The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be.

Let's talk about it.

Hi again, and thanks so much for joining me for this one. It's going to be kind of a chatty, casual episode.

Maybe you might call it a little bit of a fluffy episode, but a lot of you seem to really like all of the episodes actually in my Season 1 Recital Unit, and that included What's in My Dance Bag Recital Edition, where I talked about the fact that I don't have just a general what's in my dance bag during the school year episode, and I wanted to share that with you because it's definitely very different than what I carry with me for the recital. So here we go. This is what I carry with me to class every single week consistently.

And if you want to know about some of the little extra things that I bring in to add a little fun to that regular routine, you can check out my Props and Tools episode that talks about some fun things that I incorporate into class that I'll bring with me from home or from outside the studio, but this is like the core stuff that's always in my dance bag. This one actually is very similar to recital time. I always make sure to have a nice big water bottle and snacks with me.

I don't tend to teach for hours and hours and hours on end. I have a routine where I generally don't need to snack in between classes, but I'm particularly thinking about the time that I was teaching while I was pregnant, and I had to have a snack between every single class, sometimes during class. It was like constant, constant snacking.

But even now, I make sure to have a water bottle where it's really easy for me to get a quick drink so I don't have to unscrew the whole lid to get a drink and then put it back because it's just a convenience thing. I like to grab quick drinks during class when I can or in between classes and also something that seals really well because I've definitely had the issue of a leaking water bottle on all of my papers and notes before, which is no fun. Water bottle and snacks are always with me whenever I buy snacks that are easy to take on the go.

I just throw a couple in the dance bag to make sure that they're there so I don't have to grab them before class every single week. Then I also always make sure to keep ibuprofen or anything else that I need for days that I'm just struggling. I've had those days in the past where I wasn't prepared and it's so, so hard and painful to get through class.

I don't have that so that's another thing that I make sure just to have in a little bag on the side as well as stuff to pull my hair back. There have been phases of my life where I'm going straight from my day job to dance class and I might not be prepared to get changed and get my hair back and everything so I always have at least some hair ties and bobby pins to get my hair back for class and I always carry all of my shoes for any style all of the time. I'm very curious to hear if you guys also do that especially dancers that teach a variety of styles that require different shoes.

I do have a pretty big bulky bag and sometimes I don't know if that's the best thing to do to like schlep that big bag around with all of my shoes when I don't need them every single day but I like to have them to be prepared. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well. So I always have all of my shoes, all of my hair stuff, anything that I need again, particularly for those times as a casual dance teacher that generally has always had another job besides teaching dance.

If I'm rushing from one job to the next and I don't have any buffer time, I don't want to have to think about that stuff in the morning when I'm also packing lunches and anything else and I might not necessarily have time to grab them in between what I'm doing before I start teaching class. So that all comes with me all of the time. I actually mentioned this one in the recital episode as well and that's that I always like to have a tennis ball with me for rolling out.

So when we're talking about getting to class and having a very quick turnover before you start class, there's not time to do a full warm up, obviously. And I also find like I don't think I'm that old. I'm only in my early 30s but it's like since I turned 30, my body just needs a little bit of extra TLC.

Otherwise, I am feeling it the next day and I still am a very active teacher and I think sometimes maybe too much so where I'm like really going hard doing things with the dancers. But one thing that I really like to do to make sure that I'm not paying the price for trying to do certain things with them when I haven't done a full warm up is do some kind of quick warm up on my own that's specific to what I need before I go into a class where I'm focusing on the dancers needs because my body as a 32 year old might be a little different in what it needs than a five year old or a 15 year old. I like to have a tennis ball because if I am really in a hurry and I don't have time to do a full warm up for my own body, I can just roll out those certain muscle groups that I need to.

And I can do that again after class when I really just want to pack up and go as fast as possible but I've been teaching for several hours. I might know that if I don't roll out real quick then in the morning I might be feeling it. So it just helps me for a very very quick way of kind of activating the muscles or getting them kind of rolled out and relaxed at the end of a long session of teaching.

So those are the primary sort of little practical things that live in my bag all the time. But none of that really covers the most important thing which is how I'm addressing teaching my classes every week. And I know some of y'all show up and just do your thing.

And more power to you but you guys know at this point that is 1000% not me. I don't think that will ever be me. God bless you if it is.

I have a three ring binder that has all my notes of what I'm going to cover for every class. Now, it will vary how in depth those notes are one week to another, and especially depending on kind of what part of the season it's in. But I always have notes in my three ring binder and the binder lives in my dance bag I pull it out when I'm doing my lesson planning, it goes right back in.

Because if I don't have that. At least now I am to the point I will say this like Hello, recognizing personal growth. I won't panic if I don't have the binder with me I can get through, but I just feel so much more prepared I feel so much more relaxed.

Knowing that I'm keeping things on track the way I intended if I'm looking directly at my notes during the class or at the very least like right at the beginning of class beforehand it's just a good way to kind of mentally do a quick checklist I wanted to make sure that this week I covered this this and this, and I am looking at my binder to make sure I didn't forget anything. So the reason I bring this up is because I want to explain to you why I use the three ring binder, and I may have mentioned this before as well. There's a couple reasons one is just organization, I can use the three ring page dividers, and it makes it very very easy to separate my lesson plans for different classes.

