrelated to dance, but I've always taught dance classes casually on the side. It's the thing that I'm most passionate about, of course, but I've kept it as a hobby, in part just to kind of keep the fun and the passion alive without burning out and making it my entire career. I do have a family. I have another job currently. I'm always busy just like I'm sure all of you are, and I still live in a rural area.
Maia:So I'm still always looking for educational opportunities that don't break the bank, that I don't have to travel super far to go take a class with someone, and it's not always easy with where I live and everything else that I have going on in my life. So I just got this idea in my head looking at all the different resources that are out there in the form of podcasts and videos and blogs and groups online, that as great as those resources have been for me, many of them are geared towards studio owners, people who are looking to either win competitions, produce professional students, make as much money as possible, or bring in and recruit more students to their studios, which are all super valid, but not what I'm looking to do with my 1 hour a week that I work with dancers just strictly on a technical, I'm coming in to teach you how to dance basis. So that's what this podcast is all about. It's for those of us that are working with dancers that just come in to learn how to dance, and maybe we don't have a ton of time with them.
Maia:We only see them for an hour or a couple of hours a week. How do we maximize our time and the resources that we do have to give our students the best experience possible? So if this sounds like you, I think that you might really benefit from this podcast, but I also don't want this to be just me preaching at people or telling them what I know because I've also only been a casual dance teacher for about the past 10 years. And as much as I feel like I do have a lot to share, I'm definitely not an expert. I have so much to learn.
Maia:Again, I started this through the path of needing to learn more myself and wanting there to be more resources. So in addition to the podcast, I've also started the Casual Dance Teachers Network as a Facebook group, where I'm hoping that we can talk about the podcast episodes and continue the conversation there, so I can get feedback. So I'd really, really appreciate it if you would leave a review for this podcast, so that we can bring in more people into this community to continue the conversation online and in any forum that we possibly can find to build each other up and keep building on the opportunities that we have to be the best casual dance teachers that we can be. I'm so excited to take this journey with all of you, and I have to thank a couple people who have already taken the journey with me a little bit, including GB Mystical, who wrote my fabulous theme music, my family for supporting me with all of the crazy time that I have spent on setting up the podcast, and, of course, all of my dance teachers and my current studio owner that I work for who have been extremely supportive in my career in general and becoming the dance teacher that I am today.
Maia:I'll see you back here soon. And in the meantime, happy dancing.