MASTER MASTER THE GENERATION

Bill Waldinger Muses

Yesterday I fell into yet another online discussion on the “Master Class” and “Master Teacher”. This is a topic discussed in previous blog posts, and I almost feel rather revisit the “tights vs. no tights” or “dancing shoe” discussions than rehash this subject yet again. But every single comment. I went to the profile pages participant, just to get a handle on with whom I was And I came to a realization. For the most part, the teachers were more or less of one mind, the younger were more or less of another, and no one was actually to anyone else.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, Look magazine editor Poppy coined the term “The Generation Gap” to this phenomenon.

In a nutshell, many (not all) of the younger teachers that there are many brilliant young dancers who can valuable experiences in the classroom. This makes classes “Master Classes” and should grant them “Master Teacher”. They also cited these dancers’ reels social medial followings as worthy of conferring upon title “Master Teacher”. There were some young participants the discussion who were still in their teens, proclaiming this moniker of “Master Class” be applied to their classes well because of their “nearly twenty years of training” “the stage experience they have had”. They kept stating decades of experience doesn’t entitle anyone to that the use of these terms should be based solely dancers’ abilities.

Many (not all) of the older teachers, agreed that there many brilliant young dancers, but that the terms Class” and especially “Master Teacher” should be for teachers with decades of experience who have produced superior results in the classroom. The consensus the older teachers was that a dancer’s reels and Instagram followers were irrelevant when it came to bestowing title of Master Class or Master Teacher. These older commented that they would never call themselves