Fred Astaire Dance Studios

We'll give you the INSIDE story on Dance Studios in general such as FA and AM--both are nearly identical. The teachers that are DANCE experienced in studios [if any] are BACK DEPARTMENT teachers typically reserved for the competitive students or those who have signed-up for the expensive programs or the for the students with the studio a long time who know a lot and who won't tolerate the inexperienced teachers.

The FRONT DEPARTMENT teachers are SALES TRAINED primarily and often you'll encounter a COMPLETE rookie teacher who just graduated from a teacher training class. Repeat...SALES TRAINED. The best Front department people DO INDEED have dance expertise--but often the studios have discovered that tossing a rookie with a PRETTY SMILE who is PUMPED UP can indeed get a good sale going. Excitement and ATTENTION sells a LOT in the dance studio business.

The DANCE INSTRUCTION the average teacher gets is knowing steps~~which is about 2% of the real knowledge of dancing but good enough to fool the public. Largely their forced to learn via the students. It would take time to develop a good teacher and many don't have the patience to "go back continually to fundamentals" to get very good at all as a teacher...and of course the studios don't want to invest the training for fear the teacher will just go elsewhere as many "teacher training contracts" are not enforceable anymore. Many teachers actually teach WRONG ideas and habits that are hard to break to correct.

Now all that said, people do learn to get over their shyness at dancing there...so what's that worth? And many people do INDEED have fun there.

Now for those who comment that you just got done paying for lessons and they want to sell you thousands of dollars of lessons. Your comment is EXACTLY how AMDS works and also how FADS works--same thing year in and year out. Both major chains are the same ILK of people having cross bred back and forth numerous times.

You sign-up for a teaser package and they work a "procedure" on you. That procedure is to sell you the next package of lessons--typically around a couple hundred dollars. They'll sell you a package of so many private, group and practice sessions. [FYI: Only the private lessons are typically contractually binding.] You THINK that is ALL there is to it.

In other words, you THINK their goal is to teach you how to dance under that package. NOT TRUE! [yeah, you'll learn something and probably be confused...] Their goal? They're actually working ANOTHER procedure on you where EACH lesson is carefully constructed to determine your objections to not signing up for the next package which is in the THOUSAND dollar range.

They spend a lot of time working their FRONT DEPARTMENT people in sales training so that when they present the CLOSER with you the student at the end of your package, that the closer knows all your objections to going on and can hence sign-you-up easily. YOU KNOW WHAT?? It works WELL IF they follow the procedure, get the student pumped up, etc. Now I'm NOT saying they don't deliver something--many people have fun there...and VALUE is determined by who will pay for it.

But what EXACTLY IS the "something"? I contend AMDS and FADS are not really DANCE STUDIOS but are "SOCIAL CLUBS"...that teach a little dancing.

How do I know all the terms only employees would know? Take a guess...