Mijn lokaal in Hilversum, deel 2

The muzieklokaal was just rebuilt last spring. There used to be a "helling" which gave the room a "zaal-achtige" gevoel. It was a lot of fun, with the class surrounding the teacher who was below. Didactically speaking, however, it was a bit of a nightmare. The students were "on top of" the teacher, it was an invitation for bad behavior, and the whole thing resembled a sort of Roman Colosseum in which the Christians were thrown to the Lions (insert your own comment here). It was very difficult to get to the students to give them individual instruction, and it was very inflexible allowing only for a classical classroom set-up. Not to mention that it was extremely difficult to clean.

The most radical change is in the flexibility the teacher is offered. The "opstelling" in the old room was etched in stone; it was totally flexible. Here I have much more flexibility to experiment with different looks, seating arrangements, points of focus that are appropriate to the given class. For instance, I like often to group the chairs in six "islands" of five tables each which is favorable to independent work and collaboration. In these photos you see the room in a more classical opstelling.

In the third photo you see the banks of keyboards (all equipped with very good and extremely old headphones which we discovered during the renovation!). The keyboards are situated on large tables which have built-in electrical outlets that feed into a central control. Thus I can turn all the keyboards on and off from a single switch behind the blackboard. Less happily, students have been playing with these outlets, jerking them up and down so that they start to break.

Notice also the carpeting on the walls which deadens the sound--that is one negative point about the renovation. The carpeting was put in because the room sits below the teachers' lounge and there were complaints about the noise. Whereas the room used to have a nice, "live" acoustic, I now have to play much louder to get the piano heard, to really "pump it out." We are still waiting for the curtains, which makes it very difficult to look at things projected on the beamer (clips, films, internet).