We just finished our 12th week (24 sessions) of teaching yoga to high school students in East Oakland. Our official average student attendance is 10.6, however, that number is bolstered by 3 really great weeks in September where we had 17-18 students each time and brought down by November where we hit our low of 4 students twice.
At first we were pretty strict about attendance. We told the students that they needed to attend 30 sessions by the end of the semester (Jan 25) to earn one semester of credit. (6o sessions for a whole year of credit). Now that our numbers have dropped slightly, we've extended the deadline to the end of the school year. So the students that could only come one day a week might still have a chance of getting 1 semester credit over the course of the whole year or our students who are athletes, could come during the off season even though the dates don't line up with the academic semester. Unfortunatley, this change in policy hasn't resulted in the surge of student attendance that we anticipated. We'll have to go back to other marketing tactics... signs on the walls, announcements over the PA's and encourage word of mouth by the students who attend regularly.
Just to be clear... there is no chance that the class will be canceled since we do have student who are depending on us for credit. It would just be nice if we could keep our numbers up and build the program up and keep it going into the next semester and school year.
A really great thing about the students who want to get credit for the course is that they are coming every time (we have 6 that will for sure get credit for the year if they keep up their attendance and another 5 that will definitely get semester credit) and on Thursday we did something special for the first 30 minutes of our yoga class.
You'll remember this post where I showed off my new collection. We decided that it was time to bring the collection to the students. We knew that if we showed them pictures of Iyengar (and his crazy poses like this) at the beginning of the course, the students would freak out in their usual teenager ways. They would make fun out of their nervousness and some lack of cultural acceptance and appreciation. But, after 23 sessions of exploring their own practice and learning several poses, they were incredible to watch as they thumbed through Iyengar's Light on Yoga and Light on Pranayama and all of my Yoga Journals, amongst the other books that we brought in. Their excitement was inspiring. There was so much of "look at this" "can we do that?" and "how does he do that?" All Tosca and I could say was... serious home practice, dedication and hard work. Like anything, if you really want it, sometimes it requires a lot of your time and attention! (something which is hard for our teenagers... in a world where TV changes camera angles every 5 seconds, it's hard to give your full focus to much- but that's another post).
Hmm, time and attention to a home practice. What a good idea.
BTW: Newest book on the coffee table is Richard Rosen's The Yoga of Breath: a step by step guide to Pranayama EXCELLENT! I'm about 50 pages into it and am looking forward to this new exploration in my practice!
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