Excellence pt. 2: Venues for tango milongas, tango classes, and tango festivals
Posted by Henry in Excellence series, Tango on July 13th, 2009
In continuing our excellence series, we turn next to the question: What makes an excellent venue?
There are arguably three types of important venues, which may or may not overlap. One is for milongas, classes, and festivals.
Simba had a great series of thoughts in his post on how to organize a milonga.
What do you think? What makes an excellent venue?
Coming soon: guest blogger on tango classes
We are pretty excited about the guest post that Sorin will write in the next few days about his opinion on Excellent Teachers.
Sorin is based in Boston area, but is currently studying and dancing tango in Buenos Aires. He’ll help us compare teaching styles between the US and BsAs.
Excellence: Tango classes and tango technique
Posted by Henry in Excellence series, Tango on June 9th, 2009
Clay from Portland, famous for organizing the single largest tango festival in the US, has some informative surveys on his site.
Survey #1 deals specifically with teaching to beginners, and the most improtant qualities (in order of importance) identified for beginners teachers are:
- Understood mechanics of tango.
- Good communication skills.
- Encouraging.
- Patience.
- Good dancer.
- Empathetic.
- Methodical and organized.
- Non-judgemental.
- Flexible and creative in classroom.
- Danced with you during the class.
- Explained the “culture” of tango.
- Funny and entertaining.
- Knew your name.
Are there different qualities that are important for teachers working with intermediate or advanced dancers? What other skills become relevant at higher levels? Can an excellent teacher for beginners be a mediocre teacher for other levels? If so, are there any teachers that are good for any and every level, and always have something to offer?
If there exists a teacher or teaching couple that always has something constructive to offer at every level for every type of learner, then I would venture forth that they are truly excellent. Then again, do these types of teachers even exist …?
Excellence, pt. 1: Argentine tango classes and teachers
Posted by Henry in Excellence series, Tango on June 8th, 2009
What makes dancing fun? What makes dancing tango fun?
A good community will have, at least in part, good dancers taught by good teachers.
We start our excellence series by asking a very simple question: what makes a teacher excellent? Put another way, what distinguishes excellent teachers from mediocre or even good teachers? Here is a distillation of some early responses:
- Passion & enthusiasm
- Knowledge of tango music, Argentine culture, and Spanish
- Vast experience, careful preparation, and good communication
- Humility, sense of humor, and respect for your students
From my personal perspective (disclaimer: distinct from that of the company), good teachers know a lot about the music and the dance, have a wealth of experience, and an undying passion that they convey to their students. But building on the last point, truly excellent teachers connect with and inspire their students by capturing their imagination.
So how to connect and inspire? That’s for your comments and maybe the subject of another Excellence Series post … 
What do you think? What is missing from this list or if nothing’s missing, what’s the most important? Think back to your favorite two or three teachers — what made them so incredible and so unique? What qualities makes a teacher excellent?
Happy dancing,
-Henry
Excellence in tango classes, teachers, milongas, and resources
Posted by Henry in Excellence series on June 6th, 2009
The purpose of this blog is to reach out to our community and receive candid feedback. This time, we are asking a rather difficult question:
What defines excellence for you?
- What makes a great tango class so enjoyable?
- What distinguishes the amazing tango teacher from the mediocre?
- What transforms a milonga from an event into an experience?
- What do you wish you could do online easier in the global or your local tango community?
Answer just one or all of the questions but if anything answer this: How would the perfect tango community look and feel?
A bit of a vague question, but we know individual answers will be enlightening for all …
Sneak peak and feedback
For those users interested in offering feedback on our future direction, we’ve created sneakpeak.knowtango.com.
Take a look at the embed feature, the calendar feature, and the new design — what do you think?
In the meantime, here’s just a taste of your feedback:
“Nice work. Nice widget :)”
“What a good idea! Many thanks to everyone who have helped in updating Tango Map.”
