On taking notes

A couple of months ago I started dancing again in the Netherlands. It took me a while to organize everything and to find a new place to take lessons.

It has been a lot of fun to start dancing again but there is one thing I learned from this experience;

Even in just 2 months I can forget a lot of the things that I have learned!

Aside from that it also taught me something though. I need to keep better notes.

For a while now I’ve been writing down the new moves/combinations that I learned. At first I just wrote down their names but I soon found that didn’t do. I would read the name and… absolutely nothing. My brain just blanked out. Nothing would come to mind.

So then I started writing the actual move/combination down entirely. This worked great for months. My notes served as great reminders on days when I forgot what I had learned in class earlier that week. Taking notes is definitely something I recommend to everybody who starts learning salsa.

Unfortunately 2 months down the road things weren’t clear so anymore. When I went over my notes I ran into a couple of problems.

1) I had used the name of another move/combination to describe part of the new move/combination.

2) my note taking had been inconsistent.

Especially the first part became very frustrating when I went through my notes. I would be in the middle of the description of a combination when all of a sudden I ran across the name of another move… that I couldn’t remember either. Imagine my frustration when I realized I had never written that move down because it was so ‘easy’.

And I have to admit, after I finally figured it out what move went with the name, that it was indeed an easy move. I had not trouble doing it. Unfortunately I had lost a lot of time trying to figure it out again.

The second part was less frustrating but still annoyed me my notes weren’t consistent.

Sometimes I would write down an entire 8 second count, second by second. At other times I would only write down which part of the move started on 1 and which part on 5. Although this wasn’t a big problem it did have me running into timing problems when trying to remember moves that were a bit more complicated.

So to prevent this from happening I have now started taking complete notes (all counts described) and I’ve started checking all my notes to see whether moves or combinations I refer to are actually written down as well. I’m sure this will help a lot.

Aside from that I’m considering to use my video camera more often. So far it has been a great tool to give me feedback on how I look but I think that it can do just as well as a visual aid. Together with the written notes I should be able to easily remember moves/combinations that I have forgotten.

But how about you? How do you remember all the moves/combinations that you have learned?