Last week, I chaperoned a dance at my school. Most of the music they played just sounded like noise to me, but then, I suppose that that’s how it’s always been, from one generation to the next. But one specific difference stood out to me.
Back when I was a teen, at a dance, most of the songs, you’d be dancing with a big group of your friends, and all be just more or less bopping. And that still seems to be what happens, even if Kids These Days do it to worse music. But every so often, they’d do a slow song, and for those, you’d ditch your friends, find your special someone, hold them close, and dance just with them, mostly ignoring the rest of the world.
But there didn’t seem to be any of those. Not just bad slow-dance songs, but none at all. Is that just not a thing any more?
I haven’t been around teens much in years (apart from random encounters) but I have read that dating among teens is at an all-time low. Instead, they prefer to go out in small groups to hang-out (mixed gender).
Perhaps (only speculation on my part) the lack of a slow dance is a symptom of this. There just are not enough teens at a dance who are paired-off to merit a time where it is only them on the dance floor (which would also make those few stand-out which teens are loathe to do).
It’s a little sad since those slow dance bits were great but times change.
I’d sooner assume the school is terrified of reactionary parents going apes*** if their kids touched gasp a member of the opposite sex while a school staffer, i.e. the OP, looked on.
I attend dances that include 20-somethings and slow dances are still a thing there. We geezers & geezerettes still enjoy them too.
It probably varies a great deal by locality. As a middle school teacher dance chaperone I didn’t pay too much attention because the parent chaperones were so busy enforcing the slow dance rules (like “no grinding” and “no moving clothing around”). Slow dancing is still very much a thing here.
It was important in my day too, but wasn’t limited to that “special someone.” There was lots of pleasure regardless of who in particular was “dancing.” In sixth grade it was important, but later not so much.
In grades 6-8 my parents made me attend formal dance lessons (slow dances, hand on waist/shoulder stuff) hosted a the local Junior High School. Boys had to wear a sport coat and tie. Girls wore long skirts and wore long, white gloves. Much angst ensued but I’m glad we did that.
Not sure why that was not offered once in high school.
You lucky dog. It was mandatory for us in sixth grade at school, but never after. I’m a better person for it, and could have used another couple of years!
The dance instructor was a tiny old bat named Dart Tinkham. I had to work pretty hard just now trying to remember her real name since we all called her, naturally, Fart Stinkum
I grew up in a tony demi-fatcat suburb in SoCal. For whatever benighted reason our 5th grade elementary school, so age 10-11, had mandatory square dancing lessons for all the kids for 1 hour per week. Square dancing!!?!
Truth is I enjoyed it and am glad I got pushed through it, despite otherwise having lots of trouble relating to girls. But square dancing in late 1960s uber-hip SoCal? You gotta be kidding me. I remember becoming fairly good at it by 10yo standards. I remember about zero of the details now. Yee haw! Bow to your partner, bow to your corner.
We didn’t have any parent chaperones, except those teachers who happened to also be parents.
And it didn’t occur to me that school administration might have told the DJs not to play any slow dances. I don’t think they did, but then again, someone did have the sense to tell the DJ towards the end to play some ABBA songs (we just did Mama Mia as our fall musical), so there was at least some instruction to the DJ.
In my Catholic grade school in Green Bay, in the 1970s, we had to do square dancing, too. ISTR it was a part of PE, maybe a couple of weeks each school year, when I was in 5th through 7th grade.
We did some square dancing too and I also think it was a PE thing but it wasn’t much.
When I was in kindergarten we did some square-dancing for a talent show and I do-si-doed my partner off the stage. We were spinning around and I thought it would be neat to let her go, so I did. She fell off the stage (she was fine…not happy but fine). I was not allowed to participate anymore though and they gave me the job of emcee which (I thought) was more cool anyway.
Wow – only because of the “and I LOVE YOU!!!” repeated lyrical buildup. Could get awkward. (As opposed to, say, good ol’ Stairway to Heaven, which – as Erik Davis noted in the 33 1/3 book series – is really just about commerce.)
