Quaint ramblings and occasional reflections of a journeying Aussie musician...

18 January 2006

Children's Song

Monday afternoon...keyboard class number three....four primary kids to a class....they've all just come in from lunchtime, so they're all animated and bubbly and I'm trying to get them to sit down in chairs for longer than two minutes, to NOT press the big red button that starts the band-in-a-box calypso feel...and I totally understand where they're at, because if I was a bubbly primary school kid who'd had a sausage roll with ketchup for lunch who'd just been kicking a soccerball around, I wouldn't really feel like reading notes on a stave either!
Today it's C and F triads, and try as I might, for most of the lesson I'm not getting anywhere with them...they're yelling and playing other tunes and glissandoing their way through the half hour and I'm trying not to raise my voice with them.....but then one of them, there's a moment of stillness in his eyes and he says, "Oh, it's like this, is it?" And he moves those two top fingers in his left hand up from E and G to F and A...and he's GOT IT! And in my mind I breathe a sigh of relief, because at least one of them has absorbed one kernel of information...and that somehow makes the whole thing worthwhile?

Okay, so that was Monday....then there was Tuesday.....

I teach at another school, a Jewish boys primary school....the place is an old synagogue, so it's tiny, and I teach in the shed outside, where they keep the fruit! so people keep coming in and interrupting every once in a while...my head almost touches the ceiling....can't quite get the door shut because there are workmen out in the bitumen 'yard' drilling away at something....
The kids come out of class and they've got so much energy, it's literally bubbling out of them...and they're taking me for a RIDE! yelling and making silly noises and falling off the chairs and backchatting me and I AM yelling back at them....some information is imparted, some of them get to play some of the time, but after my two hours are endured I trudge back out of the school, across the park to the tube, wondering where it's all going....

Don't get me wrong, teaching's great when they're switched on and they want to listen and stuff is learnt, but when they're not up for it....last week I started a day a week at a high school, and it was so refreshing to actually converse with students, feel some respect from them, and be able to actually show them something....

I know I'm just having a whinge, and there are loads of people out there working longer hours in crapper jobs for less money....I know I'll move on sometime....

No comments: