I have this next week off from school for mid-winter break, and Lizzy advised me to completely take a break for most of it, but to start getting my brain back in gear towards the end of it. That makes sense, so I don’t get overwhelmed. Specifically she asked me to start thinking about what I want to do with the next mini-elective of sixth graders, because she’s completely handing them over to me while she finishes preparing the choirs for festival.
For me, this is an incredibly daunting task. No, I don’t think daunting even covers it. I know that this week I’ll be reading up on Wong’s The First Days of School and reviewing my notes from this last mini-elective. The one relief is that the class is only 4.5 weeks, and I’ve been through one-and-a-half of these mini-electives with Lizzy so far. My class starts on Thursday, March 1, so I have a few days when I get back to get things in order.
She’s giving me free rein over what concepts and material I cover. I could make this a completely different class from what she normally teaches, and she would be okay with it as long as I do it well. I’m definitely going to go back and sift through my secondary general music resources and see what I can bring to the table.
Something that’s daunting but also something I’m looking forward to is planning the unit as a whole. It will give me a chance to look at the big picture, and then divide it into smaller chunks. I won’t be freaking out so much about planning lessons from scratch for every day, because I’ll have some larger goals to fall back on that I am in control of.
My main challenges in this unit are going to be classroom management and establishing clear objectives. Right from moment one of day one I have to be on the ball and know exactly how I’m running my classroom. My goal is to remember that I am in authority over these students, and that I have to take exactly none of their crap. I also need to remember that in order to be truly successful, I need to have my stern side balanced with lightness. This is easy for me to forget, but I may actually plan some humor/lightness into my lesson plans so I remember to include it!
I do have some basic goals I want the class to achieve: finding their singing voices, moving to the beat, showing understanding rhythmic concepts, showing understanding of melodic concepts like solfege and steps/skips, and something new I want to bring to the unit, at least a minor understanding of how music works in other cultures.
I’d like to do something like “World Music Fridays,” [which I totally did not steal from music history at CMU] where we listen to some type of non-Western music, look at its cultural context, and compare it to our own music and culture. I’d like to have some kind of activity in there other than just show and tell lecture-type stuff from me, so that’s something I’ll have to think about and do a bit of research on.
I’m looking forward to putting together this unit (especially in a situation where I will receive constructive feedback on a daily basis), I’m just nervous about what the class will be like. Will they be well-behaved? Will they be disrespectful? Will they be willing to put themselves out there for the music? I guess I’ll have to wait and see, and adapt.
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Author's note: A couple of weeks ago in a journal for seminar, I used the phrase "free rein" and wanted to check that it was not, in fact, "free reign." This led me on an internet quest for about an hour, after which I decided that even though "free rein" is correct (derived from an equestrian phrase), I prefer the spelling of "reign." Oh well.
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