Many, many years ago (when in 5th Form at Northcote Boys' High School) I convinced the teachers to allow dancing classes after school. The waltz was probably the hardest to learn, for some of the lads. One of my mates never quite managed it; his version of waltzing was to take his partner in the standard ballroom hold and then run clockwise around her. Most of the rest of us (I had a mother who was a ballroom champion so I was blessed in this regard) learned how to waltz by learning how to do a "quarter turn" and just using that.

To see a bunch of boys walking down the corridor from the English room to the Maths room (around a square corner of the corridor, to the right) was truly a sight; all carrying their books, they would reach the corner and do a quarter turn in unison.

With primary school kids (who often seem to expect they'll get germs if they have physical contact with the opposite sex) I often found it useful to avoid asking boys and girls to take a member of the opposite sex as a partner. Instead, I'd tell them that the taller ones were to be called kangaroos and the shorter ones would be called wallabies. All subsequent instructions would be couched in those terms, allowing the kids to sort out their own partnering.

Cheers, Rowan