The final time I observed Katie McIntosh I got to see her 4th and 5th grade choruses as well as her 3rd grade general music class. During this visit I got to do quite a bit of teaching. The 5th graders are singing a piece called "Jasmine Flower" that has a section that is in Mandarin. There are quite a few students who speak Mandarin, and so Katie is having those students teach the students who also want to sing that verse as a feature teach them the song before school and in a few minutes during chorus. I was tasked with supervising and playing piano for those students while they taught the words.
At first it seemed as though I would only need to play the notes for them when they sang, but I quickly realized that there was no plan or sense of urgency to teach the words by the students, so I took charge. I had the students who didn't know the words go on one half of the room and the students who did know the word stand at the other half. I asked the students who do know the words to speak it for them, but this seemed to make them nervous since there was a little too ambiguous for them. So instead I played the piano so they could sing the words for the rest of the students. This worked well and we finally got into a groove of going phrase by phrase with me giving directions to enunciate and repeat certain sections along the way. While we didn't get through the entire verse due to time, what we did go over the students sang very well in front of the whole rest of the choir. While I admit that I didn't have full control of the classroom (some students were off task or moving around the chairs in the room) I decided that it was most productive to continue to work with the students who were focused and eventually most of the other students started paying attention. Ideally I wouldn't let that kind of behavior go unaddressed, but given ten minutes to teach a verse of music I thought that continuing on was the most appropriate thing to do.
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AuthorReese Massey recounts her observations of elementary and secondary music teachers during her time in pre-practicum. Archives
November 2019
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