The Day My Students Taught Me to Dance

I teach English as a second language to adults, and this year my class was mostly women from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Guatemala and Ukraine. On the last day of the term, I asked them to share something from their home countries.

They decided to teach me their dances.

We pushed back all the desks. The Afghan women taught me a dance with graceful, spinning hands. The Eritrean women taught me a dance with quick shoulder movements that I could not do at all. The Guatemalan women taught me a marimba dance. The Ukrainian women taught me a dance that ended with everyone holding hands in a circle, spinning faster and faster until we were all laughing too hard to stand.

They told me it was a celebration. It was. We celebrated each other, in four languages and no shared steps, for a whole afternoon. Best class I've ever taught.