"Leirskule" is a traditional event for Norwegian children that generally occurs when they are between the ages of 10 and 13. Children from all over Norway travel with their schoolmates to spend a week together at a camp. My school, RCNUWC, is a host site for a Leirskule program. Children from all over the country come to my campus to spend a week with their classmates learning things that can't be taught in the classroom. Here at RCN, we provide opportunities for the children to kayak, rock climb, mountain bike, etc. For the months of April, May, June, August, September, and October of 2007, I spent three hours a week with Leirskule children. My role was to teach them about different types of traditional music from around the world and to let them practice with the instruments we have here at school.
With this project, I hoped to share my love for music, a love that I have fostered since I was a child. I wanted to share that same passion with the Norwegian children and I hoped to inspire some of them to take up an interest in music. I also wanted to show them how versatile music is and give them the chance to appreciate music that they may not have been exposed to before, like African-American step rhythms and Latin American traditional drumming.
I feel that I was quite successful in my role as a music teacher. I sincerely enjoyed going and sharing my love of music with the children every week. Sometimes, the children were very difficult to deal with, as is to be expected when you gather fifteen 11-year-olds together in the same room with musical instruments. It was very frustrating at times to try to make them behave, especially with the language barrier as I do not speak much Norwegian. However, I did find ways around this. When children were misbehaving, I would recapture their attention with a different instrument or musical piece, or ask them a question about their own musical tastes. This would usually set things back on track. By the end of every session, I felt that every child had gained something from the workshop.
I learned a lot about how difficult it is to teach. I learned, on a small scale, what it must be like for my teachers everyday. I gained a lot of respect for the profession through my work in the Leirskule program and have become more grateful for the education I receive, as I saw firsthand what it is like to have unappreciative students.
I taught this workshop with two other students, one from Norway and one from Argentina, and we learned a lot about each other through our time together. We had to learn how to work together and complement each other's teaching style. We also had to study many different types of music as we all came from such different cultural backgrounds. Kare Sandvik, the music teacher at my school, helped us a lot, especially in the beginning. He encouraged us to take our own knowledge of our cultures and invent new rhythms or songs rather than just copy old ones. This was challenging, but rewarding in the end as we all felt personally connected to the music we were teaching to the children.
This activity benefitted the children in that they had an opportunity to play musical instruments that they otherwise may have never known about or played. They also experienced world music taught by international teachers, an education that they could not get back at their normal schools. They experimented with their own musical abilities while learning about cultures from around the world.
If I were to do this again, I would like to brush up on my Norwegian language skills as I feel it would benefit the children. I would also have liked to start practicing the pieces that I would teach to the children sooner. I feel that me and the other teachers didn't prepare enough in advance and we didn't really know what to expect with the workshop, so it took us a few weeks before we really honed our skills and the program.
This has taught me a lot about patience with others and communication. I have had to overcome my frustration at not being understood and not being able to understand. This will be useful as I expect I will travel in many different countries in the future and I now have much more patience in dealing with language barriers than I did before.
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