Term 1 Week 8

Admist all the crazy marking and assignments for CA1, I’ve managed to keep my sanity with the music I teach everyday. The silver lining in this grey overcast week would be the fact that for the 1st time, majority of the Sec 1 pupils have successfully learnt to play the song “When You Believe” in a span of about 4 weeks. This is much faster compared to previous years where it can drag up to an entire term learning the same old song week in week out.

In retrospect, the difference between this time is that I have set bigger targets for the pupils to learn 2 lines of the music instead of 1. You see, there are altogether 5 lines in this song. Previously, I wanted them to learn the song comfortably and well, as perfect as they can. Thus the target for every week was to master 1 line. However by the time they reach 5th line, they would have forgotten the 1st. Then there would need to be a “Revision week”. All this humdrum just kills the excitement of learning a new song. It’s no longer a “new” song. This time, to tap on the enthusiasm of learning the “new” song, their target was to master 2 lines by the end of each lesson. Yes, it was stressful on their part, but it keeps the momentum going. Yes, it wasn’t perfect but at least I can see that most of them are excited and are trying. At least they get frustrated they can’t get it right. It beats the nonchalance they give to many other subjects.

The icing atop the cake had to be the minus-one accompaniment track which my dear IT-savvy hubby has so kindly put together. This accompaniment track was the finale to learning the song.  The students were to play xylophone together with the track. The end product was “nice”. It wasn’t anything very sophisticated, but at least they were able to sense that satistifaction of being able to make music as a group. The feeling I would say is indescribable… 

So next week would be onto another “new” song, and the journey begins again… Hope it’s even sweeter the next time!

Term 1 week 7

It has still been a mountain of assignments to deal with. Somehow I have managed to mark and return them on time. I’ve also manage to write feedback on individual pieces of work given, as much as I can manage (and what my poor red pen has been subjected to).  However I’m not sure how my students understand or interpret what I’ve written. I guess only in the follow-up assignment then will I be able to know.

As for Music, I’m so pleased with most of the Sec 1 classes actually. They’re currently learning to play “When You Believe” on the xylo. So far progress has been good. They have (strangely) been able to progress much faster than the students from past years. Not sure what is the reason though. In fact, 1E2 is so fast they are ready to move on to another song next week. Of course there are also those who are lagging behind simple because of a poorer eye-hand-coordination. They just seem to take a longer time to learn the instrument.

For the Sec 3 class, the number is dwindling. Woohoo!! For once, I’m happy students are not turning up. I’ve also taken the assumption that they are not interested to come anymore. Cos at the beginning of this year, I had more than 25 students in my class and I was pretty worried about having to accomodate the schedule for sooo many school.  Well, I’m down to 14. I believe it’s going to dwindle somemore. I’m in the midst of marking their CA1 test and it becomes clearer who are the ones who are not doing well. But my question is that they are not doing well because of a lack of aptitude or simply because they have missed precious lesson(s) because they were cropped up with something organised by their school on that fateful Monday afternoon. I made it clear that I’m not obliged to do any make-up for a 3hrs lesson. I did email them my teaching materials. But there’s not much I can do if they miss a 3hrs lesson. Well, I hope this serves as a wakeup call to those who have been missing class and also a warning to everyone else not to miss the lesson as the consequences are detrimental!!!!!!!!!!

After this week’s AFL, I’m quite glad we finally got down to something practical. We got down to relooking our SIO and ensuring our lesson objectives are stated really clearly. I guess it has to be that clear that students can even tell themselves how they fare at the end. My only question that still remains is that if we need to stop to backtrack at some point of the lesson, then how can we move on? How about backtracking simply because students haven’t been paying attention? It may just signal to them that it’s ok not to pay attention cos the teacher’s going to reteach anyway… Teacher’s Complex.. To reteach or not to reteach? That’s the question..

Term 1 Crazy 6

Mad mad week… With all the assignments for CA1 that need to be completed, it’s been really a rush. For EL mainly, there’s 4 assignments to be done by week9. If you divide that evenly, that’s about 2 assignments per week. The pertinent problem is the marking. Thank God for 1NA, there’s only the Introduction to be done, not the full composition. I wonder how the other EL teachers who have 2 or even THREE classes to manage. With only 1, I’m already quite stressed.

Well, because of all these crazy madness, I haven’t really been able to “teach” since 2 weeks ago. Just preparing them for the assignment has taken away much time that I would normally use to really “teach”. For e.g. I had to forgo time for oral presentation and journal discussion, which in my opinion are more lasting language skills than writing a composition per se. I am hoping to be able to recover lost time when the CA1 is over.

SO since it’s a crazy week, I have only little time to spare for my reflection and will have to end off here. (See the irony?) I wonder if this is meant to be like this? Hm….

Term 1 Week 5

I’ve been thinking a lot about this AFL thing. So far the 2 sessions conducted by external vendors haven’t been VERY useful. But to say they were useless would be a lie. Some things mentioned did start me thinking about some of my classroom practices. One of them is the questioning technique and how we respond to students when they give answers in class. We often ignore all the “incorrect” answers and only highlight the “model” answer. I’ve learnt during session 2 that we ought to tap on the “incorrect” answers to show to everyone what is lacking in that answer. I have tried to comment on my students’ answers during lessons thereafter. But even after I do, students do not respond. So I’m not sure if my comment about the “less-than-perfect” answer go through to them.

Another thing about AFL in general that I have been thinking about it the scary fact that after teaching for so long, you start to realise that each time you walk out of a classroom after a lesson, what is the reality of how much learning has taken place? So much has been put into the preparation and teaching but jus how much learning has taken place? 

During my Sec 3 Music lesson on Mon afternoon, I decided to try out something, not something that was taught in the session though. Hehe… I just wanted to find out how much the students were learning from the what-seemed-like-an- eternal 3hrs lesson. 

I did a simple listening worksheet on a Fugue – the lesson for that day. I had a list of (a) to (i) questions. Some questions were evaluative in nature while others were factual. At the end of the listening exercise, I pointed out which were the factual questions. There were 5 altogether. These 5 were the litmus test of how much the students had been paying attention. For each of the 5 questions, I got the class to show by raising hands who got them right. This was also a way for me to know if I had been effective in teaching the key points of the lesson. There was 1 particular question where not many got correct. It was a simple concept of finding out the number of voices in the Fugue by interpreting a simple symbol. Simple it was, most of them didn’t get it. Then I realised I didn’t put much emphasis on it during the lesson. As for the few who got it, they were probably the MOST attentive in class and caught what I said in that brief moment. I knew it was my fault for not placing enough emphasis on it.

Through this simple exericse, I achieved a couple of things. First I found out who were the ones who REALLY paid attention and understood almost everything I taught (and conversely, who didn’t). Second, the students also got to see or realise for themselves if they were seeing stars or achieving them during the lesson. Lastly and most important, the students who made an effort to follow the lesson had their morale boosted upon knowing where they now stand in the class. I thought I should do this more often at the end of every lesson. A pity many times I have more to cover than the time I have.