Singing will continue until moral improves.

Today I was asked to leave a class. It was almost the end of the period, and it was because the teacher had some choice words for the unruly students that she didn't want me to hear. Based on what I have listened to, she must have been preparing to unload some heavy ammunition at those kids, but they deserved it. I packed my laptop as quickly as I could and left the room. The students all said goodbye, likely unaware of the hurricane that was about to strike. I wonder if this sort of thing ever happens in American classrooms when the class misbehaves for a guest speaker, I suspect it does, but only if it's politically correct.

 (TL;DR, if you're just here for the photos and videos I promised, here's the link.)

Other than that class, Grade 5 (2), my other classes have been great, especially as I get better at teaching. The improvement is largely because I've begun lecturing less and integrating more student interaction into my lessons. Initially, I was hesitant to do this because it meant I was communicating less material, and the the immense class size complicated any interaction. But, after I realized just how hard it is for some kids to understand me, I determined that games may teach them more than I do: Even if what they learn is not as complex as an idea that I could explain, if they can't understand that explanation then it has no value anyway.

After realizing this, I also sidestepped the class size problem by using a song as the interaction mechanism. As many people know, songs are an interesting and potentially powerful teaching tool. If the students concentrate while they sing, it is easy for them to memorize rather long passages of meaningful English, which they can practice and consider without a written aid. In a few classes I've attended and some I've seen, teachers have used meaningless or overly repetitive songs to teach kids, which sort of bugs me. I, with negligible musical skill, memorized some pretty long songs when I was a kid, and some of them had almost no repetition, like the National Anthem, or Weird Al's 'White and Nerdy.' So, when it came time to choose a song for my lesson I knew I wouldn't be using nursery rhymes, I would be using contemporary pop and classic rock. Both genres often have songs with simple lyrics that tell a story, catchy tunes, and cover a wide variety of subjects. Also, both genres are popular internationally, so it is likely my students will have heard songs from these two genres.

Today's Grade 5 lesson was about sounds, so choosing music was easy. After all, the was an international hit single released recently that was just about one sound. The Fox's sound. And that is how I got sixty kids to sing 'What Does The Fox Say.' But, I've only taught this lesson twice, and one of those was G5(2), so I'll have to observe my other classes to see if they get something out of this song. I hope they do, because it's an easy tool for me to use.

Finally, on a different note, I finally have some visual records of the school! I've taken pictures and videos from around the primary school, generally to show how big it is, and I've posted them in this album. You know, the one with the buy-one-get-one frogs. I'll continue to add more photos and videos here, so you can bookmark it if you want, but I'll try to link to it in each of my posts. And I promise the quality of my videos will improve, but some of the ones here are shot while I'm moving. Eventually, I also hope to film a few of my lessons, when I get good enough to film. I did capture about ten minutes of G5(2), but for the same reason they earned that teacher's wrath, I'll only use that video to analyse my own work and what I should improve, but I'll not post it. Tomorrow, I think I'll film a better class.