Opposites / extremes

I started out this year trying to stick to the new curriculum I had planned over the summer, though with some modifications. My plan had been to focus on one major dance element or concept each week, with a set structure to the week: creative work lessons on Mondays and Tuesdays to introduce the concept, video observation and journal writing on Wednesdays (which is our district’s early release day, so the classes are too short for getting dressed in dance clothes – good day for classroom work), and technique work that continues to focus on the week’s concept on Thursdays and Fridays.

Unfortunately, the Wednesday observation / writing day went right out the window, for a number of reasons: For one, I had no workable technology for showing video; also, the first time I brought out paper for observations, the non-participating students wadded it up and threw it around the room (so I gave up on that for a while); and, as it turned out, I would still have to supervise the locker room for the other PE class even if my students were not getting dressed – so since I couldn’t take my students directly to a classroom there wouldn’t be enough time for any serious observation and writing anyway. So Wednesdays turned into a very short regular class and catch-up day, either creative work or technique, whichever most needed the extra time…

My plan was to start working on opposites – EXTREMES! One thing that came up at the curricular progressions workshop over the summer was that middle school-aged students tend to live in “medium” – so getting them to go to extremes right off the bat seemed like it would be useful for everything afterward. The elements I picked to work on extremes were size/range, level, and speed/tempo — as probably the most easily accessible elements for brand-new, non-dance-experienced kids.

For Size/range, we did some basic freeze dance work using action words and HUGE and tiny movements (I tried to do a bit of Shape Tag or Puzzle Museum, but only the 6th graders actually did it, since with the 7th and 8th grade classes were still too chaotic to get much past the freeze dance). For the technique classes, I tried to focus on doing a little jazz combination with very big and very small movements (with mixed success).

The next week, for Level, we tried to do a little bit of Rocks and Bridges (from Anne Green Gilbert's book), where movers climb and leap over low shapes ("rocks") or crawl under and through high shapes ("bridges") — again, the 6th graders managed it, but it was a little scary since we were still in the little portable classroom (leaping was really out of the question). We tried the Erosion game the next day, in which pairs manipulate each other into gradually lower shapes, and all the classes had some success with that lesson. For the technique half of the week, because we weren't moving very quickly through steps, I couldn't very well teach them a whole combination focusing on Level in two or three classes (as I had envisioned before school started) — so I just appended five shapes onto the end of their (very brief) jazz combination, alternating high and low.

The next week, we spent just a day working on Speed/tempo, working on finding movements that they could do faster… even faster… hyperspeed! and slower… slower… s-u-p-e-r slow-mo… Then they got into groups and began their first choreography project. The project was pretty simple: create a short dance that includes extremes of size/range, level, and speed/tempo — and, of course, a beginning and ending shape!

For this first assignment, I let them work in groups that they felt comfortable with (this may be a mistake in the long run, but at this point it was definitely a matter of choosing my battles — arguments over "I can't be in a group with him/her!" were just one more thing I did not need to deal with). As it happens, once they got into groups and began planning their own steps, some of the students who had not been dancing yet got pulled along, and began asking if they could join one group or another and participate, so the classes began to look more generally successful…

The next problem was that, absolutely universally, everyone in the class agreed that they could never, never perform their dances in front of the rest of the class! So I made the agreement that, just for this time, I would just come around with my video camera while everyone was working, just as if it was a normal practice day, and no one else in the class would be watching because they would all be practicing (sigh… so much for showing and responding…). I am hoping that once they get a little more comfortable, we'll be able to get them to show in the future… baby steps for now. In the end, the finished projects were not the most original in the world, and the extremes were certainly not as extreme as I had hoped — but about 2/3 of the class did complete the assignment, which a few weeks before was something I would never have believed. So it's a start… This week we're starting on shapes and symmetry, we'll see how it goes from here!

a difficult year…

Well, I certainly haven't started out to write as frequently as I had hoped for the new school year! My apologies, it is turning out to be a much harder year than I had anticipated — and I'm afraid I was so disheartened, at first, that I just couldn't bring myself to write about it…

As it happens, I do have three dance classes at my new school, one for each grade (6th, 7th, and 8th) ostensibly as a PE elective. The problem is, they programmed the kids randomly into their PE classes, apparently expecting us to sort them all out the first week of school. It's probably a little understandable, because of the way this position came about, in the last week of the school year — they may have already programmed the classes by the time the idea for a dance program even came up. But I had understood that they had polled the students to be sure there was enough interest in Dance to support three classes, so I was a little baffled that they didn't save the names somewhere… We tried to fix the situation during the first week of school... but of course for those middle school students — who are, after all, all about not sticking out and appearing different — once they were in a class and expecting to go out and throw footballs, peer pressure kicked in and very few kids stepped up to say they would rather take a dance class (and leave room for the sports-minded kids to trade into regular PE).

So I ended up with about a quarter- to a third of my students actually choosing to be in a dance class, with the rest constantly asking me when they can change classes (they can't anymore, not until spring semester) or just not participating, playing around and talking incessantly — and a critical mass who were so openly resistant to trying a dance class, or even having a modicum of respect for me as a teacher new to the site, that for the first couple of weeks it was all I could do just to get through taking roll without calling in a school safety officer to get them to settle a bit… For a while, I was in total despair — had I been a first-year teacher, I would have been thinking that there was something seriously wrong with my teaching (thank goodness for the perspective of 16+ years in urban schools).

Added to that was the space issue — the auditorium, as it happens, is the usual repository for furniture that has been moved out of classrooms that no longer need it; and with construction happening with the other school on the same campus, there was a lot of furniture not getting moved out of the auditorium. So I spent the first five weeks of school trying to teach 40-45 students at a time in a regular-sized portable classroom! That would be crowded enough for a "desk" class, but for dance?!?!? Obviously we did not have room to do any of the kind of curriculum that might hook those reluctant boys — running, leaping, sliding — or much of anything else, for that matter. Five weeks in, I was just about ready to file a grievance for health and safety issues when they finally got the custodians to push all of the extra furniture off to one side of the auditorium so that there would be enough room for us to use it… So we now have some more space, but the downside is that there are piles of furniture all over one side of the room, and the kids who don't participate in dance like to play around and hide in the piles…

Things have gotten better since those first couple of weeks... I still have far too many kids (15 out of 45 in one class) who literally never participate, and I spend way too much of my time chasing down, and sending out, kids who are running around the room yelling (not to mention all the phone calls home to parents). And of course, my new curriculum has pretty much gone out the window, along with much of what I've come to depend on over the years (the first time I brought paper for non-participating students to take observation notes, the 7th-graders crumpled it all up and had a great game of throwing it around the room — I haven't brought out a stack of paper since). But we have managed to progress through some creative work and one small-group choreography project as well as a (very) little jazz technique. And at least I'm no longer coming to school with my stomach in knots every day. Baby steps! Perhaps we'll accomplish something this year after all...

Okay, I do plan to start writing about the curriculum we've managed to cover — I hope to post something about the creative work and choreography project over the weekend or early next week. Bear with me, and stay tuned...