“This is really superb!!! I feel like becoming a Tango globetrotter.”
“una gran idea …”
“the map ~ that’s really cool!”
If you have any ideas or suggestions, never hestitate to sent them to suggestions@knowtango.com
-Henry
New look, new features. Check out the list!
Posted by Henry in New Features, News, Tango on April 22nd, 2009
After a few months of your great feedback, here is what we fixed or changed in our most recent version:
- Fixed toggling events/day to change results on the map and in the headers
- Fixed monthly repeats function to be more intuitive
- Fixed date on headers to show soonest upcoming event date
- Fixed headers to be sortable within each category
- Changed event toggles and counters to hide-able map overlays
- Changed search results to display only the events visible on the map (up to 50)
- Added day toggle (works kind of like a map-based calendar)
- Added the event types Workshops and Shows
- Added a notification when you save a broken address
- Added a “Request delete” button
- Added option to upload a flier for an event (PDF, JPEG, GIF, or PNG)
- Added Orchestra field to Festival
Keep the suggestions coming! How else could we make our site better?
¡KnowTango, ahora en castellano!
Posted by Laurel in New Features, News on April 3rd, 2009
¡Estamos muy contentos de anunciar que ahora KnowTango ha sido traducido al español! Ahora podés usar el sitio en inglés o español. Esto hace que KnowTango esté disponible a una audiencia aun más grande. Nuestra meta es hacer que KnowTango sea fácil de usar para tanta gente como sea posible. Poco a poco vamos llegando.
Gracias a todos los que han estado visitando el sitio y nos han dado observaciones y reacciones. ¡Por favor sigan así!
-
We are excited to announce that KnowTango has now been translated into Spanish! You can now access the site in either English or Spanish – making KnowTango accessible to a yet even wider audience! Our goal is to make KnowTango as easy as possible for as many people as possible to use. Little by little we’re getting there.
Thanks to all of you who have been visiting the site and giving us great feedback. Please keep it up!
Welcoming KnowTango to My Life!
Hey Tango World! So loud out there, full of music and the silence of dancers (except a few beginners too nervous not to shush :-). It’s exciting to actually merge my work experience (programming) with one of my most cherished passions (tango)! I started programming senior year college, which was thirteen years ago! Mostly server-side web programming, and mostly on UNIX. Now I am more versatile, doing also quick scripts as well as full-blown software engineering. That’s the boring part. The more interesting part is that while being a nerdy programmer in front of a computer at some corner in some God-forsaken lab at Yale, a labmate kept suggesting that I join tango at her now world-famous Yale Tango Club. Eventually I gave it a try after being nudged by another friend. And, woo, that changed my life a lot. It’s no coincidence that so many scientists are in tango; it reminds us the human side of life.
I am studying Hindi now, and the other day I learned about India’s most famous poet, Kabir, and he said that you can spend all your life studying and thinking, but you’ll die not being anywhere closer to the truth; but if you know the 2.5 syllables of love (in Hindi it’s 2.5 syllables), you know life. So true for tango, especially for those who’d tried dissecting the steps but failed to open their hearts.
So I will be one of the people driving the software forward, heart and mind. It’s true that nowadays it only takes two to tango, but I am glad there’s more than two of us in this wonderful team!
KnowTango goes international
We are truly excited to say that our idea has been catching on around the global tango community. We have gotten a great show of support on our facebook fan page (check the wall fan posts), and in emails from organizers, teachers, DJs, and dancers in more countries than I can name.
But nothing speaks as clearly as numbers: since our launch on Feb 24th, we have had 4,107 visits from 766 cities in 64 countries. That means a set of eyeballs checks out our site once every 7 minutes — that’s pretty cool!!
I’ve also attached a map of where our users come from, thanks to Google Analytics. If you know someone who would like the site, make sure to tell them about it so we can have 1 comprehensive and complete global tango resource. 
Users from around the world
