Term 1 reflection.

Term 1 was exhausting. It was a term filled with some awesome stuff but also some difficult stuff.
My classes this first term have been mixed. My seniors classes are fantastic, I have a large year 11 class and they are so enthusiastic and just soak up every bit of knowledge that is thrown at them. My year 12 and 13 classes are smaller but an awesome bunch of talented musos that are always keen and passionate about their music.
This year as a school we decided that junior music would be offered as an option for year 9 and 10 ( it used to be compulsory at year 9) This is based on the success of the passion projects so giving students the freedom of choice to learn their passions. I was totally on board for this, I re wrote my junior units so that I had two semesters. The first semester would be a performance based semester where students cover lots of different aspects of Performing Arts and then work towards a performance. I was seriously amped to get into this but alas as my classes arrived I realised that they were not digging this idea and had no passion at all for performance arts and little passion for music in general. sigh!!! What did I do wrong?? At the end of the 2018 we had 40plus juniors perform in our Musical Theatre passion project, all willing to sing, dance and act to their hearts content! Being honest I was a little crushed...... What the hell do I do now?? I have changed all of my units and the students hate it???!!! It actually took me a while to really process this and figure out what to do next!! So, eventually I realised two things.

1. Some of our students just don't read the course outlines and hand books before they choose! So, they choose a subject based on what they think it is! ( listening to music, jamming on the guitar, watching youtube?) Who Knows!!
2. Most of the students that have chosen Music actually do want to do music. They have seen the musical theatre performances and want to be able to perform but they are too scared or they just don't know how!

So I swallowed my pride and changed the direction of what we were doing! Instead we went back to basics and learnt some skills on the keyboard and the guitar and started thinking about what music we liked and how we could eventually perform it?? This was reasonably successful and students definitely learned new things and enjoyed learning. Did we do a performance in term one? no! Will we get a performance done in term two? Who knows?? Are the juniors getting a cool musical experience and learning some practical and theoretical knowledge?? YES! So I am going to take that as win. It wasn't what I had planned or expected but in teaching nothing ever really goes as planned ha ha!

I still am a firm believer of always trying new things because sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Even though I was disappointed that my new course did not flourish this Term. I will still continue to push this as a subject option. For me I think that I need to make sure I go into the deans assemblies and talk about the new course so that students understand what the expectations are.

In the end Term 1 ended well. I finished We Will Rock You which was again a fantastic opportunity to be singing again this year! No more shows for 2019. Ready to take on the challenged of Term 2.