„Much Ado About Nothing“

After spending days engaging intensively with this book — working through its content, summarizing it, asking the author questions, and eventually writing three articles of my own — I had to realize at some point that a large part of this work had basically been for nothing.

And yet it was not wasted.

Because engaging with such a radical position has once again made very clear to me what good teaching actually involves: not simply transmitting forms, but creating understandable connections, regulating complexity, setting meaningful tasks, making differences perceptible, and accompanying experience without predetermining it.

A Practical Test of the Learning Model in Tom Tabaczynski’s Somatic Milonguero

Tabaczynski’s learning model has considerable appeal: a few basic movements, plenty of observation, comprehensible input, personal exploration, different partners, and finally learning in the real environment of the milonga. On paper, this produces a plausible learning path.

It becomes more interesting, however, when we try to work through this path with two actual beginners.

An addition to Tom Tabaczynski’s theory of motor learning

In a discussion about my article, Tom Tabaczynski raised an interesting question: Do we think about what we are doing when we drive a car? Do we consciously think about grammatical rules when we speak? Why, then, should we assume that dancing is based on conscious decisions made according to rules previously learned in lessons?

Two different questions are being merged here: How is a developed skill performed? And how is that skill acquired?

Somatic Milonguero by Tom Tabaczynski – Is Teaching Unnecessary, or Does It Need to Be Fundamentally Different?

This obviously lengthy article is not a conventional book review. Somatic Milonguero by Tom Tabaczynsky is, for me, an opportunity to reconsider some fundamental questions about tango teaching. Much in this book touches on subjects I have been thinking about for decades. Some of it confirms experiences I have had in my own teaching, other parts have provoked disagreement, and on some points I changed my mind several times while reading. I therefore want less to evaluate the book than to examine its theses in the light of my own experience with tango, learning, and teaching.