My Journey - Part 8

After my dance teacher's training, I wrestled with the idea of changing my position from ESL teacher to Dance teacher in the Department of Education. What did this involve and was it feasible? Joan Arnhold assured me and all of my classmates in the dance teacher's training course that there were many jobs for dance teachers in schools in New York. I spoke to a few people at my school, and people warned me that there might not be many dance teacher jobs. The school's Union representative, for example, told me that his wife worked with the Department of Education a few years back as a licensed Special Education teacher and also had a Dance license. He told me that she tried to switch positions, and had a dance teaching position for a year or so and then her school cut the program due to lack of funding. I had heard of a number of cases where schools cut their arts programs when they faced a lack of funding, and the current climate at public schools was tighter and tighter funding. Switching to a dance teacher's position away from my steady ESL teacher's position sounded a little risky. I checked the Department of Education website to see for myself how many dance teacher's jobs were available. I was surprised to find nearly a dozen, but disappointed to find that all of them were available only at charter schools. ,

For those of you not familiar with charter schools, they are schools with public funding that are given the freedom to radically alter their curriculum, job positions, and money allocations throughout the school. They essential operate like private schools outside of the control of the teacher's union, and are known to make teachers work a much longer work day for about half the pay of regular public schools. Certain community leaders favored them over traditional public schools because they promised to deliver better standardized student test scores than public schools. Some indeed yielded higher standardized test scores, but all charter schools could pick and choose their students. In contrast, public schools had to be open to all students regardless of academic background. The effectiveness of charter schools has greatly divided politicians, educators, and the public alike. But, most educators see them as an indirect way for legislators to kill teachers' benefits and public pension schemes that the Union and public educators worked so hard for for so many years to secure. If there were no stable public school dance teaching jobs, I was sure as hell not going to work for half the pay and half the benefits at a charter school!

So, where could I go next with my dance teacher training? Something that stuck at the back of my mind in exploring becoming a dance teacher was that my project with Shahar had got me quite interested in trying yoga classes. Without real prospects of becoming a dance teacher, the only moving I was doing was my tai chi long form at home. I wanted a way to get back into my body again. A little looking around on the Internet made it very apparent that there were almost as many yoga studios in each neighborhood as there were places to buy groceries! I was astounded... New York was well-serviced with an abundance - or perhaps an overabundance of yoga studios. To add to my surprise, I soon discovered a yoga studio 2 blocks from my apartment in Astoria, NYC called Yoga Agora. I liked the studio well because information about the teachers was not advertised on the website, and with the incredibly cheap rate of $5 a lesson, the classes were practically free. With no egotistical teacher-gurus and barely a dent in my pocketbook to worry about, I started to attend classes at the studio regularly for a few months. My teachers, Anna and Nick, were kind and gentle, and appreciated whatever you could give on a particular day. The element of competition I found all too present in some of the dance classes I had taken around the city was absent. I felt very much at home with the dimly lit studio, the flicker of candles, the ambient music, and the sincere thanks the teachers said to us after every lesson. I was hooked!