It's not your parents' dirty dancing...

Edutopia is conducting a new poll on student dancing at high school dances (click here to participate in the poll). Of course, it has no scientific value of any type, but I always find the subject of student dancing to be humorous, so I thought I would explain why…

As mentioned in the Edutopia poll, adults have found the dancing of teens to push the limits of good taste since dance was invented. I guess I'm no different. My first year as a teacher I was “invited” to chaperone the Homecoming Dance, and my wife and I naively accepted. We were “dance floor monitors” which is like the chaperone equivalent to the Marine, fresh from boot camp, sitting in the front of the landing craft at Normandy. I’ll spare you all the glorious details, but I did commit to myself that I would never chaperone a dance again.

And that statement is the beginning of the problem. Our school could not get chaperones. Teachers and parents alike refused to do it because it was just too unsettling to watch the activities on the dance floor. Well, after enough complaints and one canceled dance (due to too few chaperones) the administration instituted the following policy:

“Dancing shall be performed in such a way that the dancers will be face to face and vertical.”

And here you see the humor… “Face to face and vertical!” The school’s administration actually had to go around to classes and explain this new policy to students, who of course, would ask for demonstrations and counter-examples.

So that’s the dance policy at our school, and if you really want to get down with the “horizontal bop,” then you’ll have to find another dance floor on which to perform it.