Trendsetter

I think I might have accidentally started a trend.

Trends are unexplainable and people are usually unsure about where they come from.  One of the latest, the dance move Dabbing, has been annoying and baffling teachers for a while.

"Miss, do you know how to Dab?" they shout down corridors.

 If you are a hip and trendy teacher, like me, then you will suddenly sneeze into the inside of your right elbow, while the other arm automatically extends because you have reached the age where independent control of your limbs can be a bit hit and miss.

"Oh, she's so..." you don't quite catch or understand the word they say and you are not sure if it means cool or embarrassing.

I like to think that the move was invented by a middle-aged teacher, possibly in America, teaching a module on hip-hop. I imagine a man, greying, with a bushy moustache and glasses, who trained as a classical pianist and now can't quite fathom why he's teaching this kind of music to kids who don't seem to be interested and who have never even heard of Bach and wouldn't know a Czerny exercise if it bit them. I imagine his classes liked him.  He worked to excite them and he was passionate about music.  As any good music teacher knows, moving is the best way to get children to appreciate music and so he and his students were bopping around the room when he remembered he hadn't put any deodorant that morning, sniffing one pit after the other in time to the quick beat of the music.  His students all copied and a dance move was born.

Today, I was teaching recorders to a year 1/2 class.  We had been playing B's for a while and had managed to go from a hideous squeak to a reasonably pleasant sounding, "Here comes the King," rhythm, that, while not strictly in tune was somewhere close to a B.  We were just about to have one more go when my hands got suck in a weird position.

"Shall I get someone?" asked the lovely teaching assistant.
"I don't think anyone can help.  I probably just need to rub them."
"There must be someone who can cover the class," she said.
I would never inflict teaching a recorder lesson on anyone else, so we just laughed at how odd they looked.

As I was forcing my hands to stretch I noticed the children trying to copy my hand pattern.  Later in the lesson, as we had switched to singing the gesture had spread and by the end of playtime, the whole playground seemed to be performing the new hand gesture.

It will be interesting to see what they call it.