From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Kerry Sopher at Brigham Young University comes clean about his love for ballet and how he employs it in his lectures. This self-taught dancer uses ballet moves to illustrate diplomatic relations throughout history.

“…the glaring flaws of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies dissected with the help of a series of deftly executed entrechats…a re-creation of the tension surrounding the Bay of Pigs crisis by remaining en pointe for as long as possible (20 seconds on a good day!)… To the strains of Stravinsky’s joyfully martial Rite of Spring, I performed an athletic, 15-minute-long, tightly choreographed celebration of the war on terrorism…I found this performance to be so emotionally and physically exhausting that I was forced to end the class 30 minutes early, right there on that high note.”

It is an interesting story in its own right and an a fairly novel approach to integrating the arts into other subjects. I have never been a real big fan of interpretive dance, but I have to admit that the moves he applies to the various historical occurrences seem appropriate. (Especially his pas de deux with a nervous student to illustrate Anwar el-Sadat’s suspicions of Menachem Begin.)

I also have to empathize with him over his mortification at being snickered at the first time he used dance to illustrate his point in class. To have had the guts to do it in the first place, much less to screw his courage to continue after the laughter from the back of the room is commendable.

I actually went to Ratemyprofessor.com to check him out and see if any students had any comments about the dancing. From the ratings you can’t tell he is anything but a real good teacher. That is probably as it should be. His use of dance is as a illustrative tool to help students learn and not some out of context indulgence or eccentricity.