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...