35. SCHOOL SUCKS

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Welcome to Episode 35 of the Salsa Kings LIVE podcast!

This episode, Andres admits that school sucks! Or does he? Many people find learning, studying, and examining boring. They’d rather do something the find more stimulating. It’s a high consensus that people do not like being in school and maybe don’t even like learning. Andres wants to challenge that notion and contest that learning can, in fact, be very fun.

Andres asks ‘Why can’t learning be fun? Why must they be opposite?’ Can’t engaging the mind and learning be fun? Andres urges people in high school and college who might be listening to challenge the idea that they can’t have fun while engaging the mind in particular. Andres insists that growing and challenging oneself can be very fun.

Andres admits that often it’s possible that the instructor can fail, and not make the curriculum as stimulating as it can be, and the responsibility does lie on the teacher on some extent. However, there is still a responsibility on the part of the student to learn and to understand the curriculum. For a student, it may be homework they have to do, for dancers it is repetitively doing moves to make them become second-nature. We as a society have become used to instant gratification, but it isn’t that easy in reality.

Part of why people find these things so hard is that we’ve entered the mentality that learning isn’t fun. Andres asks for a mental shift so that we can reassess our choices in how learn. Andres puts out two kinds of dance societies: Academies and Clubs. Clubs aren’t automatically dancing bars, but your social network and your friends that you come together to dance. In an academy, the focus is on learning rather than being social or marketing your dance.

This all of course depends on what a dancer wants. Depending on what you want, you will get very different kinds of enjoyment from these two different types of dance and you need to figure out which works best for you. If you want to go out for the social merits, then an academy isn’t going to give you what you need. The teacher will assume you are there to learn. Similarly if you want to improve your dancing, then the club is not going to give you what you need.

Learning has become a dirty word, but the reality is that learning can be fun both in social and learning situations. Find what works for you, and open up to letting learning be fun. It might just actually happen.

“There’s no reason you couldn’t have a blast learning alongside others that want to learn the same as you. ...This goes outside of dance…. There are fitness clubs and then there are fitness gyms that really focus on the wellness aspect, while the others are more focused on the community building of fitness enthusiast… Just know that if your intention is to learn then you will get better results in a place where that is their intention as well.”