Suck it Up

                What happened to my dance studio? It used to be so good, but now it’s just mediocre.  What happened to the drive everyone used to have? Where did the sense of friendly competition go that made everyone better dancers? What happened to the focus and discipline that was constantly in practice? I wish I was a part of that studio. I know what happened; our studio split in two and we lost teachers and students to a new studio that we practically made. But why did we all of a sudden suck after they left? Obviously we were good because all of those teachers and dancers who left were trained by our original teachers before they became teachers themselves. So what the heck happened to us?

                We didn’t suck initially. I was only in eighth grade but I could tell we didn’t suck. We were considerable smaller but we still had talented dancers and a new, talented teacher that we were really excited about. After two years, new people, younger people, came into our troupes that had not know the sense of discipline and hard work that used to go into every dance class. When my brothers dances, they would sweat their tails off all class long and all that hard work paid off because they got platinum ratings (the highest possible), high point awards (aka first place), and special judges awards. They dominated. When our studio split, most of the really amazing dancers either had graduated or went to the other studio because they thought it would be the most awesome experience ever. (It wasn’t and most of them quit dance after one year. Some of them even regretted switching to the new studio.) We were left with good dancers and hard workers which was pretty great. But after they all graduated, we were left with the new generation of dancers who hadn’t been a part of the hard-core studio days. All of the new dancers now are lazy and don’t want to work hard, which is rubbing off on our new teachers. It’s so frustrating because even if I wanted to work hard and the teachers wanted to work hard, no one else would. If we had a hard class all of the dancers would complain, get mad at the teacher, and not try. No wonder we get gold ratings at competitions now and never get any high point or special awards. When we do poorly everyone always says “we actually did well because it was a hard competition and there were a lot of good studios there.” That technically shouldn’t matter because we get judged on our own personal dancing and we are not compared to other groups in order to determine our score. It’s our own fault we don’t do well, not the fault of the competition. People just need to suck it up and do the work. How do you expect to succeed without practice? Don't blame the world, blame yourself and be better. Or just stop dancing and let the rest of us that actually love it, do it. (515 words)