Openness in learning
I have always been fascinated with the human learning process. Especially since starting beginners classes on a regular basis, I am even more interested to understand how to facilitate or even speed up the learning process.
From my own experiences, I believe one of the important ingredients in ensuring efficient learning is a willingness on the part of the students to receive new ideas. Simple, direct, and may almost too obvious, no? Otherwise, you may ask, what is then the point of attending a lecture, seminar, etc., if not to learn new ideas? Well, contention comes when the “new ideas” seem, at first sight, to be contrary to previous knowledge? Or when we feel we know it all? Or we know of a better way for doing certain things, etc.? It is too uncommon to see people attend a class with a fixed agenda and unwilling to change their mind-sets even for a little while.
4th Taipei Tango Festival
Come September, Tango Taiwan will be holding its 4th annual Tango Festival. This is definitely something to look forward to after having attended only the first festival in 2003. It’s also very encouraging to know that with dedication and passion, it is possible to build such a community from scratch as it were.
Since many of the classes seemed to have very interesting topics, ended up signing up for 8 classes! 😉 I hope that I won’t live to regret it and still have some energy left for the three milongas that I will be attending…
CD count
Seeing that Royce had put up the list of her huge music collection on her website recently, I decided to also update my list of CDs after some recent “acquisitions”. I was in fact quite shocked to realise that I have already amassed more than 60 CDs and that’s counting only the traditional, danceable CDs. If the cost of each CD averages to about SG$20 (more especially in the early days when such CDs were difficult to come by) each, then that works out to be… 😯
Overseas injection
In the coming months, Singapore will host two visiting couples from Argentina. Firstly the return of Gato/Andrea after two years at the end of August and the first-time visit by Guillermo/Fernanda to Singapore in mid-October. In-between these two couples, the Taiwan Tango community will be hosting its 4th annual Tango festival in late September, which will be attended by a not-so-small contingent from Singapore. Finally, towards the end of the year, we will see another couple making the pilgrimage to Buenos Aires (lucky chums!), the Mecca for Tango.
Hopefully all these activities will give the local community the added boost in new ideas as well as attracting new blood and retaining the fringe dancers!