Wendsday we thought our first lesson at the Humfryskolan in inner Malmø. It is a school that boosts of its creative teaching environment, where music and film are some of the new ways for students to express their fallings and used as an outlet when the students need to let out steam.
The school is a public school with only 90 students or so and there are only classes from sixth grade to ninth grade (on line).
From seventh grade all students are provided with a Mac laptop (which made Ulrik a happy man)
that they are responsible for until they leave school. They use the computer in many lessons and also at home doing homework.
At the school there are several music rooms where students at any time can play on the instruments. In some of the classrooms there are electric drum sets (enables use of earphones) and keyboards. It is also allowed to use the walls to paint on and for the students to express their feelings in art and craft.
The first day teaching, was a interesting experience, I was going to teach about film genre and themes to the eighth graders and started to divide the students into groups. But all through the lessen their was noise, people looking at their computer or mobil phone, one girl taking a call in class and students going in and out of the room as they pleased. No one really wanted to speak English or answer the questions and when I asked them to do group work, they just ran off in different directions and most of them came back with no results or interest in the lesson. In the middle of the lesson two girls were verbally fighting across the class room. There was only a small group of students that wanted to work and come up with a product. It ended up with in the last lesson that I had to get more back to basic with them and reform the groups back into the horse shoe table that they started out with. Since most of them were unable to perform any kind of group work.
The following three hours that Benita thought in the sixth grade class, were equally exiting and demanding.
So now it is back to the thinking box and find ideas on how we can get a class with not much discipline to behave for a three hour English lesson.
