One interesting thing that I’ve learned on this trip is that Zhuhai No. 9 is constantly putting me into awkward situations. We started teaching our arts curricula this week to our music and singing students, and I had drawn a grand staff on the board and had asked if the students would be able to read music notated this way. While a few kids who had studied classical music raised their hands, the majority of them gave me blank looks of confusion. The class leader nervously handed me the music book that they normally used in their singing class, and I saw that their singing notes were notated in some sort of numerical system that I hadn’t ever seen in my own studies of music. I had planned to teach music through Western systems of music, but it was beginning to appear that this would not be a viable option.
As I was realizing this, I had stood at the front of the class with a surprised gape plastered to my face whilst the students watched awkwardly from their seats. Quickly, I shifted gears and decided to teach the kids about the basics of singing technique, about breath support and about intonation. While the rest of the class proceeded in a clumsy mess as I tried desperately to pick up the shattered pieces of my lesson plan, I was surprised to see that my own versatility was sufficient in keeping the students entertained while teaching important voice fundamentals for them. By the time class had finished for the day, I was feeling much better about teaching music and singing to students in Chinese.
Unfortunately, teaching the students about how to sing the songs that we will be selecting next week still remains to be an important problem that I have not yet decided how I will address. There is one option of teaching the western system of music to the kids, but I don’t believe that this is something that is viable nor enjoyable for the students in the next three weeks. One other option is for me to learn the music system that the students use to sing in their music class, and I believe this is a more plausible manner for teaching singing to the students. The last ditch effort is to teach the songs by pure imitation, but this might be really effort intensive for the kids. Either way require lots of motivation, dedication, and effort. Will update on how things go in the next post!
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