I drove up to Olympia in the morning yesterday, where Brenda and I taught three classes on blues and lindy hop. We then each taught two privates, made it to the local dance, and drove home late that night. I woke up this morning at 9:30am to teach a two-hour private to two local dancers from Portland. They mentioned a new blues dance with an older crowd that might need some instruction, so I might have some more ins to teach.
It's nice to be making a little money from all this working. I feel like I will almost be able to cover my rent using proceeds from teaching dance. That's a liberating feeling. Furthermore, the more I teach, the more ideas and offers I get to teach. I was considering what a Balboa workshop with Brenda could look like in Olympia. I'm also considering starting a solo Charleston class in Portland. If I advertise everything myself, I can get cheap studio space, and I would only need 3-4 people to turn a profit.
Brenda told me that professionalism and persistence go a long way in this job, and I am starting to sense that. There are many factors in getting hired to teach. 1) people have to like you and be comfortable around you. This means we have to be presentable and friendly in all moments of dancing, at times a difficult task. 2) people have to see you as an authority. This is not solely a product of your own knowledge, but perhaps even more a product of how the community views you. Thus there is a certain momentum to teaching. Once you begin teaching, people accept you as an authority, and you are free to teach more, but before you gain the status of having some authority, it's difficult to get hired. 3) This is where persistence seems to come in. People want to get better, and they want to look cool. So if I just keep offering my time, again and again, at an affordable rate, and can give people what they want, I suppose I'll be able to make this work.
I've heard it for years from my mom and other teachers - Teaching is lesson planning, teaching is preparation. So when I am already discounting my teaching to the lowest prices I can, I have to work out my lesson plans which is tons more work than I'm being directly paid for. I feel a little bit like when I worked as a cook. I agreed to work for a salary of almost nothing, and I proceeded to regularly work 60 hour weeks. My hourly rate comfortably settled at around $3-4/ hour, because of all the excess work. That's like my life now.
