Teaching A Chorus Class of Mean Eighth Grade Children

I forgot to mention this in my other post:

            On Thursday, my chorus teacher decided it would be a fun idea to let a student teach the chorus class. SHE CHOSE ME!! I was so excited, becaus I love to sing and I love chorus, and I love our songs! I stood up, and said "Hey guys! I'm your chorus teacher for today!" Right off the back this kid sais no your not. I wouldn't have been so bothered, but he's one of my REALLY good friends. Then a bunch of kids were like "Where did you go to college?" "What's your degree?" "What did you major in?" I was like, seriously people?

           So, I passed out music for our first song, The Erie Canal, and decided it would be good to go over the ending for all of the different parts. I started with the Sopranos (the higher female part). I then proceeded with the Altos (lower female part) and the Baritones (the middle guy part, but the only guy part in our chorus). They were fine. We've been working on the song for awhile, so I had them do it from the beginning. Our Altos consist of a few people who actually like to sing and try, and then kids that don't like to and barely sing. We usually have this one girl who overpowers everyone else, she's really good and she tries really hard to blend, but the altos are so quiet, but she wasn't there today. So the Altos started singing the Soprano part a few times in our song, but the ironic thing was the parts they sung Soprano were the parts where Altos had the melody (the normal tune of the song)! I was like okay, let's review that. We did, but they were still quiet.

          We have construction going on at our school because it's being redone, and the workers were quite far away. As a reference to try to get them louder, I told the Altos to sing so the construction workers could hear them. It sort of worked, they were the loudest they'd ever been! Without the girl who usually holds them together! I was so excited!

          It was great, but I still had a problem. A lot of the kids were being really mean to me. I always like to stand up as much as I can when singing, 1.) because it's better for your posture because you're not as tempted to slouch, and 2.) because I get fidgety in chairs. Most of the other kids in the class don't like to stand. The were refusing to stand, and it was really getting on my nerves! I sucked it up though, and eventually got them to stand.

         One of our songs is We Are the World. It's everyone's favorite because, as eighth graders, we got to pick it! There are solos in the song, and they haven't been assigned yet (auditions are tomorrow) I decided to mix it up a bit and point to random people to do the solos. Even though some people didn't really do it when I chose them, we helped each other out and it was fun. Overall, it was a fun experience :)