More grinding. Yikes!
So I know that there has already been coverage on grinding complaints, but here’s to a small blog entry not necessarily complaining.
So when the administration started cutting down on the various rules at Uni dances everyone was in a frenzy! I remember as a subbie coming to my first Uni dance and not expecting anything at all. I expected students to be standing in the corners and talking and maybe bobbing their heads to the beat, not dancing in the middle of a hot attic with thumping music and flashy lights.
As a subbie, though, I never remember feeling offended by it; in fact I thought it was kind of cool. I felt super-mature for attending these high school dances. Now, though, the atmosphere isn’t like that. Fewer and fewer people are coming to Uni dances, and although bringing a friend from another school is discouraged (in case they might cause trouble), they honestly aren’t that thrilled to come any more.
At the beginning of the year, I decided that even though they were cutting down on grinding I still wanted to go to the dances. If I wasn’t having fun, I could leave school and go out on campus for ice cream or hot chocolate (and in some cases that’s what I did). Now, though, I’m not even allowed to do that unless I take the time to call my mom, get her on the line with Assistant Director Sue Kovacs, and make sure it’s OK with both of them (which isn’t easy considering my mom rarely has her cell phone available to call).
The school has given us chances to learn alternatives such as swing dancing during Agora Days, and during the Halloween dance we had an instructor come in. Personally I took the swing dancing class and had tons of fun with it! Even though I only learned how to play the role of the male lead, I still thought it was very useful to know. In all honesty, though, I don’t think that I am going to burst out into swing dancing while “Get Low” plays in the background; I don’t know about you, but I would feel a little awkward.
So this weekend I had the opportunity to check out another school dance, at Central High School, with another one of my Uni friends. Figuring their school dances would be similar to our old school dances, we dressed in simple jeans and a black shirts. When I got there though, girls were walking in bunches chatting away. They were wearing heels and dresses that I thought were only suitable for winter formal. Turns out that this was a formal dance (and I’m sure you can guess how glad we were that our Central friends forgot to tell us this).
We decided that it didn’t really matter to us, though; we would rather dance in jeans than in a dress any day. So the Central friends we had arrived with went to give our tickets to the school dean to let us in … and we couldn’t go in. Neither I nor my friend had realized that to get into the dance we needed to have our school IDs. So we were forced to dash back home.
When we finally got into the dance there were so many disco balls and a huge screen that had music videos playing on it (and they weren’t playing “funk” music). In fact, at one point there was even a power surge!
To my shock, though, not even half the gym was filled with people, and of those people not all of them were dancing. It seemed completely ridiculous to me that these people had such nice dances set up for them, and so much freedom, and yet not everyone was taking advantage of it. No one appeared to be offended, but people would group together and “casually grind” as their friends struck up conversations around them.
So basically, if you look at Uni we were given a lot of freedoms. To get into the dances all we had to do was sign our name on a paper; to invite guests all we needed was to have them write their names down. We were allowed to dance however we wanted to, and we were even given a podium/stage to “dirty dance” on. And not only were we given these freedoms, but most of us took full advantage of them.
Now looking at this dance I just went to, and some other dances I’ve been to, you could say that Uni students might’ve even provoked the teachers to some extent. I’m not saying that grinding is bad (hey, I’m all for it!), and I understand that my experiences don’t necessarily represent all public schools, but if you were a parent how much would you really enjoy seeing your child rub up on some other boy or girl?
What I observed at Central wasn’t exactly what you could’ve called ‘hardcore grinding’ (despite what everyone has told me about the intense dancing at other public schools), and I think it’s safe to say that I’ve seen some “better grinders” at Uni dances. So can we really blame the administration, parents, etc. for not wanting their children involved in such provocative dancing, despite how much we really want it?
— Lizzy Warner
Panic on the dance floor: What’s it like at other high schools?
Special report: Grinding down on student dances