So while I'm teaching back to back classes I can just find the divider and flip to the plan for that day. There's no time, trying to shuffle through different pages and I've talked in the past about how it's so important when you have back to back classes to try not to have downtime right at the beginning of a new class coming in because, especially with kids if they're not super well regulated independently. That's where you can lose their focus and their energy.

And then you're just getting class off on the wrong foot, so having the binder dividers as opposed to just a general notebook or general loose leaf pages that you might have to flip through helps me stay organized and start right off at the very beginning of class. The other thing that I love about the three ring binder is that I don't always have to recreate the wheel and come up with a new lesson plan. I keep all of my notes from every class I've ever given and created some kind of plan for, and then I can reference pages that I already wrote and just stick them back in the binder.

Now, this way I don't have to carry every single page of notes I've ever written in my dance bag at all times, but I have a separate binder of sort of my archives, I guess you would call it. I can flip through and find old material that I want to use in current classes, grab just that page or pages, pop them in the binder, and when I'm done with that unit and I don't need them anymore, I take them out and put them in another binder for storage. It makes it really easy for me to go back and reference past combinations, phrases, lesson plans, anything that I need, and just swap out what I need at the given time.

So three ring binder is totally my recommendation for notes if you are a note taking teacher. And again, if you go back and kind of listen to a variety of episodes on season one, you'll know that I definitely recommend that. I think it helps us to stay focused and stay on track that we're not just coming up with generic phrase work or work that we're kind of just feeling on a whim that day, but we are following a very clean and methodical curriculum, even if we don't have a curriculum given to us.

Okay, so other organizational things that are in my dance bag, I have an attendance book. It's actually just a folder has attendance sheets and I check off who's there every week. I think that's pretty standard.

That's just something that I keep with me at all times. And because I'm not the studio owner, in my current situation, I am then reporting attendance back to the studio owner. So it's very good for me to have that book with me all the time.

I don't want to keep it at the studio because if I have to reference it or report on it, I want to have it with me in my bag. So that comes everywhere with me. Finally, I carry my laptop.

And of course, I always have to make sure I have my charger, because those long hours playing music from my laptop, it can deplete the battery pretty quickly. So laptop and charger for playing music. Occasionally, I also use the laptop to show videos to the class or pull up different things.

I've talked about that in the past. But primarily for me, I'm just using the laptop to pull up Spotify. That's my personal go to.

I have my playlists all set up on there. I play the music from my laptop. Here's another one where I want your input.

Do you guys use a laptop or do you use something else when you're playing your music? Because I'm starting to think that maybe I should switch to using a tablet just because it's a little bit more portable. Obviously, if you're carrying it in your dance bag all the time, there's just the fact that a laptop is a little bit heavier, a little bit bulkier. And again, I have that big bulky bag.

I'm wondering if there's ways that I can cut down. So tablet might be nice for that. The other thing is, so for me, I have my laptop connected to an auxiliary cord that goes to our studio sound system where I teach right now.

And that works really nicely. But there are times when I would love to be able to walk around the room and start and stop the music wherever I am without having to walk back to the laptop and manually stop it there. So I'm doing a lot of running back and forth because our sound system with my laptop attached to it is in one corner of the room.

And I'm rarely ever just standing in that corner of the room. Like I said, I'm very, very active and involved and moving around the room all the time. First of all, if we had a Bluetooth option, which technically I do have that option at our studio, but it's not as good quality as the full sound system.

So I like to use a sound system that can only be attached via aux cord right now. If I had Bluetooth or if I had some way I know I've had teachers in the past that had a remote control for their sound system that they could be moving around. So if I could just carry my little tablet around in one hand really easily and control it that way, or if I had a remote control, I feel like that might really help me with the going back and forth to and from in the sense that A, I just would be less tired from running back and forth and B, it would help me to like give corrections right there in the moment, change the volume, whatever I needed to do on the music in order to do that and then move forward right from there.

No back and forth because that's another area where the energy might take a dip if I'm trying to control the music going back and forth every time. So currently it's always laptop for me, but that's an area where I would really love to hear what you use for your music. And also, is that something that you carry with you all the time? Do you have something that stays at the studio? Do you also use Spotify? Or are you using something else for your music? What do you like what's working for you? Because I'm always open to improvements.

And I feel like that's one area where maybe I could do things a little bit differently. I've been doing this for so long, but you know, I'm always open to change and improvement. So again, that's just my system.

That's what's in my dance bag all the time. Occasionally, of course, other odds and ends hang out in there for a little bit. And then when I clean it out, I'm like, oh my gosh, what is this? There's like 50 million bobby pins just loose in the bottom or whatever it may be.

Sometimes, like I said, when I start putting snacks in there, I'll forget that I put snacks in there. I'll put more. And so then I'm cleaning it out and there's like 15 granola bars.

And you know, granola bars are not that cheap. So then I'm like, that's a lot of money. I've been carrying around in my backpack all this time.

So I'm very curious to hear what's in your dance bag. What are your systems for music? What are your systems for any class notes that you use? What do you think about all this? Don't forget to join us in the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook to share your thoughts and also follow us on Instagram at the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast. To close, I have a fun little quote to share with you.

This one is from Vicki Baum. "There are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them."