QUOTE
I'm really curious about trying this out.. but gah I'm scared of making a total fool of myself..
Nobody's going to be bothered, as they'll all be too busy worrying about making a total fools of
themselves 
- apart from the experienced people - who also know the feeling only too well, as they remember having it, too.
However, this is only
anticipatory anxiety - a common experience people get before trying new things, especially in a group.
There are long poses and short poses, typically. They often start with the short poses and get longer. My own opinion is that for beginners, long poses are more valuable than short ones, because often beginners misunderstand what short poses are actually supposed to be for. (I'll talk about long poses first, then short ones, then explain why I say this)
In long poses, take the time to plot out the overall shapes of the body, get proportions and placements accurate. Don't worry about doing a finished drawing (anybody can do detail, its getting general proportions really well which is the tricky thing).
Draw big, don't be afraid of working large - better to stand up at an easel, use charcoal, hold the stick lightly by the middle-to-back (not in a death-grip by the tip, like you were signing a cheque), and draw by using your whole arm, moving from the elbow and shoulder. If your mark's in the wrong place, no problem, just wipe it back out. (Don't get pulled into this idea of "I must work small, I'm only a beginner" producing some tight little 3 inch high drawing - its
easier to work bigger. And you paid the same money as everyone else in the class!).
What short poses are for, are for working on "gesture" - getting the overall action of the pose down very quickly - they are not supposed to be a mad dash to do a long pose style drawing, but even faster!
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Strong personal opinion time...
I think that a lot of classes, artists, and even teachers, have very little idea of what they are actually doing life-classes
for - they don't understand or know why lifeclasses were invented, or what they were for - they're doing them because they're "artistic", and traditional.
As a result of this, you see piles of bad lifeclass drawings where models look like bags of hammers, misshapen and disproportionate (your stick figures are actually a sounder approach!).
So - what are lifeclasses for? Originally, they were intended for teaching artistic anatomy, and for drawing skills - but they were also a way of creating study-drawings of models in stock poses or performing stock actions, which were then used as a basis for multi-figure paintings - this can be seen up to the end of the 19thC in paintings like this one:
There's often an over-emphasis, I'd suggest, on short poses - for people who haven't yet learned how to draw a reasonably accurately-proportioned figure given all the time they need to do so in a long pose!
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So, relax - use the short poses just to get down gestures (what's the general line through the body, the tilt of pelvis, shoulders, head, positions of limbs - which leg is the weight on? - not much more than a glorified stick-figure, really - put down the general shapes in a few lines).
Use the long poses to try to get proportions reasonably accurate - plot out the overall shape, look at heights, widths and angles of the big shapes making up the body, and the shapes of the negative spaces (like the shape of the space between an arm and the torso, or between the legs). Take your time, it doesn't matter if you produce a finished drawing at first - sound starts are better than a rushed unsound finished drawing. You'll pick up speed with a bit of experience.
You should be learning, but it should also be fun, don't let yourself be hassled either by your own feelings, or by others
Dave
