For the past couple of weeks I have been teaching online pole dance, twerk, floorwork and lap dance classes via Zoom. Because apart from being a pole instructor I am an Internet academic with no chill, I wanted to write about my experience with Zoom, best practices to set up and general thoughts. Consider this post a butt-naked autoethnography of remote fitness teaching.
Interesting Times…
If a few weeks ago you would have told me I’d have spent my days watching a lot of cute butts on video while teaching them how to pole, twerk or how to give a lap dance, I wouldn’t have believed you. But ‘interesting’ (read: challenging; scary; weird af) times call for interesting solutions.
Everyone keeps going on about how we are living in unprecedented times, that will change how we live even when this is over. And it’s true: this is an unprecedented situation for our lifetimes, and we can already feel ourselves changing. For the Internet – and our practices surrounding our interactions with it – this means that we are witnessing culture being made. From Coronavirus TikToks (been loving those) to Cardi B “CORONAVIRUS” trap mixes, from increased remote working to no-contact delivery, we are creating new cultural practices everyday.
@wobruno I CAN’T GET THIS SHIT OUT OF MY HEAD ##coronavirus ##cardib ##virus
♬ CORONAVIRUS wobruno – wobruno
Which brings me to autoethnography. For the non-academic folks, autoethnography is the most fun research method because, for Ellis, Adams and Bochner, it “seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience,” using bits of autobiography and ethnography. If ethnography is about the study of cultural practices through participant observation, autoethnography is about you and your understanding of that culture.
And nothing represents our current culture – whether you’re a pole dance instructor or a remote worker with a team to communicate with – like video conferencing app Zoom.
How I Have Been Using Zoom
I’d like this to be clear: this is not an ad for Zoom. But Zoom is the service I’ve seen most teams – and most instructors – use so far. Wonder if this meme has already spilled the tea…
For the uninitiated, Zoom is a video conferencing app that has been around for a while. I have been using it since last year, since the time I did a podcast interview with my friend Emma from A Girl In Progress, the savviest home-working queen based in Australia.
Looks like you can use Zoom for pretty much everything from online meetings, training sessions, webinars, events, file sharing and the like. They are probably one of the few businesses that are thriving right now. So here are my tips / consideration about the app.
Before Your Zoom Class
Be Flexible
I won’t go on about the opportunities this challenging time offers, but the fact we’re all stuck at home without access to our local gyms / studios means people from all over the world could be taking a class with you. I’ve had my first US-based class this week – well done Aurora / @aurorasparklez! – and that was only possible because my studio has some classes later in the day that can be joined from different time-zones. People might want to work out in the morning, or during their lunch break. So allow for a schedule that fits all needs.
Make Sure You Have A Cut-Off Period For Booking
Up until a few years ago, people perceived online spaces as ‘elsewhere’ from what they viewed as ‘real life’. However, as everything you would consider part of real life – paying bills, working, dating etc – has moved online, this concept of social networks or online spaces as being detached from life doesn’t hold up. This has become very apparent in my experience in teaching via Zoom.
In my pole dance studio, students can’t book a class via our website or via the Mindbody app if they try to do so just an hour before the class takes place. This is because if the instructor were to travel to the studio even for a one-person class, they’d need an hour to get there from most areas of London.
When we started teaching our online classes, the day after our schedule was published, I didn’t have anyone signed up for my first lunchtime twerk class and just assumed the cut-off period for booking was going to be the same as offline classes. But we hadn’t introduced a cut-off period, and someone was able to book five minutes before when I was already occupied doing something else – so I dropped everything and taught.
Especially if you’re working from home and doing a variety of other jobs like me, having at least a 20-minute cut-off period for booking might help prevent this. This is because if you’re on an urgent work call, or have any other sort of emergency, you are at least warned whether your class is taking place or not – which is considerate to both you and your students.
Setting Up
Find your ideal position for your laptop or phone, so that your students can see you demonstrate effectively and so that you have enough space to do what you’re meant to do. If you’re wondering about how to set up your home pole (and laptop for zoom) I’d recommend to have one meter of space in each direction to allow space for your legs and heels – more on house poles set up here.
It’s also worth choreographing things that don’t require much traveling around your room and much direction changing. Especially in London, flats aren’t always so spacious to allow you to fish flop or somersault around – and when you’re choreographing a lap dance routine going to and from the chair, you’ll have to shift your laptop in between.
Music
With Zoom, you can use either your phone or computer audio – which may be tricky if you want to put music on for the warm-up, or if you need a song for your routine.
This is easy to solve if you own both a phone and a laptop: connect your phone to your speakers and use Spotify through your phone, so that you can use your laptop to speak. You can record the chat through Zoom if you want to take screenshots or snippets to post on social media or send to your students.
Schedule Via The Zoom App
Add your classes to your calendar so that you can prepare for them and get in the mood at least half an hour before. Get a drink of water, wear the right clothes, pee. This seems silly, but being at home can make you forget all the steps you take when teaching at your studio – and if you’re teaching three hours in a row, that can be challenging.
Unless you have Zoom for Business, meetings with more than 3 people are cut at 40 minutes – which means you’d have to call again in the middle of a class after you’re cut off. I have found so far that by scheduling the meetings through the Zoom app in advance, Zoom automatically upgrades my meetings for free, so for now I haven’t had that challenge.
Otherwise, it might be worth upgrading your Zoom studio account to business, provided you don’t have two or more classes happening at the same time.
Educate
Most of your students will be familiar with Zoom and its etiquette. If they are not, try to write a post giving them info on how to use it – e.g. that they have to download the app and that they have to be on time; that you’ll give them a meeting ID and password for them to join, and that they should mute themselves if they aren’t talking. We did something along those lines here.
