As far as those adjustments in my teaching practice, there have been a couple of big ones, neither of which I'm really particularly happy about. One is that I still have not tried requiring regular journal entries for these classes — as I wrote about earlier, the first time I supplied paper it was crumpled up and thrown all over the room, used as footballs or paper airplanes, so I just abandoned the idea for a while. The next time I tried was in October, when we were unable to use the auditorium for three days and went to the library for video observations and writing instead. Some of the students did fabulous, insightful work (reminding me why I really miss reading those regular journal entries); but so many tore up the paper and left it (again) in a mess all over the room… That. coupled with the extremely short time I have to get anything done in my classes (about 25 minutes after dressing, hiking across campus from the locker room to the auditorium, then reversing the process at the end of class), has kept me from being too eager to pull out the writing paper again… leaving a big hole in my teaching, at least for the time being.
The other major adjustment has been in the "perform" part of the Create-Perform-Respond cycle. From the very beginning all of the kids were absolutely horrified at the thought of showing their work to their classmates. On the last couple of creative work / composition units, during the two days of exploring the elements, I did manage to get the 6th graders to show their individual phrases, one-half the class at a time — but that was as far as they were willing to go. When we got into the group compositions, I once again began hearing "we're not going to have to show this to anyone else, are we???" The only way I have been able to convince all groups to even finish their projects is by promising that the only person who will see their completed work is me (and my video camera, for assessment purposes). My compromise has been to come around with the camera and record them during general practice time, right where they're practicing, while everyone else is also practicing and therefore presumably not watching — no showings, so no responding either. Of course, this neatly chops off a huge part of the experience of dance — a performing art form, after all — but so far it has been the only way to get the kids to let me see their compositions at all! I keep hoping that as we go along they'll develop the confidence to begin showing — maybe in the spring semester, we'll see…
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Directions & facings project
The composition project I gave just before winter break was pretty simple: create a dance using any steps, movements, and dance styles you like (school-appropriate, of course!), a long as you include movement that travels in at least three different directions and that faces at least three different walls or corners. We started out with a couple of days of explorations — first just reviewing axial and locomotor movement, then working with various traveling directions and axial facings. I included a lot of actions they could play with in various ways, and by the end of the second day many students were getting into the spirit pretty well.
Then they began working in groups on the composition, and I ran into a new problem: most of the 7th graders (those that were participating and working on the project, at any rate) wanted to dance to a song called "Payaso de Rodeo," which I soon discovered is the music for a simple line dance well-known in the local Mexican-American community, much the way the electric slide was well-known to mostly everyone a couple of decades ago. The dance itself does nominally fulfill the basic requirements of the project, as it travels (minimally) in four directions and faces four walls — the complete dance is: slide/chassé to the right, then left, then back, then front, then one-quarter turn to the next wall and repeat... over and over and over...
I had a very hard time getting across to them just why this wasn't okay for their project, especially since some students who hadn't been participating before actually started to join in ("but we're dancing, what do you want?"). I had to sit them down and explain that this was a creative work / composition project, that I was expecting them to create something, and that just getting up and running through a dance that I could see random people doing in innumerable YouTube videos was not creating! I used the analogy that if their English teacher asked them to create a short story based on their own experiences, using certain elements, it would not fulfill the assignment to just write down a story that everyone already knows, like Snow White or the Three Little Pigs. A few of them tried to tell me that their English teacher would be okay with that (I told them I was pretty skeptical, and that I would certainly check with their English teacher!)… They did finally get the point, chose new music, and created a dance of their own (pretty basic, but their using their own ideas at least).
This did, of course, give me an idea that what these kids really want to do in my class is something they already know how to do — which is a little weird to think about in a learning situation, but could be related to making them feel successful, or at least in their comfort zone… something to ponder for the future, at any rate.
