That magical moment in the classroom

Every once in a while, we as teachers get the opportunity to experience that magical moment when our students’ eyes are opened to a new world. In the Information Age that we live in, with digital access to everything at our fingertips, these moments are few and far between, so I was fortunate to experience this precious moment in my English class with my Lao,Vietnamese, Chinese, and Pakistani students.

While learning about different genres of music, my Year 10 IGCSE students encountered reggae, opera, heavy metal, Latin, deep house and the blues for the first time. As teenagers they love music, but their main point of reference is K-Pop. They do listen to some other global and local pop artists, but they have no experience of any genres outside of pop. It was thrilling for me to engage with their enthusiasm as they asked questions about new types of music from around the world. I was particularly excited about introducing them to the legendary Bob Marley. I also had a little laugh as I gave them a quick scare with Iron Maiden. Homework for that week couldn’t have been more fun: listen to one song every night from a different music genre. Though this moment was magical in the way that I got to watch their minds open up to a whole new world, it was also startling to realise how their experience of music has been limited by social media algorithms that promote popular music at the detriment of other genres. Repetitive content that funnels into their feeds reduces their exposure to wider knowledge. But on the bright side, the biased algorithms gave me the opportunity to teach my students something new. Technology truly cannot replace humans.

I am grateful that I got to be their teacher in that moment, to see curiousity in their eyes and watch their world expand in a single lesson.