If this is you in class,

... you might be doing it wrong.

In browsing and buying stock images to use on my other site, I have to wade through an awful lot of really strange stock photos that can only loosely be called "ballet".  I found this one on a free images site, and holy heck I sure hope she's just some poor unsuspecting model that was asked to put on pointe shoes just this one time for this one picture.  I'm not confident of that though, the bottoms of her shoes have some obvious wear to them.  Yeeesh!

If you resemble this in class, if your shoes resemble this ever, please find a new instructor and burn the shoes.