I find myself asking, is this good enough a lot. For the last few years, my band 3 school has been making videos of sports day and campus related events. Our goal is to make the school look good while showcasing our students’ English abilities. Well, that sounds nice on paper, but if you work in a band 3 school, or are familiar with the trends in Hong Kong you know that that is not easy. In recent years, many well off locals and foreigners alike have been immigrating to other countries. This means that higher banding schools have openings and more capable band 3 students are choosing to leave their band 3 schools and enter higher banding schools. This along with everyone’s absorption with gaming and social media translates into weaker English speaking abilities.
Past Experience
For last year’s sports day, I tried really hard to set up interviews with students on the day of sports day. Not many students are willing to talk to me or a student reporter with a camera present. It’s a little bit better without a camera present, but not much. Why? because many of them lack the ability to put meaningful sentence together. Both last year and this year we got a number of one word answers. One advantage we had last year was there was a bold student reporter. He would actually go out looking for students to talk on camera and some cases the students would run from him. I asked this student if he wanted to be a reporter again this year. Not surprisingly, he said no.
Preparation
I think what sets this year apart from last year is the work that went into recruiting students ahead of time. I formed a speakers group and a tech crew group and met with students to do the sports day promotion video. Therefore we had a project under our belts. Many of the students who helped out with that returned to help out with sports day. Things are extremely busy now as it is the end of the school year. It was the day before sports day that I got the idea of a script. I woke up early that morning and began to write it out. I knew from previous experience that I couldn’t rely on students to have anything to say on their own without having a script.
All we had was Wednesday lunch break for the speakers group and after school for the tech crew. Thursday was sports day. Honestly, I hadn’t even finished writing the script when I met with the students 9 speakers at lunch time. I presented them with the general vision and different roles. Then I assigned them their roles and told them to check the WhatsApp group later for the completed script.
Sports Day
Unfortunately, both Thursday and Friday afternoon were rained out and we had scheduling conflicts, so the current video and the video I had envisioned look very different. But back to the title of this blog is it good enough? That depends on who you ask. The original video is 12 minutes long. It’s been edited down to 5 and half minutes. Why, you ask? Well, first of all we can’t show 12 minutes in a morning assembly, but beyond that our goal is to make the school look good. We don’t want embarrass students or teachers. When it comes to students we make the decisions ourselves whether or not to include them, but we ask teachers for their permission.
Perfection
There was one interaction with a teacher that I knew enough not to include. I’m pretty sure that if I had asked him he would have said don’t include it, but I was really surprised when another one of our teachers told me not to include her in the video. Personally, I thought she did fine. If we are to go around and ask every student or teacher if they want to be in the video, I doubt whether we would be left with a video to show. The fact is we are never going to be perfect. Mistakes are a part of life. Hahaha, I can hear some of you laughing. We aren’t perfect, but AI is or at least AI can be pretty close to perfect. Soon schools will be giving AI a sample of a student’s performance and asking it to edit out any mistakes. AI will be able to generate the video of students and make them look and sound perfect. It will be much cheaper and a whole not less troublesome than trying to train students to learn their lines, speak correctly or to use a camera correctly. We will enjoy the end product and pride ourselves on what a terrific job our students did, but there’s a big problem. It’s fake, and we are lying to ourselves.
Being Authentic
As I told Hirika after the video, it is better to laugh than to cry. If you are working in a band 3 school, this is really important and I am grateful to Hirika for reminding me of it. Actually besides laughing or crying, I think that there are some other commonly embraced approaches that we as teachers take when dealing with our students. They are to control or to ignore. Sometimes we try to control the situation to get the students to do what we want and if that does not work, well, we ignore them. Why because subconsciously we have allowed ourselves to believe that the standards we are trying to reach are more important than our relationships with the students. This is a dangerous approach. Students are looking up to us and in affect what are teaching them is if they do well we will accept them but if they don’t we will ignore them. Consequently they are withdrawing from us and we are wondering why our relationships don’t seem to be working.
Laugh, Cry, Control or Ignore
If you want real learning and growth to take place it has to be done within the context of relationships. Here’s where I would like to give Hirika some credit. She is the roving teacher reporter in the video. There were a number of interactions she did with students that I didn’t include in the video because they would have been considered embarrassing to the students. Honestly, at first I questioned why even bother with a live spontaneous reporting, but I am glad that she suggested it and that we did it. Why because it’s authentic. It’s okay that the students are weak. We shouldn’t remove all signs of weakness or pretend that they are perfect when they are not. We need to be honest with them and honest with ourselves. We can’t make them say everything correctly, but we can relate to them where they are at. Hirika did just that. She laughed with them while they were making mistakes. She wasn’t laughing at them and she wasn’t ignoring the fact that they were making mistakes. She was standing somewhere in between and I think we all need to do more of that.
Fung Ling TV Sports Day Video
Be Authentic
True not everyone will like you, but that’s okay. You have to live with the real you. This is not an excuse for being lazy. Do your work because it is the right thing to do. Yes, AI might look perfect, but it’s not human. It can’t experience relationships. You can. Life is more meaningful when you are doing well in all of your relationships – family, friend, classmate, co-worker, boss, spouse, and God. Thanks for taking the time to read this. It wasn’t written by AI 🙂
