On Wednesday evening, I got a call from my English teacher at TJHS. Much to my surprise, she was asking me to teach a dance lesson the next day. She had apparently gotten the idea after watching the musical. In about two weeks the students are going camping in Kuishi, and it sounds like each class is performing some sort of skit or dance, so she wanted the third graders to learn the Gaga dance from me. I was excited at the opportunity and immediately set to simplifying the choreography so they could learn it in 50 minutes.
On Thursday, I brought some P.E. clothes, a CD, and a scribbled sheet of instructions for the dance. When 2nd period came, we headed to the music room for our dance class. While I tested out the CD player, the students started filing in. There are only 8 third graders, so the music room was large enough for us all to dance in. I started off by explaining that for this dance, we were all monsters. The dance starts off with everyone skulking around, sort of crouched down with our hands like claws. The students laughed but all of them cooperated. After warming up on the monster moves, I started teaching them some of the actual choreography. I had cut out a lot of sections so that we were basically only dancing during the bridge and chorus; the rest of the time was spent posing.
Around the time we started working on the steps, two other teachers showed up. Both of them are new to the school this year. I'm not entirely sure what subjects they teach, but A-sensei is a woman in her forties, and S-sensei is a man in his twenties. Despite the fact that both of them sit fairly close to me in the staff room, I hadn't spoken with either of them before. I found it rather disappointing that S-sensei hadn't shown any interest in talking to me since we seem to be around the same age, and since he sits directly across from me in the staff room. But now they were both there to see my class. Since I thought the students would feel awkward if the teachers were just standing there and watching them, I invited the teachers to dance with us, and they actually did. They didn't line up with the students, but I could see them doing the steps off to the side. It made me want to laugh watching S-sensei doing the Gaga dance while wearing a suit.
The students picked up the steps fairly quickly. I danced at the front of the class and shouted instructions, but after a while I think a few of them had it figured out on their own. I'm not entirely sure my instructions made a lot of sense, anyways; I was shouting things like "Goggles!" and "Slow crazy! Fast crazy!". I was surprised to see that out of the four boys, two of them seemed to be getting into it. I can't tell whether they were having fun or not, but they were really going for it. One of them, probably the brightest and most diligent student of the class, seemed to be remembering the steps on his own. After we had done the dance together numerous times, I asked the students to try it without me in front of them. They were pretty hesitant, so I said that I would stand off to the side and still do some gestures and yell instructions at them. Mostly I wanted to see what the students looked like when they were dancing; up to that point I'd been doing everything with my back to them. So for our last run-through, I stood at the side of the room and let the students try it on their own. Some of them were watching me for hints most of the time, but a few of them seemed to remember without needing to look at me. I was proud of all of them; they had learned a lot in a very short time.
To give the students a brief break during the middle of the class, I offered to show them the dance as we had performed it in the musical. It's fairly different from the version I was teaching them. I have to admit, I was at least partly motivated by vanity in suggesting it; I wanted to show them what I could do. And the full version is considerably more impressive than the abridged version we were doing in class. The students sounded fairly interested in seeing it, so I danced it as a solo. I'm not entirely sure who I was trying harder to impress, the students or the other teachers. I guess it's all the same in the end.
Before I knew it, class was over. We had just barely had time to learn all the steps and run through the dance a few times. I hadn't really been watching the time while we were working on the dance, but I felt like we had split the time fairly well between learning the steps and actually running through the dance. I think most of the students enjoyed the class, and I had a great time. It's really nice to get to teach something you're enthusiastic about. Not that I don't like English, but dancing is a lot more fun for me. I'm hoping the students will be able to remember the steps since I think they may be performing it for the other classes. I left them a copy of the CD and an outline of the steps, but I'm not sure how much sense my written instructions made.
After that class, we had two regular English classes with the other grades. I was feeling pretty euphoric from the dance class and the other classes went smoothly. Later in the day, the English teacher asked me if I thought I would be at the school in the fall. I said that I probably would get to stay at the school since there weren't any new ALTs coming to the Board of Education this summer. The reason she asked was that the students had said they would like to do the dance for the culture festival. I'm guessing they want me to reteach it to them when the time gets closer. I was really excited to hear that; to me, it meant that they had enjoyed it. I'm hoping that I've got a closer bond with this class now. Most of the time, I'm not a very interesting person at school. Now they've actually seen that I have a personality and maybe some talent. All in all, it was a really great day for me.
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