Lesson ten started with activities that focused on rhythm. The new task was to learn to read, write and play dotted-time values. To this end, two third of the lesson was dedicated to doing body percussion, ostinati notation, reading exercises and rhythmic dictation. The last fifteen minutes was comprised of collectively continuing the composition assignment.
In the both groups, the students tried to come up with various ways with their instruments of penguin wobbly walking and ice sliding.
Just like the previous week, the girls’ group actively participated in all the shared activities and were focused. Having absolutely no interferences felt almost surreal.
Looking from a teacher’s perspective, the atmosphere was relaxed and cosy.
With the boys, I had decided in advance to maintain a calm atmosphere; early in the lesson, the boys made attempts to compromise the peace, but I reminded them about the deal we had already made a number of times. However, the attention span was really short and I had to repeatedly ask them to focus on the activities. Despite the reprimands, I paid attention to my own tone of voice, trying to deliver my message in a determined yet friendly manner. When sitting together doing some sight reading exercises, one of the boys, Matt, suddenly turned to me and asked: “Which do you like better, girls or boys?” I said that I liked both equally. “I want you to consider us as stupid”, the second boy, Jack, continued. His comment was quite unexpected, and I asked him, why would he want that?
He just answered “because”. This led us to a conversation about their family members who, in their mind, did hold them as stupid. I said that I was sure that no one really believed this.
After nine weeks, of at times quite intense negotiation about what behaviours were or were not acceptable in the lessons, the conversations made me reconsider again the social dynamics in the BoM classroom. Again, what were the available identities? To me, the striking trait of adopting highly stereotypical gendered learner identities (Gordon 2006a) signalled possible links between localized understandings of group masculinity and group femininity in the BoM classroom (Paechter 2006) and gendered border work (Thorne 1993; Bredesen 2004; Paechter 2006; Connell 2009; Berg 2010).
Despite some social ups and downs during the lesson, positive things happened as well. Some time later, when conducting rhythmic dictation, the whole group was suddenly, extremely well focused on the task, and some of the boys cooperated actively, helping each other complete the assignment. I thought this was very promising. In the last part of the lesson, when working on the group composition, the students came up with some new ideas. In my diary I wrote:
09-11-11
Some nice moments today! Everybody was actually concentrating during the rhythmic dictation. Emil, Amos and Max really cooperated nicely (peer learning!). There were also some nice ideas with the composition. Jack’s comment, that boys are expected to be
‘stupid’, however, came out of the blue. I wonder what he really wanted to say? Did he really mean this? For the first time I saw vulnerability in his actions.
The eleventh lesson plan introduced the concept of keys, major scales and tonal degrees. We studied them by listening, singing, playing instruments and doing textbook exercises. The boys’ lesson was a roller coaster. At times, they participated quite actively, but their concentration only lasted for a short while. The good periods were followed by poor ones. What was new, though, was that they seemed to be more conscious about their own behaviour and even commented when things started to ‘go under’. During the composition assignment, however, the positive intensity of the previous week was gone. The boys did not get any further with their group composition and suffered even to remember the beginning of it from their work the week before.
Instead, the girls moved to the next passage of in their story, in which the penguins are swimming and fishing in the sea. Although the girls were mostly working in a focused manner and achieved a lot during the lesson, something peculiar happened. Two girls sitting next to each other ran into a small conflict about the use of their physical space, and it took me a while to convince them to stop quarrelling. This was a totally new situation. In Phase 1 when everybody still was working together, the girls never showed any disruptive behaviours. It is worth mentioning, however, that I may not have noticed this going on with the girls before when the boys were keeping me so occupied. Consequently, I have to admit that as a teacher, the boys behaviour was so challenging, I could not share my time equally then between my students. In my diary I wrote:
09-11-18
In the boys’ group I had to bring up the question about their motivation to compose. Five out of eight students said they want to continue with the project. Once again we made a deal about better concentration in the future. Unlike the boys, the girls moved on to the next passage of their project. Interestingly, there was a small quarrel between Rebecka and Julia who normally are good friends. It seems that the girls are starting to show their feelings.
