New new new

I had never taught this topic before so it’s rather new to me even though I have come across it previously. Had to do some reading up in order to prepare for my lessons. I found it really interesting and refreshing to be able to read up and learn about something new. I think that’s something a teacher should never stop doing – read and learn. Sadly we don’t have the luxury of time to really sit down and read, not just for teaching purposes, but for the sole purposes of self-upgrading.

In fact upon reading up on the history of 20thC English art songs, I fed my class with much knowledge about this genre of music. Even though most were not “in the syllables” but I was glad I gave it to them. I was wondering if I could have even given them the “raw readings” and get them to extract the information for themselves. That perhaps could have been a more effective way of retaining learning.

The flipside to the lesson was that all the scores I had didn’t have corresponding CDs and vice versa. So I could not show a good example of an English art song with both music and score. The best I could do was to play the voice part and got them to make descriptions of it. Wished we had more teaching resources available. Something I need to do is to really organize the teaching resources (CDs and scores) so that I can make the lessons more meaningful.

Before I started the teaching of the Baroque period, I planned to do a quiz on what was previously covered, i.e. Elements of music, instruments of the orchestra and some other rudiments of music. Since it was my first time having to handle 5 different SOWs at one time, I kind of mixed up my lessons and gave the Sec 2 class the quiz for Sec 3’s which tested on music of the Baroque and Classical periods, which have not been taught!

Initially they stared at the questions blankly which I chided them for not retaining what they have learnt last year. As the quiz went on, some students started to be able to answer some (not all) of the questions. Since it was a group quiz, the competition to win motivated them to really think hard. To my surprise, some were able to answer the questions even though these topics were not taught.

It was only after the lesson that I realized I had made the grave mistake!!! Poor girls! But I as sure impressed at how they were able to manage most of the questions. This got me thinking about how much prior knowledge our students actually know, and that we can tap on in order to hasten the pace of their learning so that we can eventually dedicate more time to things they really need help in rather than going through the motion because the syllables says so. Something that I can try out would be to give a “Fore Quiz” instead of a “Revision Quiz” to test how much they already know!

Advertisement