Level: 2E de la eso, Music
I work with several teachers for bilingual subjects outside of English and one of them is music. I am a musician, so it is pretty fun to get an opportunity to teach what I know and to compare music instruction here in Madrid to that of the U.S.A. One of the music teachers asked me to prepare a little lesson on noise pollution one day, so I made a short powerpoint and presented it. Noise pollution happens to be a personal topic to me, as the neighborhood I live in back in Seattle is on a hill directly under the flight path for air traffic from SeaTac airport and has very high noise pollution. Because the neighborhood, called Beacon Hill, is a working class neighborhood filled primarily with Black Americans and Asian and Latino immigrants, there is a growing movement in the neighborhood to fight against the noise pollution as a racial and economic justice issue. The students in the music class are basically bilingual, with a very high English level, so I decided to include the story of my home neighborhood in my presentation and try to lead a discussion on how Noise pollution is related to institutional racism and classism. This part of my presentation only sort of worked, and it was obvious that most of the students had never encountered any of the background ideas that would have made this conversation possible (they didn't have much of a grasp if any on the concept of "racism" in general.) That was my fault, as I took for granted certain things and presented them with a problem without giving them the tools they would have needed to understand it. Over all though, the presentation went pretty well, and I learned a lot from teaching it.
Here's the link: Noise Pollution Presentation
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