Coaching beginner dance pair -- standard practice

[sampaguita]

My skating buddy is considering enrolling in dance under my dance coach. If he pushes through with it, my coach will be coaching two beginner students. Most likely we will be competing as a pair.

How does coaching work for a dance pair, at least in your area? We get charged on a per-student, per-session basis. If we are to enroll in dance as a pair, each of us will be paying the same amount as though we were studying singles.

If we were two students studying SOLO dance, then each of us would get a 30 minute lesson. If we enroll in dance as a pair, do we get a 30 minute lesson or a 1 hour lesson? We will be the first students in our rink studying dance as a pair (everyone does freestyle here), so this is really new to us, and I'd like to know what is the common practice in other parts of the world (so at least I can cite real-life cases).

Thanks!


Mod note: topic moved to proper forum.

[SynchKat]

What fun.

Here you would decide how long you want your lesson, most likely 30 minutes, 1 hour is a bit extreme.  You would split the cost of the lesson.  So if your coach charges $60/hour you would pay $15 for half an hour and your partner would pay the other $15. 

Is your coach a dance coach?  Does he know how to teach partnering?  If not then it might be advantageous to get some ballroom dance lessons together to learn proper partnering,.

[Clarice]

Around here, teams split the cost of the lesson.  You are buying the coach's time, and that is the same whether they are teaching one or two of you.  I usually took hour lessons with my partner, but that was mostly because we lived two hours apart and it was silly to travel that far and take a shorter lesson.  If we had lived closer together, I would have liked shorter, more frequent lessons.

[nicklaszlo]

I think it would be fair for each partner to pay half of each lesson and the total lesson duration to be equal to the sum of the duration of your separate lessons.  That way nobody has a big change in what they are paying or receiving (either total or per hour), but you get to skate more.

I only do pairs and I'm married to my partner, so my real life case is of limited use to you:  We take our freeskating and pairs lessons together, and pay a bit more per unit time for the specialized pairs coach.

[PinkLaces]

My daughter had 2 short lived partnerships for ice dance.

The first one was a total bargain as they both were taking a group dance class. There were 2 instructors  - husband and wife high level dance team. One worked with my daughter and her partner and the other worked with the other students. Ha! Didn't know how cheap I had it.  My daughter paid for her group class and partner paid for his.

Second partner, we each paid for ice and split the lesson fee. They had a lesson together once a week. They also each had a private separately that we each paid for. The private lesson was to work on the dance steps and the together lesson was partnering.

[sampaguita]

Thanks everyone!

Seems like most of the coaches you mentioned charge by the hour. One more question though: do your coaches charge higher on a per hour basis if they teach a pair (maybe it's harder to teach a pair than to teach an individual, I dunno)? Say, it's $60 an hour for solo but $80 for pair.

My coach requires that both of us enroll in lessons, but the minimum session length is 30 minutes. What I'm thinking is that we split the one hour combined session into 20-20-20: 20 minutes each for solo dance, and 20 minutes for partnering. Or we can also do 15-15-15, if it's common practice for coaches to charge higher for teaching a pair.

(Sorry about asking too much. Students taking serious dance lessons are new to the rink, and before I talk to my coach about how the lessons will be handled, I'd like to know what is the standard. I'd rather have an agreement with the coach and the rink BEFORE we start lessons to make sure none of us ends up shortchanged.)

[icedancer]

Hmmm. Thinking that "charging by the hour" doesn't necessarily mean that you have to take an hour lesson.  Charging by the hour would mean that if you took part of an hour (say - a half-hour) - then you would just pay for part of the hour.

So if an hour is $60 then a half-hour (whether single or partnered) would be $30.

I am not a coach so please coaches please comment but I would think that saying, "You will give me 15 minutes and my partner 15 minutes and then us as a pair 15 minutes would be very restrictive and limiting for a coach.  Working with a dance pair, especially the beginning dances, the steps are the same, so in a way it would be just like taking a class (we call it a "semi-private") with another person.  They can teach you the steps and then work with each one of you individually before putting you together as a pair.  The coach may even dance (partner)  each of you because it is WAY easier (and better IMHO) to skate with someone who knows what they are doing rather than skating with another skater who is also just learning to dance.

[AgnesNitt]

An n article from a coach about issues surrounding pairs teams including coach costs and when to get a specialized coach.

http://xan-boni.blogspot.com/2013/06/baby-pairs-and-dance.html

[sampaguita]

Thanks icedancer and AgnesNitt (very informative blog article, btw), and to everyone else who provided their inputs! I'll go talk to the rink management and hopefully we'll find something that works for all of us.