A light hand hold is essential for turns, but sometimes men have an overly tight grip on me, which is unpleasant and is part of the problem when these these turns are painful. It all happens so fast that it is difficult to breakdown all the elements that are not working. This particular class is not being taught in a skillful manner (in my opinion). The instructor does not even have help with the music, and there are about sixty people in the class so he really has no idea what is going on. He taught the footwork for turns, but did not offer any instruction to the men about how high to raise the arm, and that contributed to this.

Your suggestion to raise my arm myself is a good one. It is somewhat irritating that these men are apparently unwilling to expend the effort to fulfill their role, but then it is bad attitude on my part to not do my best to make these encounters go as smoothly as possible. If possible, I will raise my arm myself. I hope it is possible, because I might have to be forceful in order to keep my wrist, arm and shoulder from being twisted. I really don't understand what is going on in their minds with regards to leading these turns.

Thanks for offering your insight and experience.

That sounds like a large number of people for a class, compared to what I'm used to. Not ideal. I guess we're lucky; we usually have between 6-18 people (usually about 10) and two instructors with an assistant.

Here's another example for something similar. We had one leader who would grab the woman's fingers (not hand) in quite a tight grip, which not only was uncomfortable, but made it difficult to execute turns. I finally figured out how to beat him to it. As he reached out, I'd put my hand into his and slide it up so he HAD to grasp my palm, rather than squeezing my four fingers. He got the idea.