On May 8, 2:35 pm, "peter" <nos...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I believe one major aspect of learning ballroom dancing is training
muscle
> memory. To this end, it seems that using mainly verbal instructions,
which
> most instructors use, is not a very efficient method.
Profits and income in the partner dance teaching business
do not come from efficiency (except, perhaps, at the very
top levels). In fact the more inefficiently a studio can
teach a student, the more hours of lessons they can sell.
So the competitive pressure on the dance business actually
optimizes inefficiency, except with the most astute and
competitive of high level students.
> Wouldn't it be better to have some computer controlled mechanical device
> attached to the student that limits his/her motion to the correct one as
he
> repeats each dance step, or sounds a beep near the area where the
student
> makes a mistake (e.g. head facing wrong direction, arm too low...)?
That's called a dance teacher during a private lesson.
The Japanese do have these gadgets to prop ones arms into
proper frame and such. I haven't seen them catch on in
the U.S. There is the game "Dance-Dance-Revolution", where
you lose points if you can't stomp on time. It seems to
be quite popular among the younger set. It would be
interesting to poll new young dancers, and try to correlate
experience with this game with the speed of learning some
basic partner dance "steps".
> Another method is based on the assumption that you can train someone to
> judge dancing much faster than training the person to dance. Once you
> trained the person to judge dancing, all you have to do is give him a
mirror
> or a camcorder to see himself learning to dance, and he should be able
to
> judge and improve himself, right?
That's generally a good idea except for bias. Most
people are not as objective judging themselves as when
watching someone else. Only some people are sufficiently
self critical. Most others would rather not look in the
mirror too carefully, or at all, and destroy their self
image of adequacy or competence. Even the top pros get
outside experts to critique their technique.
So, my guess is that there is an op****tunity for huge
improvements in dance instruction and coaching efficiency,
but the business may not be big enough to be worth the R&D
investment of the type that goes into, say, Olympic s****ts,
with wind tunnels, force platforms, biometrics, 3D motion
capture with finite-element modeling of the data, etc.
IMHO. YMMV.
--
rhn A.T nicholson d.0.t C-o-M
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