NEW STEPS TO CLASSROOM HARMONY
from Waikato Times, Saturday 12 April, 2008.

A year after taking up dancing, Hamilton man James Cooper has his sights set on competition. He talks about friendship, first-night nerves and teaching kids the foxtrot.

"I took up dancing in February last year. I started ballroom and then I did a bit of latin. I did the social side of it, just the real basics and moved into the medal classes, and now I'm looking at competing, doing ballroom. I'd always thought (the dancing) looked really cool and then when they showed Dancing With The Stars, it got me a bit more enthusiastic. Everyone was getting into it and I thought, people won't laugh at me too much about doing it. When you see Norm Hewitt and all those sort of guys, it makes it all right. And you think, oh yeah maybe it's not just real poncey. I'd always played contact sport, like rugby and gridiron and all that, and dancing seemed like it was something my mates would give me a bit of crap about - which they did.

It does impress people when you can do it properly - just, say, a basic waltz and a bit of a foxtrot. It looks quite complicated but it's quite easy once you learn how to do it. It is kind of cool and it looks really good when you're doing it properly. I signed up for the courses and then the first class I went to I got there about five minutes early and sat in the carpark for about 20 minutes trying to build up the courage, but I couldn't so I just drove home. The next week I got my mate's girlfriend to come with me for moral support and just to get me through the door. After that I was away.

When I started the social class there would have been probably close to 30 people and then when I started doing the medal courses for the ballroom dancing our class was probably between 16 and 20 people. They're all good people, everyone's really friendly and wants to get to know everyone else. It's cool. Doing the ballroom stuff, a lot of people may be in their 30s to 40s, but there are quite a few young people that come along as well. I'm 28. Age is just a number, really. I've danced with older people and younger people, and that (their age) doesn't really matter.

At the moment I've been doing the ballroom side of it and the latin side as well; I think I might concentrate on the ballroom a bit more. I think I'm a bit better built for ballroom. That's usually once a week. I watch Dancing With The Stars sometimes, but usually I'm at dancing when it's on. With the medals, there's bronze and then bronze bar and then silver, silver bar, gold - it just moves up like that, like belts in karate. For the bronze you learn two routines over four to five months, and then you perform those two routines in front of an examiner. I'm just on to the second one now, working my way up.

I'm a teacher at Ohinewai School just out of Huntly, and I've got the year six, seven, eight class - standard four to form two. I came midway through the year last year, and they were a class that couldn't work together in a group, they would fight each other in class and yell and scream and swear. And then by the end of term four, I'd taught them the foxtrot, which is really easy, and we'd made up this routine and we picked out eight couples who really wanted to get together and do something for the parents. So they performed it in front of the parents at our final assembly. Everyone just absolutely buzzed out; they'd never seen anything like that before. They're motivated to keep doing it this year, so we've introduced a few more things, and are teaching them a bit of waltz.

They just learn to be a bit more patient, a bit more tolerant of each other and be a bit more considerate of other people. That is quite a special thing and you do have to get quite close to people, like holding hands and things. For some of those kids it's a big step. To know that they're not going to get laughed at and no one's going to put them down - if you create that environment then they really do enjoy it."

END

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