In the beginning of lesson twelve, I asked the boys if they were now ready for composing. This time, the group worked really focused with the project. They came up
slipped, they managed to finish the first section of their story and even moved on to the next passage: the penguins in the water. They even practiced for a long time, polishing a section that illustrated penguins’ jumping into the water.
With the girls’ group, we started the class by repeating the major scale from the previous week and then moved to introducing learning intervals. This was carried out by singing and playing on the instruments and then doing some textbook exercises, learning how to identify and build intervals. The last part of the lesson was used to work on the second passage of their composition. The girls’ cooperation appeared to be easy again, and they had time to rehearse their piece from the beginning to the end of the second passage a couple of times.
Working the lessons in an the opposite reverse order from the girls, the boys finished the lesson by studying the intervals. At this point, focusing on learning was difficult for some of the boys; however, it was really nice to be able to give them positive feedback after a relatively good lesson.
Lesson thirteen was centred on the minor scales and the concept of related keys. Part of the lesson was also used to rehearse for the upcoming test the following week. In the boys’ group, the lesson was dynamically like some of the previous ones, including some quite promising and some quite challenging moments. In the beginning of the lesson, the students actively participated, but then suddenly they lost focus. Some of the boys protested quite intensely against the noise in the classroom, saying that it really was frustrating to repeatedly wait for the situation to calm down and to get going with the shared activities. As reported earlier, this was not the first time that some of the boys called for more a peaceful classroom environment. For example, Emil had been reacting to the situation since the beginning of the course. Now, however, he had a group of allies.
Despite ‘unpredictability’ being the best word to describe the interaction among the boys so far, one of the greatest moments of cooperation was yet to come. The last part of the lesson was dedicated to the composing project. Working started disorderly, and I pointed this out to the students. Then suddenly, one of the students, Filip, got a great idea about the passage the students tried to find a creative realisation. His enthusiasm immediately caught on to the others, and suddenly, the group cooperated like never before.
Filip seemed to be totally in charge and easily unified the others. At this moment, I only needed to step back and let them finish composing the section. I wrote to my diary:
09-12-02
This week, some of the students were openly strained drained by the fuss caused by some boys, and repeatedly brought it up. Does this mean that the boys are now starting to negotiate the rules between themselves? Great episode in the end of the lesson! Filip’s great idea inspired everybody. The best cooperation ever so far.
The lesson with the girls was again quite harmonious. They were, however, worried about the up-coming test, so, in addition to learning the task of the week, we spent a lot of time rehearsing for the summary test. Time management never seemed to be a problem for the girls. So, as in previous lessons, they still had some time remaining, and this time, they planned the ending for their composition.
The next two weeks prior to Christmas break, were dedicated to the summary test and a pre-Christmas potluck party with some games and Christmas carol singing. The both groups performed their unfinished compositions, as they were at the moment. This allowed us to jointly discuss how the same story could be given many kinds of musical realisations.
Following Christmas break, the fifteenth lesson focused on harmony, introducing triads and scale degrees. The class became familiar with chords and the idea of using the degrees by singing, and also discussed whether the chords sounded like major or minor chords. The lesson was shorter than normal because the students were going to see a performance in the music school concert hall of an animation accompanied by two pianos.
Both groups focused well throughout this lesson.
The sixteenth lesson signalled the end of Phase 2 of the research project. This lesson continued with the topic of the previous lesson. Further, the chords were named by using chord symbols. For the pianists and the guitarists, this notation was already somewhat familiar from their instrumental lessons. We also discussed the functions of tonic, subdominant and dominant. I demonstrated the functions by playing together with the students an arrangement of a song that had been learned earlier in the lesson. Socially, this lesson was also quite a success in both groups. The students were focused and the atmosphere was mostly quite cosy. I wrote in my diary:
10-01-20
This was the last lesson of the research project. For the first time a second good lessons in a row – unprecedented for the boys! Although, the “wild” boys were not around, hopefully this is a new beginning.