During Your Zoom Class
Difficulty and Safety
Depending on the sport you’re teaching via Zoom, it might be worth considering whether what you are teaching is too dangerous to be taught remotely.
In classes like a pole tricks, a lap dance or a twerk class, some acrobatic moves can be dangerous if taught without the opportunity to spot the student. So I try to make sure that I’m very aware of the student’s abilities, and don’t teach them things I think it’d be safer to show them face-to-face.
I am insured even for online classes – something worth looking into – but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Plus, what I’ve found in this difficult time is that students are more interested human interaction, keeping busy and holding onto their strengths rather than in overly challenging themselves – they won’t expect you to push them too hard.
When it comes to choreography classes, too, I’d normally teach 1 minute, or 1:10 minutes of choreo face-to-face. Online though, with the need to run through movements over and over due to reduced visibility, I’d stick to choreographing routines of 45 seconds or one minute tops – or to teaching longer routines over a couple of weeks.
Clarity
While teaching from home, you’ll have to be even clearer in your explanations. Explain each movement thoroughly, compare it to what you’d do in an offline class or use funny comparisons so that the students can easily pick it up – e.g., in teaching twerk, I’d accentuate the wrong movements even more to show the students what they shouldn’t be doing, etc.
An element of clarity is, unfortunately, shouting at your laptop. You will do a lot of this, you’ll feel crazy, you will feel even crazier while doing it upside down, and you’ll be even more cooked at the end of a Zoom class than you were when teaching offline. I’m trying to limit this as much as possible by explaining the movement while demonstrating it and shouting first, and then by going in front of the laptop, without demonstrating it or shouting, the second time.
Grid Mode
To prevent yourself from going nuts, please, for the love of God, switch from Speaker Mode to Grid Mode. That way, if someone sneezes or breathes really loudly, the screen won’t automatically switch to them, blowing their face up in a giant window in that super disorienting video conferencing way.
Through Grid mode, you will see all your students and go slightly less nuts. It also helps with the next point…
Allow Time For Questions
I try to teach small bits and then ask each student if they have a question – which is more effective while done in Grid mode, because if the students don’t have any, you will see most of them shaking their head. I also allow for questions at the end of each class, and I try to recap what happened and what’s gonna happen next time.
After Your Zoom Class
Videos
I try to send a video of my choreography or of the tricks learnt – filmed as clearly as possible – to my students after the class. That way, they can replicate what we’ve done and they can refer to it. For speed, you can also post it on your IG or YouTube and share the link.
Ask Your Students To Share / Post Their Videos
If the students consent to do so, having them post footage of either their experience of your Zoom class, or of them doing what they’ve learnt, can help you 1) see if they actually got the moves 2) promote your own class 3) get extra content for the studio Instagram. It’s a win-win.
Considerations
As a massive introvert masking as an extrovert, I actually really enjoy teaching online because I feel like I can do so from my safe space – my home. However, as someone who works with and researchers on the Internet and social media for a living, I also feel like I’m in this connection loop that never ends. So it’s very important that I – and therefore you – allow time for breaks and bits of the day when you’re disconnected.
On Tuesday last week, I taught a lap dance class with 8 people. It was really fun – but I was cooked after. My brain was not working. So bear in mind that, because of the shouting and because you’re going to be staring at a screen for a long time, your head is going to hurt.
In between private classes and group classes through my studio, I’m finding that I am teaching more through Zoom than I used to teach offline. This is partly due to the fact I don’t need to allow for travel time to the studio, and to the fact that demand is high at the moment. But that is a lot of training time, so remember to avoid overbooking yourself – you need to enjoy training, and you need to look after your muscles and take breaks.
Overall however, I am very happy I can still do what I love – pole and related stuff – and teach it remotely in this very difficult time.
Privacy and Consent: Worth Noting When Teaching Remotely
While I have been enjoying my experience with Zoom and while my work on it has been relatively harmless/ outside traditional office structures, the company has come under fire for privacy issues in the past few years and also very recently, so here are a few things you need to be aware of before you use it – as written by ProtonMail:
- Zoom’s privacy policy states it collects data on you, including your name, physical address, email address, phone number, job title, employer. This isn’t new though – so many social media platforms / apps already do and sadly, staying connected is always a trade-off;
- If you are on a Zoom call and you click away from Zoom, the host of the call will be notified after 30 seconds;
- Zoom became involved in a camera hacking bug last year, which has since been removed.
- There are growing concerns about “Zoombombing”, i.e. others infiltrating your Zoom call to share inappropriate content or even shout abuse.
With the culture of screenshotting your Zoom class to promote yourself, don’t forget to ask for consent, as written in this post by @polegrrl that Lauren Elise brought to my attention:
In short, Zoom isn’t always GDPR compliant – but unfortunately, if your students when being informed about the app still accept the terms and conditions, there’s not much more you can do. At the moment, Zoom IS the app I am seeing most people use for video classes / video conferencing, both my academic and pole network have taken it up. So here’s how you can protect your data:
- Use two devices during Zoom calls -Â e.g if you are on a Zoom call on your laptop, use your phone to check emails / chat in order not to trigger the attention tracking alert;
- Do not use Facebook to sign in, as it increases the amount of personal data Zoom has access to;
- Keep your Zoom app updated. This way, any bugs or controversial issues will be removed.
- Prevent intruders and Zoombombing on your calls. You can do so by going to Settings and turning Screen Sharing to “Host only,†before a public call. It’s also recommended that you disable “Join Before Host,†and “Allow Removed Participants to Rejoin,†and that you disable “File Transfers.†If you can – and I have been doing this – you should also protect your conference call with a password.
[Advice Source: ProtonMail].
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