Then they began working in groups on the composition, and I ran into a new problem: most of the 7th graders (those that were participating and working on the project, at any rate) wanted to dance to a song called "Payaso de Rodeo," which I soon discovered is the music for a simple line dance well-known in the local Mexican-American community, much the way the electric slide was well-known to mostly everyone a couple of decades ago. The dance itself does nominally fulfill the basic requirements of the project, as it travels (minimally) in four directions and faces four walls — the complete dance is: slide/chassé to the right, then left, then back, then front, then one-quarter turn to the next wall and repeat... over and over and over...
I had a very hard time getting across to them just why this wasn't okay for their project, especially since some students who hadn't been participating before actually started to join in ("but we're dancing, what do you want?"). I had to sit them down and explain that this was a creative work / composition project, that I was expecting them to create something, and that just getting up and running through a dance that I could see random people doing in innumerable YouTube videos was not creating! I used the analogy that if their English teacher asked them to create a short story based on their own experiences, using certain elements, it would not fulfill the assignment to just write down a story that everyone already knows, like Snow White or the Three Little Pigs. A few of them tried to tell me that their English teacher would be okay with that (I told them I was pretty skeptical, and that I would certainly check with their English teacher!)… They did finally get the point, chose new music, and created a dance of their own (pretty basic, but their using their own ideas at least).
This did, of course, give me an idea that what these kids really want to do in my class is something they already know how to do — which is a little weird to think about in a learning situation, but could be related to making them feel successful, or at least in their comfort zone… something to ponder for the future, at any rate.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Fall semester — some progress, some adjustments
Well, after teaching all fall, I've got a lot of writing to catch up on — I hope this post doesn't get too long. We are making some modest progress in exposing students to dance elements and concepts — and, along the way, I have of course made some adjustments to my teaching practice in order to make that happen…
The 6th and 8th grade classes have both appreciably improved their participation, for different reasons: for the 6th graders, we have been able to transfer a lot of kids between Dance and regular (sports-based) PE, so that a significant majority of my students are now in the class by choice; while with the 8th graders, it was more the fear of failing the semester and not being promoted to high school, which kicked in after warning letters went home from the counselor (and the subsequent discovery that participating in dance actually could be more interesting than sitting around talking…). the 7th graders are still the most challenging class, with a majority of students who regularly choose not to participate (and then often spend their class time talking loudly and playing around all over the auditorium).
I have mostly given up on revamping my curriculum, as I had intended to do this year — given the extra hurdle of so many dance-resistant students, I decided this was not the best year to experiment with new ideas… I am falling back on tried-and-true units which I know have worked well and engaged students in the past. So I have once again been alternating units on technique and dance styles (which is what middle school kids expect — to learn steps) with creative explorations and composition. We recently had a fairly successful unit on Baile Folklórico — I like to start with La Botella from Michoacán, as it is bouncy and energetic, just challenging enough, and fun to do (I had some longtime students at EOSA who would periodically beg me "can we do the bottle dance again?"). We took that up in late November, and it was about the time that some of the 8th graders started to turn around — one week, we had thirteen students who participated fully every single day! (doesn't sound like much, out of 40, but it was actually quite an improvement…).
Creative work has been somewhat harder — these teens like to get together in groups to make up dances, but they are very impatient with exploring the elements and applying them to their compositions. They seem to feel (as is common with teenaged beginners) that the reason for group work is to combine their favorite steps from videos into a really cute dance, and whatever elements I've asked them to pay attention to and work on in their compositions fly right out of their heads as soon as they get started…
Back in October, I challenged them with a symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes project (to create a short dance using only group shapes and transitions), which is always a conundrum for teens who think of dance in terms of "steps" — but they got it done, some groups quite successfully. Our latest project, just before winter break, was more accessible… but it presented some new and unexpected difficulties, which I think I'll get to in the next post as it's already getting late...
The 6th and 8th grade classes have both appreciably improved their participation, for different reasons: for the 6th graders, we have been able to transfer a lot of kids between Dance and regular (sports-based) PE, so that a significant majority of my students are now in the class by choice; while with the 8th graders, it was more the fear of failing the semester and not being promoted to high school, which kicked in after warning letters went home from the counselor (and the subsequent discovery that participating in dance actually could be more interesting than sitting around talking…). the 7th graders are still the most challenging class, with a majority of students who regularly choose not to participate (and then often spend their class time talking loudly and playing around all over the auditorium).
