How to choose a dance school

This decides the most and gets looked at the least. A Cuban salsa school and a line salsa school teach different things, and a city usually has far more people dancing one than the other. Learning your city’s minority style means having nobody to dance with half the nights.

The quick way to find out is to look at your city listing: every event carries its styles, and a minute of scrolling shows which one dominates.

Almost all of them let you take a single class or give the first one free. That is what to do, rather than trusting the website: twenty minutes in a class shows you whether the teacher corrects or only counts, whether people rotate or stay with their partner, and whether you feel comfortable.

If they will not let you try and only sell terms, that is already an answer.

Three things and no more: do people rotate, how many are in a class, and what happens if you miss a week. Rotation decides how much you learn; class size decides how much you get corrected; the missed-class policy decides what it really costs.

Never rotating. A class that is one choreography repeated week after week instead of technique and figures you can use on a floor. Levels that are not clear, with someone on their first day and someone with three years in the same group — nobody gets taught there.

And the most important one: anyone pushing a level of contact you do not want. That is not a teaching style; that is a reason to leave and not come back.

Changing schools is normal and you owe nobody an explanation. Plenty of people try two or three in their first year, and a fair few end up at one for classes and another for the social.

The one thing worth doing is not stopping while you decide. Three steady months in one decent place teach more than hopping between trials.