pennsicdance: Pennsic is 5 months away...

[Alex Clark]

Another question, and a very important one:

The Teacher Registration Form says, "In order to avoid teacher burn out and 
allow more people to experience the fun and challenge of teaching at the 
Pennsic War, you are limited to four (4) classes per teacher. Exceptions to 
this limit will be made for one-on-one classes and daily group exercise 
workshops such as Morning Stretch."

Does this apply to dance classes? I doubt that that would be either 
appropriate or desirable. Judging from the history of last-minute requests 
for additional classes, it does not look like the previous tendency of some 
teachers to sign up for more classes has been clogging the schedule. Also, 
this limit would tend to mean that those who offer to help fill the 
schedule for the first few days would not be allowed to do any teaching for 
the rest of the war. In addition, I think that this policy would put 
pressure on people who have not done adequate research to go ahead and 
teach because there are lots of gaps in the schedule and not enough 
different people to fill those gaps under this policy.

And there would be gaps in the schedule. In last year's booklet I count 43 
things listed as classes by six teachers who have more than four each. 
Excluding parties and floor assembly/disassembly, there are still three 
teachers who had 25 classes between them, and would have been cut down to 
12 classes under this policy; this would have taken something like 18 
class-hours out of the schedule. BTW, one of the six who were listed for 
more than four classes was Adele, because of two floor "classes".

BTW, if this policy does apply to dance classes, then will a party in the 
evening, or work on the floor, be counted as a class even though it is not 
a real class?

I would object to this policy in general, because it seems to have an 
arbitrary bias against expertise, but I'm not so sure that I could come up 
with a better plan for how a staff of fallible humans can keep the total 
number of class-hours that people offer to teach down to a manageable 
level. Maybe, since the dance tent, as a specialized venue, would be likely 
to be short on teachers under this policy, it would be a good plan to add 
one or two more general-purpose class venues, rescind the policy, and plan 
to schedule more classes, and let the people decide which classes to take. 
This would make it easier to accommodate frequent teachers, and would 
reduce the problem of how to squeeze classes into the schedule, but it 
would make a larger total number of classes to schedule and publish.

-- 
Alex Clark/Henry of Maldon