| School Connections |
| One Spring day in 2002, we arranged for my class to talk to Jim in the Fidler's Green chatroom. Problems with my computer at school prevented us from doing that but my fellow teacher, Eileen and my daughter, Karen, set it up so we could talk to him in St. John's by cell phone. Jim captured their hearts when he called each kid by name and asked THEM a question. This created a bond with the class and Jim sent us an audio file of one of the songs he was planning for his next CD. The class listened to "Salama" and wrote down their reactions and reviews and I emailed their comments to him.
For the 2002-2003 school year, Salama was the first Newfoundland song my Grade 5 class heard. The kids loved it and got interested in Jim's music. For our Martin Luther King Jr. Assembly in January they decided that a song about peace would be perfect - Salama! They worked hard and performed an original dance (student-choreographed) in a school assembly to Salama. The whole story and all the pictures are here. |
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| This group of girls choreographed their own dance to Salama and came up for weeks during lunchtime to practice. |
| Later on that year, they were anxious to perform another Fidler song and chose Terra Nova. That was fitting since our new Standardized Test in school was called the Terra Nova. We made a parody to share with the school and performed it for the school right before our testing period. Next we got down to learning the "real" words and choreographing another dance. So many of the class wanted to perform! We had ten students on the xylophones doing the whistle part, I played guitar, and we had to import Eileen's class to help us sing. Some of her girls participated in the dance and their added voices really made the difference in our performance. I made it part of the Social Studies curriculum when we learned about the European discovery of the Americas and the immigration to the US. This particular class really wanted to talk to Mr. Fidler on the Ham Radio to pick his brain about songwriting and performing. We had gotten a grant to write an original song and record it at the Sigma Sound recording studio in downtown Philadelphia - the same studio where Patti LaBelle and Will Smith recorded songs! Two folksingers/songwriters helped us - they were called Two of a Kind. So I arranged with Jim to meet him on the radio through the wonders of IRLP (Internet Radio Linking Project). What a thrill to be able to speak with him in St. John's, Newfoundland from the heart of West Philly on my little hand-held radio! Our conversation with him can be found here. The 2003-2004 school year brought another class eager to get to know Mr. Fidler. The second week into the school year I played Jim's latest CD, Musaik's In This World. The reaction to the Arabic song, Salem, was unexpected. "What is he saying, Mrs. T? What is he singing about ?" the class wanted to know. I answered that the CD liner notes said the song was about peace in the Middle East. They wanted to write English words to it because they liked the song so much. Here was my class interested in writing a song without my prompting them! It took us two weeks, listening to the song, paying attention to the mood of the singer, the pace of the words, etc. to write something they thought would reflect the words. We had to guess because none of us knew Arabic. Every child in the room participated in writing the song. It was totally THEIRS. All I did was remind them how many syllables we needed or a well-placed comment about the tone or flow of the words. Here is the whole story of the writing of the English words to Salem. |
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| The girls from both classes choreographed the dance and suggested the use of scarves for props. It worked really well! |
| We also had assistance from Eileen's class for the singing. They sounded very good and we were asked several times to entertain throughout the year. |
| All that year, the kids requested Jim's Musaik CD. They learned Salama also and sang it with gusto. Whenever anyone in the class would look like they wanted to fight with someone, it was not unusual to hear one of the class say, "Salem, man! Peace. Talk it out, walk it off..." All year they worked at creating and maintaining an atmosphere of peace in the classroom and the playground that continues to extend to their 6th grade classrooms. In the afterschool program this year, one of last year's students was heard to quote Salama when one of the "new kids" started a fight. He said to the boy wanting to fight, "You say you know the right thing to do. Well... There's all kinds of people who can talk the talk, But when it comes down to it they can't walk the walk. There's too much fussin' and fightin' instead of unitin' As the wars go on well, it ain't too excitin' It's a system, a shitstem, an -ism and a schism Just another form of a mental prison". To every daughter every so every pap and mama We just want to reach out and wish you 'Salama' . Yeah!" (Jim Fidler, Salama) Outside the classroom Jim's music also kept me going. We were in the 70th or 80th hour of a huge curriculum project for the School District of Philadelphia and they had just changed the rules for the umpteenth time for the finished product. The entire thing was due in 4 days and everyone had about 80 files to convert from one format to an entirely different one plus add a new section. The tension in the room was palpable. I put in my Friendly Fire CD and began plodding thru the work, happily listening. One of the Project Coordinators came over to see why I was so happy. I put my earphones on her head and she listened for a few, sat down and thanked me. "For what?" was my reply. "Because his voice is mesmerizing and all of the tension has flowed from my body right now. His voice is like a magic wand." She sat there with my headphones on for 15 minutes and left smiling. She came back later and asked me to get her a CD. She expressed astonishment that she even enjoyed the music. "It's not my type of music." Indeed, I beg to differ - if she liked it so much, it MUST be her "type of music!" |
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