In Lisbon, they know a good sport when they see one. During their annual Fun and Games Day, people can compete in many sports including Football, Touch rugby and Scottish Dancing.

While the rules for normal sports are easy to find, the ones used for two team competitive Scottish Country Dancing are somewhat harder to come by. Fortunately, I have the description here, courtesy of Roger Picken:

Two teams at a time are taught a simple dance (like Dunnet Head) during each “match” and the winner is the team which performs it best.

Apparently, this is a very popular activity. And, as described, capable of demonstrating that even a simple dance can present challenges by drawing upon one’s pattern memory, one’s sense of timing and distance and above all one’s ability to apologize after stomping on the partner’s foot during one of those advance and retire figures.

New York branch of RSCDS organizes a dance event at United Nations every year. All money collected go to UNICEF. This year we collected 1500$.

The floors at United Nations are not all that good to dance on (marble), but it is for a good cause. And it certainly gets a lot of attention from the UN visitors, as Saturday is an open day and we dance right in the main visitors area.

I have uploaded some of the pictures from the dance event to Flickr.

I have the news and it is good. I have passed my Teaching Certificate (Part 1 Unit 1). In a retrospect, the flashcards themselves did not help much, but the process of putting descriptions into the flashcards did. So, it was indirectly helpful after all.

My weekest point was marked to be the description of positioning and formations. Not surprising, considering that they are described in a text form, but to understand them one has to imagine them visually. But maybe the technology could come to the rescue there. We shall see.

The next stage is Part 2 and 3. This involves actually teaching dances and learning to do crowd control keep dancers’ attention. I am sure that will be fun to practice (eventually).

Until then, I am still just another teacher-wannabe.

Tags: rscds

Some say RSCDS is only for older people and young Scotts do not like it. You only have to look at the pictures from the Glasgow Festival to see that it is completely opposite case. I like the one for The Dashing White Sergeant the most.

Tags: rscds

I am sitting for the part one of the RSCDS‘ preliminary teaching certificate. The part one is mostly theory and history, so involves a good lot of memorisation, with the hope that memorised facts will aid later deep comprehension.

I am using flashcards to help me remember the facts. I have free software installed on my computer (Pauker) for the best results, but I also have an online copy to quickly practice at work. That stack is publicly available on Flashcard Exchange website, so anybody else could use it as well.

Alex.