I read this book around 2009. It's about a teenage girl, possibly adopted, who has a bad relationship with her mum. She lives in France, possibly Paris, but the book is in English.
She develops anorexia at ballet school and I remember she specifically gives up eating yoghurt to lose more weight, not realising eating yoghurt is mandatory at the school to prevent osteoporosis. She develops osteoporosis and breaks some bones. She is kicked out of school (?) And recovers from anorexia (I remember a line about how amazingly she avoids any guilt/shame at gaining weight, which is rare for recovering anorexics) and her mum is angry about the recovery or something.
I'm feeling a little conflicted at the moment. I started ballet in a Cecchetti-only school, and we had frequent vocab and spelling quizzes along with our regular ballet classes. We were expected to know the proper spelling, definition, and usage of every step and term that we used in class. I feel that that really helped my understanding of what the steps were and were intended to be, rather than someone who never sees the words written out and just guesses at the spelling. Maybe that's just my learning style, but I love knowing all of that.
My current teacher (who I also work for now), who was a professional with several large companies, and is phenomenal in every aspect and who I have huge respect for, disagrees with me on that. She doesn't feel that it's particularly important for the students to be able to spell the terms, so long as they know them and use them correctly.
My issue with this is that they then generally just assign an arbitrary "English-French" name in their mind to the step, and don't make the connections to other similar steps or similar terms. For example, I've noticed many of our students struggle with mixing up the names for Epaule and Epaulment and I feel that seeing those words written and understanding the meaning would help that.
I'm just wondering what other people's experiences/opinions are on this. I'm certainly not going to fight her on it. And obviously someone can become an incredible dancer without ever writing down the word "Plie". I just feel that it helped my understanding so much, and it's surprising to me that someone with her background doesn't feel it's particularly important for pre-professional dancers to be able to correctly spell the words they use every day.
