How not to teach a calling workshop

Let me admit up front that I only walked into the last 15 minutes of this workshop this afternoon (at the Old Time Music Gathering), so I cannot vouch for the first 45 minutes. However, the part that I walked in on seemed to present a pretty good example of a pretty bad example of how to teach a calling workshop.

When I walked in, the teacher was calling a simple dance, and a group of students were dancing. The dance was done in pairs of couples, with some circling, some stars, some swinging, and then couples promenading around the room to find a new set of partners to repeat. Alright so far (though I personally would not have chosen a random mixer for a beginning calling workshop). They danced that for a while while the teacher called. Then he started the same dance over again and asked them all to call along with him while they danced.

Now, I've been dancing for a few years (okay, fifteen), and maybe I just don't have a caller's brain, but it is not easy for me to coherently call (rather than point and briefly direct) while I'm dancing. However, by the end of that dance (it lasted a very long time), I could hear some improvement in people's calling - more on time, more consistent, more coherent, and mostly correct. I thought they were doing pretty well (for total beginners).

Then came the kicker. The teacher told them that they were going to do the dance again, and this time, each circle of four would call for their own circle, starting whenever that circle joined -- so if some couples found each other immediately after the promenade, they would start the dance earlier than couples who did not find each other as quickly, and everybody would be on their own with no help from the teacher. (My reaction: what?!!) This, of course, caused mass chaos. Each circle tried to start when it joined, everybody was trying to yell the calls to keep themselves on time and not get distracted by the circles that were calling at a different point in the dance, and everybody forgot how the dance went because they were seeing other groups doing something different than they were. More than once, everybody sort of gravitated to one point in the calling (usually "promenade to form a new ring"), no matter where they actually were in the dance, so it sort of got back on track a few times. But in general, it was pretty abysmal.

I'm kind of glad I wasn't there for the whole workshop. :-/ The Sacred Harp workshop after that was much better, and I got my singing fix for the week. Yay for shapenote!