What is the soundtrack of my life? An internship in group 92 Mariana Backes Nunes Introduction: Music is almost an integral part of human existence. Songs bring vivid memories, reminding us of important people, places, and events in our lives. They also serve to document our thoughts, feelings, and emotions, at some point that we can say that our lives have a soundtrack. From that perspective of music, the project entitled What is the soundtrack of my life? aimed to discuss with the students the relation between music and their lives, listening to songs and reflecting about their messages, trying to relate them with some events in their lives. This project was developed in a public school located in downtown Viamão (RS), in a ninth grade, group 92. Totalizing 20 hours of class, this project was a requirement activity for the Estágio de Docência em Língua Inglesa I course. During my observations in group 92, I could see that the students were always listening to songs in their cellphones, singing during the classes or even talking about songs and singers. I also had the opportunity to apply a questionnaire in which I could confirm that music was part of their lives and that they had a varied musical taste, which could help me deal with different lyrics and different ideas. In order to embrace this diversity and to create a space where the students could also express themselves, the final product planned was the production of an album, and its booklet, with songs chosen by the students as part of what they could consider their lives soundtrack. To reach this final production the project was divided in four steps: 1) Music, music genres and their relation with our lives; 2) Lyrics: What do they have to say to us? What do they mean to us?; 3) What is a soundtrack? What is its importance?; 4) Discovering our own soundtrack. Before showing an overview of this project and its results, it is important to highlight that this was my first experience as a teacher; so, successes and failures paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 4
appeared in the course of this project, but both of them were important to make me reflect and grow up as a teacher and as a human being. Step 1: In the first step of the project I decided to introduce the theme with discussions about music and its definition, music genres and the students favorite music genres, in order to relate the subject with the students daily lives. This first step was mostly important to get to know them and to instigate their previous knowledge about the theme. Brainstorms were written on the board to organize the information that the students brought during the debates. We also worked with the differences between the concepts of the words music, song and lyric, and the question Can music be part of the school? was brought up and a long discussion was developed. At this moment, an important agreement was made between my students and I, the teacher: we negotiated that they would be allowed to listen to music on their cellphones in my class only during the activities, and if they were really doing it. They respected this agreement very well and almost all the times that I asked to speak with them they turned their cellphones and payed attention to me. One of the best activities from this first step was a survey made in the classroom about music genres. The students had to imagine that they were interviewers from MTV and had to create questions about music tastes using Simple Present tense structures; after that, they played the role of interviewers and conducted the survey. With this activity, they could know new things about their classmates and notice the diversity of the classroom that they were part of. paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 5
Step 2: In the second step, the objective was to work with different songs and their lyrics. Then, I selected two songs that the students were familiar with, songs of different genres that the students had already told me that they liked: Sweet Child O Mine (Guns N Roses) and Shake It Off (Taylor Swift). In both tasks, the main idea was to work with the theme of the lyrics, its vocabulary and verbal structure (Simple Present and Preset Continuous tense). With the song Sweet Child O Mine ¹, one of the first activities that I proposed was for the students to underline all the words that they already knew in English from its lyrics. However, the students did not react well to it because, according to them, they did not know anything in English. Then, I decided to prove to them that this statement was wrong and, for that, I wrote all the verses of Sweet Child O Mine on the board and decided to make a kind of a game: the students had to come to the paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 6
board and write the translations of the words that they knew from there. Many students did that and even the shy ones, who did not want to be in front of the class, asked a classmate to write for them. After that, they had to try to understand the verses of the song and link the sentences showed below with each stanza of the lyrics. In this class, the students were very happy because they could realize that they already knew some things in English. The creation of a doodle was the main activity with the song Shake It Off ². After a previous discussion about what the expression shake it off means, the lyrics of the song were divided in small pieces and distributed to the students. In pairs, they had to read the verses that they received and try to understand what it was about. After that, they had to draw (or make a collage about) a possible representation of the meaning of their verses. All the students were engaged with that activity and beautiful productions were made. At the end of this class, the students and I decided that we would make a video with drawings and the song to post on Youtube³. Also, we decided that we would make a poster with the drawings to post on the school walls. paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 7
Step 3: After working with some songs, it was time to start working with soundtracks, the theme of the final project. First of all, we made a discussion in class about what a soundtrack is and why it is important. The students said that soundtracks were important to make the movies scenes more intense, from a romantic scene to a scary one. Then, a quiz was developed: I showed them many famous soundtracks and they had to guess from which movie or TV series the soundtracks were. The students loved it and were really excited with this activity; at one point, the students were all singing the song Let it go 4, one of the soundtracks showed on the quiz. Step 4: The three last classes of the project were left to the final production. The students had to bring the lyrics of a song that they liked and that they thought that could be the soundtrack of some event in their lives from home. The idea was for the paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 8
students to build the booklet of an album writing the information asked in the table below: In the left side, they had to complete the song chart with general information about the song. The Dear listener section was created for students to write a letter to the listener talking about why they chose that song and what it reminds them of. However, the students did not do their homework; they did not bring the lyrics as I had asked them to. As the school's computer lab was not working this time, we had to work with the materials that we had in the classroom. I allowed the students to select one of the songs that they had on their cellphones and search for the lyrics on the Internet. Some of the students had to use a Portuguese song, in order to complete the activity, because they did not have research materials. paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 9
In the last class, the students presented their songs to their classmates, justifying their choices. Also, a poll was made to select the name of our album: The last was the chosen one because, as they explain to me, this is your last day with us, teacher. Final reflections: As it was my first experience as a teacher, I can say that this project ended very well, despite some failures in planning some activities. It was very important in my career because it was the first time that I could see all the theory that I read and all the ideas that I had in practice and I could see which things work and which ones do not. I ended my internship having a good relationship with group 92. They were intelligent and friendly teenagers that wanted to learn more and more, but also wanted to have fun things that I could balance in my classes. Most of the students participated in the classes and engaged in discussions, although in the beginning it was difficult. The students were not used to having moments when their opinions were considered and moments of discussions about topics of their interests, especially in English classes. Gradually, they began to participate more and they even demanded their moments of speech. The students respected me most of the times because at the same time that I tried to be their friends, I put some boundaries since the beginning. However, I tried to negotiate things with them all the time, like the cellphone issue, all the evaluations, the publishing of their tasks and the cleaning project 5. The students' problem of delay was one of the only things that I can say that I failed. Concluding this report, I believe this project was an important experience to me and I have many things to improve as a teacher throughout my career. My students from group 92 helped me to believe in myself as a teacher and I hope that I could help them in some way too. For my second internship, I believe I will be a more confident teacher and I will have my task creation abilities improved with a real experience. paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 10
Notes: ¹Lyrics on https://www.vagalume.com.br/guns-n-roses/sweet-child-o-mine.html ²Lyrics on https://www.vagalume.com.br/taylor-swift/shake-it-off.html ³You can watch the doodle s video on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ituet0wveta 4 Lyrics on https://www.vagalume.com.br/frozen-trilha-sonora/let-it-go-idinamenzel.html 5 A project that was going on in the school. The project consisted of the students maintaining their room clean in order to get some extra points in the end of the trimester. paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 11
Mariana Backes Nunes Graduanda em Letras - Licenciatura com ênfase em Língua Portuguesa e Língua Inglesa e suas respectivas literaturas na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Atualmente atua como bolsista de Iniciação Científica (SEAD/UFRGS) nas áreas de Linguística Aplicada e Tecnologia Educacional. paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL Porto Alegre v. 6 nº 2 2016 12