Practice! Practice! Practice!
At my school every class has to present a morning assembly which often consists of skits, songs, quotes, speeches and everything in between. It was now my classes turn. Recently the English teacher left to pursue her oh so wonderful dream of stepping down from the meat market to tie the knot with some random man who did not believe in her continuing her education. Oh well, there goes her PhD work! Any who, I inherited her class. Still not sure why management thought that I would make a good class teacher but here I am with 4 days to throw together stuff for my class to present in front of the entire school. Joyful!
Having been one to always hate stifling student creativity I allowed my class to try and come up with material. Yet, realizing that there was huge time constraint I decided that snuffing their creativity once wouldn’t kill them. Besides their idea was to talk about African-American racism and sing a MJ song, which was so not happening. So the theme became stereotyping and the song they had to practice was “Numb” by Linkin Park.
Day 1 of practice and things were a mess. Students didn’t even want to practice yet they continued to seek practice times in the hopes of missing class. It was then that I had to pull a very low card. I told them what would happen if they did not take practice seriously. I told them that the teachers, coordinators and principle would get angry and then I told them that those yellings wouldn’t matter. What was going to matter was the entire student body laughing at them, talking about them and whispering behind their backs about how much they sucked. I hated what I had to say but I did see the light go off in their eyes, they had gotten the message. Tomorrow they weren’t going to goof off in practice but they were still going to try and skip every class they could just to practice.
Having been one to always hate stifling student creativity I allowed my class to try and come up with material. Yet, realizing that there was huge time constraint I decided that snuffing their creativity once wouldn’t kill them. Besides their idea was to talk about African-American racism and sing a MJ song, which was so not happening. So the theme became stereotyping and the song they had to practice was “Numb” by Linkin Park.
Day 1 of practice and things were a mess. Students didn’t even want to practice yet they continued to seek practice times in the hopes of missing class. It was then that I had to pull a very low card. I told them what would happen if they did not take practice seriously. I told them that the teachers, coordinators and principle would get angry and then I told them that those yellings wouldn’t matter. What was going to matter was the entire student body laughing at them, talking about them and whispering behind their backs about how much they sucked. I hated what I had to say but I did see the light go off in their eyes, they had gotten the message. Tomorrow they weren’t going to goof off in practice but they were still going to try and skip every class they could just to practice.