I have mostly given up on revamping my curriculum, as I had intended to do this year — given the extra hurdle of so many dance-resistant students, I decided this was not the best year to experiment with new ideas… I am falling back on tried-and-true units which I know have worked well and engaged students in the past. So I have once again been alternating units on technique and dance styles (which is what middle school kids expect — to learn steps) with creative explorations and composition. We recently had a fairly successful unit on Baile Folklórico — I like to start with La Botella from Michoacán, as it is bouncy and energetic, just challenging enough, and fun to do (I had some longtime students at EOSA who would periodically beg me "can we do the bottle dance again?"). We took that up in late November, and it was about the time that some of the 8th graders started to turn around — one week, we had thirteen students who participated fully every single day! (doesn't sound like much, out of 40, but it was actually quite an improvement…).
Creative work has been somewhat harder — these teens like to get together in groups to make up dances, but they are very impatient with exploring the elements and applying them to their compositions. They seem to feel (as is common with teenaged beginners) that the reason for group work is to combine their favorite steps from videos into a really cute dance, and whatever elements I've asked them to pay attention to and work on in their compositions fly right out of their heads as soon as they get started…
Back in October, I challenged them with a symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes project (to create a short dance using only group shapes and transitions), which is always a conundrum for teens who think of dance in terms of "steps" — but they got it done, some groups quite successfully. Our latest project, just before winter break, was more accessible… but it presented some new and unexpected difficulties, which I think I'll get to in the next post as it's already getting late...
Sunday, October 13, 2013
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!
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!
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
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...
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...
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
new school, new thinking about curriculum
I spent three days last week in the Curricular Progressions workshop with the folks from Luna Dance Institute, ostensibly to be working on refining my middle school dance curriculum before starting a new year at a new school… but instead of just tweaking the curriculum, I ended up shifting my thinking in a fairly major way, inspired by another participant in the workshop who is also starting a new middle school dance class. Her idea was that each week (with four classes per week), she will teach two days of improvisation and composition, one day of technique, and one day of video observation and response — with all those classes sharing a common focus in the elements of dance or principles of choreography. For example (to pick one at random), if the focus for the week were Levels, then the improv/comp classes would explore high, middle and low level shapes and movements, the technique class might introduce a combination with lots of relevés and jumps as well as floor work, and on the observation day students could view works by choreographers who work with extremes of level in interesting ways.
As I said, I was inspired… Over the years, I've developed a comfortable flow to my school year — basic jazz and modern technique and historical social dances in the fall, world and cultural dance forms in the spring, with creative work / improvisation / composition interspersed throughout the year as the base, always with enough freedom in the schedule to try out new ideas. But I realized that I've become accustomed to teaching in discrete units, which may or may not relate to each other, and which may or may not build to a coherent whole. So I was excited by the possibility of finding a way to tie everything together, relate the technique lessons to the creative work, make those spiraling skills spiral in a way that makes sense…
So rather than making minor revisions, I've upended my curriculum and turned my head around in a completely new direction. I haven't got everything fully worked out past the first couple or three units, but I can tell my thinking has definitely shifted: the other day, during Hawkins technique class, when my teacher mentioned that Erick Hawkins believed all movement was made up of loops and circles, my first reaction was to start thinking how I could incorporate Hawkins technique into a unit about curved and angular movement (perhaps pairing it with Horton?).
It's just a little bit scary, starting a new school with entirely new curriculum, not falling back on my comfortable, well-tested lesson plans; but it's exciting as well. I'm looking forward to an interesting year (in a good way)!
