Steve Yao has more ratings than any of the 4,509 Ohio State instructors reviewed on ratemyprofessor.com. But despite his near-perfect 4.9 out of 5.0 overall quality score, he was never a professor and is no longer teaching at OSU.
He said he would have loved to teach dance full-time but couldn’t get more than a month-by-month stipend teaching position. To make ends meet, he took the night shift cook job at Sloopy’s Diner in the new Ohio Union as an hourly employee who is paid bi-weekly.
But university policy says that employees cannot be on both monthly and bi-weekly payment schedules. Although Yao’s jobs would not conflict, the university would have had to treat him as a special case to let him continue teaching.
According to ratemyprofessor.com, that’s just what Yao is — a special teacher.
“Steve might be one of the greatest professors ever … take his class, it might be the best thing you do at Ohio State,” a student said in a recent review of Yao.
“He is a great teacher, funny guy, and really breaks down the dance … so you learn it easily. I loved going to class … I definitely recommend him,” another rater said.
And those are just the comments on page two. There are 63 pages of similar reviews for Yao on the website, which covers “more than 6,000 schools, 1 million professors and 10 million opinions.”
Ratemyprofessor.com receives e-mails stating that instructor ratings are uncannily accurate, especially for schools with more than 1,000 ratings.
Yao has almost one third of that by himself and has 73 more ratings than OSU’s next most-rated professor. Yao’s 312 ratings average out to a 4.9 overall quality score on a 5.0 point scale. The second-most rated OSU instructor with that score has just 77 total ratings.
Yao’s students gave him a collective rating of 4.9 for helpfulness, 4.9 for clarity and 4.3 for easiness. Yao is also considered a “hot” instructor, noted by the red pepper next to his name on the site.
But the university’s payment plan policy pays no heed to ratemyprofessor.com — or to Yao’s nine years of teaching.
There are no full-time dance instructors at OSU, Yao said. And with no possibility of tenure, he applied at Sloopy’s Diner and was hired with full-time benefits in February.
When he learned later that OSU would not consolidate his payments to one schedule and pay him overtime for his teaching, Yao was forced to make a major life decision. He could continue teaching foxtrots and waltzes to students or start cooking sausage sliders and home fries for them.
Because of the lack of job security with the quarter-to-quarter teaching position and because “the pay was terrible,” Yao took the cooking job.
“The whole process really sucked,” he said. “In nine years, I’ve made so many friends and seen so many people develop.”
In the eighth week of Winter Quarter, Yao was told he had to stop teaching. He offered to finish the quarter without pay so his students could have the same instructor from start to finish.
“I was tearing up in class thinking I was facing my students for the last time,” he said. “It was gut-wrenching.”
Yao received e-mails from his soon-to-be-former students. Many of them were students expecting to be taught by Yao again for a higher level class Spring Quarter.
“I loved seeing the progression of each student from week one to week 10, and in further quarters,” Yao said. “Each class becomes close, and many of my former students came back to visit me and dance with my classes.”
The university allowed him to complete Winter quarter with his students. But as of this quarter, Yao’s social dance classes are taught by one of his former students, Tami Thompson.
Yao is also a former OSU student. From 1994 to 1999 he studied sport and leisure studies.
But he never danced before college. He played soccer and tennis at Cincinnati’s North College Hill High School and was “against dance,” he said.
Yao’s life changed when he begrudgingly took Social Dance 101 in his second year of college, which led him to take the second-level class. Those were the only dance classes he ever enrolled in.
“I liked it and I got hooked,” he said. “After that, I started going to 12 hours a week of my friends’ dance classes I wasn’t even getting credit for.”
After graduating in 1999, Yao continued to attend OSU dance classes for fun, and one was taught by a friend of his. One day in 2001, that friend had a conflict and couldn’t teach.
The Department of Dance’s only requirement of its instructors is that they are college graduates, Yao said. So he filled in for his friend and discovered his passion in life.
He taught Social Dance 101 as well as the 102 and 103 classes, which focus more on performance.
Yao has himself been a dance performer. He entered ballroom dance competitions in 1999, 2001 and 2007, and once competed at the Ohio Star Ball downtown.
He also formed Dance Till You Drop, an OSU student organization, where he met one of his ballroom dance partners. And in 1999, he joined another dance performance club called the 4th Street Alleycats.
Despite his passion for dance, Yao now works from 11 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. five days a week at Sloopy’s Diner. He has also been everything from a dishwasher to an hors d’oeuvres chef at the NorthPointe Conference Center and Hotel and at Figlio in Grandview, where he still works occasionally.
But baking, braising, broiling, boiling and blending are no substitutes for boogies, ballets, bops, ballrooms and breakdancing. So Yao finds ways to get his dance-teaching fix on the side.
Former students of his have asked him to teach dances to entire dormitory floors. Students in Baker, Patterson, Stradley, Park and Smith halls learned the swing, salsa and tango from Yao.
He has also taught more than 200 international students from International Friendships Inc., and he has taught ballroom dancing to adults as part of an Active Aging program at the RPAC.
Yao even teaches his friends how to dance for their weddings. So when the time came for his wedding on March 13, the pressure was on.
“They said it had to be special,” Yao said. “So my wife and I did four dips and a lift.”
As a full-time employee, Yao gets to take 10 free credit hours of courses at OSU. He’s considering enrolling in social dance.
