Music, Teaching, Learning, and Life

Several times in recent months, individual students have given me ideas for ways to do things that I hadn’t considered before.  It happened again today in a first grade class.

We’re learning about tempo and learned an old favorite of mine from the Silver Burdett series, “Obwisana” with the stone passing game.  In the past I’ve used rhythm sticks, and haven’t been completely happy with how that worked.  The sticks are too noisy, roll away, and sometimes students fingers are accidentally whacked even when we are careful.  I tried capped pens the other day, but those were too small and harder for the students to grasp.  As I was explaining to a different class today how we would add some kind of object to our movements next time, one boy spoke up and said, “Like paper balls?”  Ah-ha!  I had the students crumple up a piece of paper each.  It worked!  The noise level made by the paper was practically non-existent, and the students were able to easily pick the paper up and pass it on to the next person in the circle.  And even better, the paper balls didn’t roll away quite as easily!  If the students got confused and someone was left without a paper ball, it was quite easy to safely throw them the extra paper ball.  Of course, they LOVED that!

One of the hardest lessons for me to learn as a teacher has been to relinquish some of my need for control:  not classroom management, but control.  I find that when I succeed in that area, classes go amazingly well.  When I’m bull-headed and must have things “my way or the highway,” I lose some of the students.  Even if I have their outward behavior with me at those times, they sometimes aren’t really “with” me.  Just the simple switch of trying the little boys idea helped that class succeed.

I’m going to work on remembering this lesson!