(true fact: They tried teaching us the Hustle when I was in sixth grade...
I learned the hustle at some point... not sure now if it was the "social dance" unit in my junior high phys. ed class or in high school. Anyway, they brought the boys' class in and tried teaching us to dance. It was a disaster, both in terms of our collective ability to dance, and socially. And I discovered the boys' gym teacher, who most of the girls thought was pretty cute, had the most awful clammy hands... That said, I still remember a bit of how to do it (the hustle, that is; I thankfully forgot the rest of it decades ago).
As for Grade 6, that was the year the music teacher taught us how to do square dancing. That was fun, and helped me many years later, when I was learning medieval dancing in the Society for Creative Anachronism. There are a couple of the steps that are very similar to both kinds of dance.
Grade 6 was also when I learned such elegant dances as the bunny-hop, and I remember one day when we all decided (with the teacher's permission) to bunny-hop back to our home room, after the music class was over. As we passed the other classrooms and they heard us humming the music or muttering the steps to ourselves, both the teachers and students stared at us like we were insane.
But that school was weird anyway. The classroom used for French was part of the same larger room used for music, and it was only a folding canvas partition that separated them. So the French teacher taught us some French songs, and said, "Now sing as loudly as you can; let's see if we can drown out the music teacher next door."
So we belted out "Sur le pont d'Avignon..." and sure enough, the music teacher was a bit miffed.
you all mostly..
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