As I said, I was inspired… Over the years, I've developed a comfortable flow to my school year — basic jazz and modern technique and historical social dances in the fall, world and cultural dance forms in the spring, with creative work / improvisation / composition interspersed throughout the year as the base, always with enough freedom in the schedule to try out new ideas. But I realized that I've become accustomed to teaching in discrete units, which may or may not relate to each other, and which may or may not build to a coherent whole. So I was excited by the possibility of finding a way to tie everything together, relate the technique lessons to the creative work, make those spiraling skills spiral in a way that makes sense…
So rather than making minor revisions, I've upended my curriculum and turned my head around in a completely new direction. I haven't got everything fully worked out past the first couple or three units, but I can tell my thinking has definitely shifted: the other day, during Hawkins technique class, when my teacher mentioned that Erick Hawkins believed all movement was made up of loops and circles, my first reaction was to start thinking how I could incorporate Hawkins technique into a unit about curved and angular movement (perhaps pairing it with Horton?).
It's just a little bit scary, starting a new school with entirely new curriculum, not falling back on my comfortable, well-tested lesson plans; but it's exciting as well. I'm looking forward to an interesting year (in a good way)!
Sunday, June 30, 2013
next year - new school! (and hopefully more regular blogging…)
Well, I seem to have gone completely AWOL for the last couple of months… a consequence, I guess, of teaching at (and dashing between) two different school while simultaneously trying to find a school interested in building a dance program. Also, I guess, there's that thing of not really teaching much dance this year — I have kept a little more up-to-date on the art program blog for my school's website...
So as it happens, I got the word this spring that the art program I'd been teaching for the past two years, since the dance program at EOSA vanished, was also being cut — the classroom teachers thought their kids needed more physical activity, so they decided they needed a PE specialist for their prep teacher (I tried, but failed, to sell the leadership team on the value of a dance-based program… I got comments like "yes, but those sports skills are so important, too…"). When I reminded my contact in HR that I had been trying since December to get some help from her department to get back into a dance position, she gave me a list of three schools with open positions so that I could inquire about interest in dance… To make a really long saga relatively short, one principal replied to my inquiry right away, saying she was so excited to get my message because she had been hoping to start a dance program for two years (if only I'd known!).
So I get to transfer, to a middle school this time (now I will have taught every grade in this district). It will be a half-time position, three classes of Beginning Dance (one each for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders), presumably stuffed full of kids (40-plus in each class). It's been a while since I've taught middle school, so this should be interesting — last time (about 10 years ago), I was a very different teacher, with not nearly so much experience under my belt… and most vitally to me, without having yet had that experience of guiding kids to get beyond cute steps to cool music and to truly create meaning in dance. I am excited to see what will happen (and so relieved I won't have to teach elementary-school PE!)… No matter what, with three dance classes a day, I should be able to find much more to write about here than I did this year!
So as it happens, I got the word this spring that the art program I'd been teaching for the past two years, since the dance program at EOSA vanished, was also being cut — the classroom teachers thought their kids needed more physical activity, so they decided they needed a PE specialist for their prep teacher (I tried, but failed, to sell the leadership team on the value of a dance-based program… I got comments like "yes, but those sports skills are so important, too…"). When I reminded my contact in HR that I had been trying since December to get some help from her department to get back into a dance position, she gave me a list of three schools with open positions so that I could inquire about interest in dance… To make a really long saga relatively short, one principal replied to my inquiry right away, saying she was so excited to get my message because she had been hoping to start a dance program for two years (if only I'd known!).
So I get to transfer, to a middle school this time (now I will have taught every grade in this district). It will be a half-time position, three classes of Beginning Dance (one each for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders), presumably stuffed full of kids (40-plus in each class). It's been a while since I've taught middle school, so this should be interesting — last time (about 10 years ago), I was a very different teacher, with not nearly so much experience under my belt… and most vitally to me, without having yet had that experience of guiding kids to get beyond cute steps to cool music and to truly create meaning in dance. I am excited to see what will happen (and so relieved I won't have to teach elementary-school PE!)… No matter what, with three dance classes a day, I should be able to find much more to write about here than I did this year!
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