"You Can't Sing It for Them"

A few weeks ago I went to a Notre Dame Saturday Scholar lecture.  Margot Fassler of the Sacred Music program presented "You Can't Sing It for Them", a documentary she and a colleague at Yale produced.   The video follows a young musician who attempts to combine several dying choirs in a mainline African-American Baptist Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut into a "massed" choir--a word which was anathema to some. Excerpts of the video were very compelling and I was able to get one to use with my class.  I felt using it during our precious class time could be justified because a theme of the video was Black music from slave days to the present and I thought it fit right into my goal of broadening my students' lives.  Plus I am trying to learn to use more technology.

Well, we never did get the video hooked up to the big screen TV in the building.  We had to watch it on my little Mac laptop.  But the 25 minutes we spent watching it were a time of blessing for me.  It had been a morning of some frustration.  A group lesson on using formulas for circles seemed so confusing to students even though I did my best to make it concrete and to break it down into parts.  I found myself losing patience when so much careless guessing was occuring.

So it was so nice to end the morning with a time when it seemed that the teacher-student barriers were eased and we all watched with interest as a dilemma in a black church unfolded.  It led to some discussion of how different churches praised God--by being "caught by the Spirit" and jumping around or with hands raised or in a much more sedate style.

It would have been easy to have let my sub continue the video with the students on Monday when I will be absent, but the experience was giving me so much joy that I wanted to claim that for myself.