Lesson 3 (23 April)

This is admin Benjamin, I'm doing the post today. Just came back from GOS, after that hour long train ride from Lakeside to Paya Lebar but that's besides the point.

First, settle some admin and stats first. We clocked about 3hrs today, with Benedict and myself reaching at 2.20pm for setup and Wenye at 3.01pm for teaching. Isaac had some Earth Day event or something like that, so he couldn't make it for today's lessons.

Up next we'll have a chronological listing of today's events.

Before we formally started our lesson, a few girls from the morning session entered the class for a short session with the new conductor, Ms Chan. They were using the keyboard, so we couldn't start the lesson. There was a slight delay and we started the session only around 3.10pm.

When the lesson started, we forgot one fundamental thing, that is, to make sure that the students are actually sitting upright and with both soles on the ground. There wasn't much of an introduction, and we dove straight into warm ups. We started out with finger-candle blowing. First it was 5 counts, then 2 sets of 10, then 1 finger blow ten counts. Things started out alright, just that towards the end the students decided to become snakes and hiss at their fingers instead of blowing, so we "might-as-welled" moved on to the snakes/hissing warm up. This warm up was skewed to be more of a breathing control, teaching the students how much air they should release while making the sound. We tried 10 seconds, but some of our choristers couldn't hold it there, so we went to 7 seconds, and without much delay we moved on to the next activity.

Note that at this point of time we forgot to do dog panting, despite a cue to Wenye to initiate the activity. That aside, we moved on to the ma me mi mo mu warm ups, which was somewhat, to me, not fully taken advantage of. We stayed at one note for this warm up, before we moved up one note higher. That is, we only did two notes, which wasn't exactly a good thing because they are not warming up their vocal range. Last week, we moved relatively high up the scale and we could stretch the students a little, and I was a little disappointed on how fast we moved away from this warm up. Next lesson, we should work on stretching the students a little. Last week's lesson showed that they could go pretty high on the scales.

Then we had star jumps within the confined space, which i thought was not a good idea because the choristers were less than half an arm length away from each other, and there was a bit of knocking on the chairs and on each other. Not good. Jumping on the spot and other games would have been better.

After this we did solfege, and it is quite heartening to see that the choristers remembered all the hand signs, which was a good thing because it indicates that they are paying attention to us and absorbing whatever we say. We made them sing the note with the piano, which generated relatively good response from the choristers. Moving on, we also tried without the piano, which wasn't very successful because they only had an impression of doh in their minds.

Next we did the "hello, how are you" warm up. We tried getting volunteers to do, but apart from some of our choristers the response was not very good, so we decided to do by group, that is, front bench and back bench. We started out by asking the front bench to ask the back bench for a reply, then we reversed roles. Then we made each pair demonstrate, and the volume of each pair wasn't very impressive. We should work on their confidence, in view of this.

After that we moved in to laughing is contagious, but at this point in time i noticed many of our choristers we drinking a lot of water, so i gathered we made them do quite a bit at the start so we asked them to take a sip of water. Then the choristers understood it as a break, so they started insisting on going to the toilet. The sit-at-your-place water break became the normal break we had, so there was a disruption in our plans.

After the break we moved away from laughing is contagious for a while. We started the post-break with the loosening of lips, then we inserting dog panting here. We got some of the choristers to demonstrate laughing is contagious to us after that, and then we had two or three rounds of the song before moving into GOS school song.

First was the run-through of the lyrics. How to read and enunciate etc, and I recapped on the meanings of the difficult words in the song, but it turned out that none of them recalled it, so it was kinda awkward in that situation. We quickly moved on to both volume and vocal range, and this time we tried the parabolas happy curve and sad curve and the exponential curve and the downwards version of it, etc. The choristers grabbed this concept well, maybe we could exploit this.

After that we went through GOS again, very in depth, with breathing, enunciation, loudness all incorporated in today's session. We split the song into 3-line segments, and went through the song. Response here was extremely poor, but we can't blame them because they have been working in the same song for the past month, and indeed it is getting a bit dry. Nevertheless, we're working towards our goal of a recording that seems a bit difficult now, but it's a task worth undertaking.

Finally we went on to Bugles' Calling, but it was really late in the lesson and our dear teacher failed to understand the cues that time was up until 4.55pm, after the bell had rung. Within the course of five minutes we complicated Bugles' Calling a lot, and it was not very good for the students.

Either way, the students were super restless and touchy today. Ms Phoon says that it could be due to the girls from the morning session appearing before the session, making them a bit sensitive. It was quite a problem for us, because today's productivity was at an all time low, and we failed to do anything properly.

Moving away from the lesson, the new conductor, Ms Chan, gave us some advice that I thought made sense to me. She said we need not focus on being too perfectionist with the students, and should instead get them to grasp the concept before we go for perfection. In other words, as long as the students get the idea that so is higher than me and doh, and can illustrate this concept properly, we can then fine tune that to perfection.

I can't remember anything now, and whatever i noted down in teaching minutes has been used up, so I'll end the post here. Might be edits, might not, we'll see if I recall anything I missed out.
[EDIT: Hey this is Wen Ye posting - I do agree that this lesson was not very productive, and I missed certain cues on our planned lesson, particularly because I had missed the previous lesson and I had little sense of continuity. Given that I will be taking the next lesson, I will definitely improve on this lesson to do better. To ensure that choristers are engaged, some of the less-important warmups will be spread throughout the lesson - (esp the more engaging ones.).]

Benjamin

Edited by Wen Ye