First and foremost, I need to state my qualifications – I am simply a ballet teacher, but one with close to 40 years teaching experience. The perspective that this gives me is one where I have been able to observe students over many years as they grow and develop. Unlike a grade school teacher who may have a child in class for a year, many of us who teach ballet may start with a young preschool age child and have this same child in class for many years. At my age I have students whom I first met when they were two or three, who are now adults and who bring their children to ballet classes. I am lucky to live in a community where this can happen. Nothing can tell a teacher if she is effective more than to see the results of her teaching on her students over the years.
One of the main things I have observed is that although some of my students have gone on to have fine careers as dance professionals, more have not chosen dance as a vocation and have, instead, chosen to do many other things – and yet dance has helped them in their academic schooling as they grew and in their professions as adults ... and it has enriched their lives. Some of the early rewards of a good children’s ballet program are fairly well-known: self-discipline being first and foremost.
Ballet is by its nature very disciplined; it is also something that is learned through practice and repetition – not a bad life’s lesson in itself, albeit a hard one. When a child can learn to really concentrate and focus on the quality of the work, the repetition becomes less tedious. In our classes at the Academy of Movement and Music, we have developed a syllabus that consciously works to build increasing amounts of time spent in concentration. In this day and age of Sesame Street quick-bits of information and entertainment designed to capture attention, learning to focus and concentrate as one must in a ballet class is a very different kind of learning – and helpful in an academic classroom as well.
Although there has been enough research now to question the “Mozart Effect” and the effect on I.Q. of early exposure to classical music and music lessons, I believe that there is possibly a real “Pavlova Effect” (my own term). I believe that a child in a ballet class is often combining learning through visual and aural stimulation with kinesthetic sensation. Since all people learn via one of these channels, a good ballet class has a chance to present material in such a way as to reach all students.
I also believe that part of the “Pavlova Effect” comes from the patterning of the brain with right-left, front-side-back, up-down information all in time to musical counts – and often dealing with the body’s orientation in the spatial coordinates of the room. All of this can help develop brain skills that apply to academic work as well.
One of the other things that most people accept about ballet is that it takes a long time to get good at it – and having a child learn what it takes to be good at something by really working hard at it over time is something we all need to learn.
Since most of us who teach ballet don’t even imagine that we can aspire to a 100% success rate (and thank goodness we can’t – there aren’t enough jobs already!), it is important to realize that there are other goals we can hope to achieve, and that these are equally important and truly validate the work we do as teachers.
It is also not a bad think to help a child learn to love a beautiful art form!