Yes, it’s that time of year! Snow is melting, flowers are blooming and for some angst is through the roof! Why? It’s exam and evaluation season in ballet studios!
End of the year evaluations and meetings always bring a flood of emotions. Whether your school holds formal exams or simply provides a written evaluation for each student, it can be a scary time for dancers. Emotions are swirling and each kid is asking themselves, “Am I getting promoted? Even asked back? Cut?!”
As your dancer is getting ready to go through this, we’ve got some suggestions for how you and your dancer can prepare and get through this season without completely tearing your hair out.
If your school conducts a formal exam, your job as a parent is to help your dancer get in the best headspace possible for the day. We hope that the school has done its job in preparing each student to do their best. What we can do is everything outside of that.
Make sure they get plenty of rest and eat a healthy breakfast and lunch. And, talk about anything EXCEPT the exam! Perhaps encourage them to go through the exam in their head and visualize themselves doing it to the best of their ability. Visualization is an effective practice tool used by dancers, performers and athletes.
If you drive your dancer to class, keep the atmosphere in the car relaxed and positive. Maybe create a ritual you do before or after every big ballet event in your dancer’s life. Abbey and I have a handshake we do before every performance or evaluation and we go for frozen yogurt afterwards.
Good or bad we do it every time.
It’s something that adds a nice bit of consistency to the chaos.
After their evaluation is complete try not to grill them right away. Give them some time to decompress. They may come out excited and chatty or mentally drained and need a bit of quiet time. Give your dancer the space to share with you on their own timeline.
I made this mistake so many times! I’d anxiously wait in the lobby and grill her as soon as she came out. Big mistake. She’d give me a one word answer, “good.” That was it. Now, I try to give her space. When she’s ready to talk, she usually does and it often results in a much longer and more detailed conversation.
Even if schools don’t hold formal exams, almost all schools provide some sort of end-of-year evaluation. Usually, this evaluation is delivered to students via a meeting. Sometimes parents are invited. Note that as students get older, parents often are not allowed to attend these meetings. This is especially true at the advanced levels of company affiliated schools.
However, as long as you are allowed to attend, be sure to go! This is where the honest conversations can be had about your dancer’s future. Before the scheduled meeting, try to sit down with your child and discuss what their goal is for the meeting. Of course everyone wants to know the two big things – am I getting promoted and do I have the potential for a professional career! But, goals are really individual. For example, does your dancer need to work on their mental toughness? Their body language in class? Even their arms!
Once those goals are established, you can sit down with your dancer and draft a list of questions that you want asked in the meeting. And a pro-tip? Put them in order of importance! You don’t want to find out that there are five minutes left in the meeting and you still have 30 questions on your list! Plan to get the most important stuff out of the way first.
One year I had two pages of questions! Obviously we weren’t getting to all of them! And, don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions. You might be surprised by the answers.
In the meeting, your dancer should handle asking most of the questions. As a parent, you’re the backstop. This is a life skill that they’ll need throughout their pre-pro and professional life. As parents, we want to bulldoze as many uncomfortable situations for our kids. But, this will help them in the long run when they will hit speed bumps in their career and they have to speak to authority figures in a calm and productive way. Teach them the tools now so they’re better prepared for life. No matter what profession your child winds up in they will have to learn good communication skills and how to have difficult conversations.
Ok, so some exams and meetings just don’t go your way! I guarantee you that 100% of our kids’ friends have had a bad exam or a terrible meeting with their school.
It happens to everyone. Some years are just tough and ballet is unforgiving. When this happens it’s a perfect time to model good behavior for your child. Keep calm and ask open ended questions to see if there is an underlying issue or root cause to your child’s poor review.
Sometimes kids have a hard time taking bad news. During the meeting, watch your dancer to make sure they understand what their teacher is saying. Also, If it isn’t the end of the year, see how your student can focus on setting some realistic long and short term goals for the remainder of the year.
Remember that the teachers are human too. Delivering bad news is just as hard as receiving it. Try to keep the meeting productive and the lines of communication open.
If your studio does not do end-of-year meetings, I’d suggest asking for one. I started doing this when Abbey was much younger. We sat down for about 15 minutes and discussed her progress from the previous year, what they would like to work on and setting some goals for the next year. Abbey and I always found it to be very helpful to hear their thoughts on her progress and what they would like her to focus on. It does not have to be very long nor involved but getting your child used to meeting with their teachers and discussing their progress. This set a foundational groundwork for their future ballet education.