Dance Should be Part of the School


“Intelligence is what we use when we don’t already know what to do,” said Jean Piaget (Powers). This is relevant to everything, including dancing. In my town, there's a very small dance school, which has a Dance Team of 11 girls that go to competition. I love dancing and would love to make it part of our school, for so many different reasons. First, dance is so beneficial for the brain and body. Second, it helps prevent dizziness, improves balance and prevents certain sicknesses. Also, if dance was part of the school, it would help with money and more people might do it. There have been multiple studies on what dancing does, its effects and how it's helpful.

I've always known how good dancing is, but that’s because I dance. But there's much more to it than the fact that I love dancing. Dancing is amazing for so many reasons, such as the fact that every one of all ages can dance. I feel like a lot of people think that dancing is only a girl sport, but it’s really not. Both females and males can, and should dance. Dancing is a great way to get exercise and become flexible. It is a way of expressing yourself and showing who you are, if that’s something that personally represents who you are. There are so many different styles of dance, so there is something for everyone. Dancing is a great way to meet new people. I know that when I was dancing in Castle Rock, I met new and different kinds of people. When I first started dancing 4 years ago, I was in dancing with little girls who were several years younger, and they were amazing. But over the years, I ended up becoming friends with the girls who were both younger and older than me. I go to a dance camp every summer, and I meet extremely talented girls there, who are also very nice girls. When dancing, there's also the ability of learning from the other dancers. One of my personal favorite parts of the dance season is putting on the shows and getting costumes! There's so much new you can learn from dancing.

Dancing is so effective both mentally and physically. It helps with stress reduction, increases serotonin level, forces you to make split-second rapid-fire decisions, as opposed to memory and makes you smarter. Dancing also wards off Alzheimer's disease and other dementia. It makes you use several brain functions at once: Kinesthetic, Rational, Musical, and Emotional. There was recently a study done at Albert Einstein’s College of Medicine in New York City on how effective dancing is. A group of scientist testing this got a group of 75 year olds and studied mentally aging with rates of dementia. These scientist studied physical and cognitive activities, and they found that reading helped protection from dementia by 35%, bicycling and swimming by 0%, crossword puzzles four days a week by 47%, golfing by 0% and dancing by 76%. This shows these scientists that ¾ of the group of 75 year olds were affected by dance, in a positive way (Powers). If there was dance at our school, as part of our school, then this would probably end up helping a lot of people.

Along with the study of the 75 year olds and dementia disease, there was another study done with actual dancers. In September of 2013, the Imperial College London looked at the brain structure of professional dancers. They took 29 professional dancers and 20 professional rowers who had the same age and fitness level as the dancers, put them in a chair in a dark room and spun them each around. The scientist looked at who, after the experiment, was dizzier by having every person doing the experiment state how long they felt like they were still spinning after they were still. It turned out that the dancers adapted back and overcame the dizziness quicker than the rowers. To conclude their experiment, they found that dancing makes you less dizzy and have better balance (Bergland).Dancing is beneficial in so many ways.

“Dizziness, which is the feeling that we are moving when in fact we are still, is a common problem. I see a lot of patients who have suffered from dizziness for a long time. Ballet dancers seem to be able to train themselves not to get dizzy, so we wondered whether we could use the same principles to help our patients,” said Dr. Barry Seemungal, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial (Bergland). Dr. Barry Seemungal, along with some of his other doctors, studied this with the test of 29 dancers and 20 rowers. There had been many studies on the benefits of dance throughout the years, and many things have been figured out. Dance helps with balance, brain and muscle memory, dizziness, stress, diseases, brain function, and much more. Dancing should be part of school because it would help save some money that the dance school has to invest in because of the PTA and Booster Club. That would help with going to competition, classes, recitals and costumes. Dance should be part of the school system.