Hey readers,

It’s been quite a while since I last posted, so posting today before tomorrow’s RE and the upcoming revision week would be a good choice, or so I think.

Right, so I haven’t posted in about two weeks, so I have two weeks to track. Basically, in this post I will cover two lessons, one on 16 April, and another on 23 April.

A few things to note, the 16^th April session was chaired by yours truly, and the most recent on 23^rd April was conducted by Wenye. In many ways, the 16^th April session was more effectively than the 23^rd April session, but it wasn’t just related to the teacher.

I’d like to start of with the 16^th April session, since I conducted it. Lots of impressions made, and a first for me.

The lesson started off quite easy, because the students did not have to listen too much of my voice. Warm ups were centered around breathing, so everyone could do it without me helping. As for the “Hello, how are you?” and the “Laughing is contagious” warm ups, I could cope because it was easy to reach and within range, and Isaac was already there to help me out, so it was okay.

I introduced something new during the lesson as well. Apart from jumping on the spot to get the students hyped for the warm up, I used a reaction game to help them wake up and be alert, at the same time loosen up. I’ve affectionately called this game “clap clap jump”. It’s quite simple. Basically when I say clap, they clap, and when I say jump, they jump. So I’d say something simple like “clap jump” at the start, then it progresses into “jump clap jump” or “jump jump jump clap” etc. It tests their reaction and helps them open up and laugh along as well.

I brought in the concept of volume using a curve, instead of the more than (>) and less than (<) sign. We did this the previous week with Grace Orchard School Song, but I thought before we put words into it we try out with an “ahhhh”.

It was rather effective because I can control my loudness pretty well. While explaining to them I said something along the lines of “you need to control when to be LOUDER and softer” and some of them jumped when I raised my voice while saying “louder”. They got the hang of the concept quite well, some of them tried to attract attention by varying pitch even though I told them not to, but on a whole, response was good.

I brought in vocal range as well. Using a curve, this time they had to follow the curve and vary their pitch. They grasped the one going downwards pretty well, and I believe it has to do with the connection of cartoons when the character falls from the sky and goes like “pewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” and the key gets lower and lower. When they tried the upwards curve it was difficult, but ultimately they still managed to grasp the concept, which was a good thing.

Of course through the lesson we had the repetitive stuff, including solfege, bugles’ calling and the school song, which is rather repetitive, so I’d give it a skip in this post.

Moving on to the 23^rd April session. This session was particularly tough, because there was poor coordination on our part and the students were a bit high and restless, so we were having a lot of problems keeping them on task.

We recapped whatever we did last week, but I personally believe Wenye was a bit ill informed about what we did in the previous week despite Benedict’s 2000+ words report on team blog. So the order was pretty much messy, and we were all struggling, and at times I couldn’t help but intervene in the lesson because the students were veering off course, Wenye didn’t know what to do, I had ideas and more.

It was pretty disappointing to see how we didn’t manage to stretch our students, and we failed to keep many of them under control. Ms Phoon says it could be due to the appearance of the morning session choir in the first 10 minutes of the afternoon choir, and says that they may be disturbed and troubled by what they saw and want to attract attention. Even so, I don’t really see why the reaction was so bad. In my observation I realized there was some kind of conflict in class, which was a reason why things couldn’t move on pretty well.

Nevertheless, we moved through the lesson and it was quite messy and we tried using different methods to get back on track, but it was quite difficult. All of us were tired at the end of the lesson from the struggling we faced, and more significantly, the dejection we faced that we barely completed anything in the lesson.

That would conclude the recap, moving on to reflections, even though some of it has been incorporated in the recap above.

In my first teaching lesson, I found a new opening for myself. I realized that, hey, teaching isn’t very difficult after all, at least in this context. I have a passion for music, and for the past few lessons I’ve been listening intently to how people sing, and I think I might have very well gotten the drift of it. It’s quite fun to teach, and lucky for me I had an audience that paid full attention, and because it was my first lesson I was fully prepared for it.

I think the first time teaching was a refreshing experience. For once I made myself useful in the team after many weeks of manning the computer, updating blogs and preparing the powerpoints. The teaching left me with a dry throat, but a happy feeling that I’ve tried something new that I feel I’m grasping quite well.

Right, I guess perhaps I should stop here right now. Half my classmates are pestering each other about physics that we never understand, and I need to settle lots of other non-academic admin stuff with RIPB and my class.

Will post again when I have time. Either way we’re not going down this week because it’s a holiday for them, and I have little intention to go down because CTs are coming up. We’ll see.

if we ever meet again, i'll never be the same~

Benjamin