Teaching Kids to DJ

[Guy (Boratto?)]

^this.

To be brutally honest this whole situation sounds like a huge challenge... teaching a difficult technical skill to 20 kids with only one tool to demonstrate the skill on.

I expect the students' perception of what DJing is will be pretty different to what ours is. I would assume they will be expecting you to be teaching them how to scratch. On the plus side, if you can turn your lessons into something along these lines, this is something that can give the kind of instant result that difficult kids thrive on. Moving beyond this to any kind of skill will be the difficult part.

Second, you won't be able to control the classroom - in tough inner city schools you need to gain kids' trust over weeks or months, and until you do this they will be difficult. If I was in your situation I would tell the school that the format is impossible, that it would need to be set up in sessions of 2 or 3 students at a time - and you'd need an established teacher there to keep them in line. More to the point I think you'd need to be dealing with 16 year olds to grasp the technical skills you'll be teaching them (and be willing to put the work in to move forwards), but I guess it's too late for that?

Thankfully it's something they're actually interested in for a change so that will make things easier for you. Draw up minutely detailed lesson plans that have scope for the class struggling over the smallest detail or getting through it like a house on fire, make sure you have activities that will keep the best students busy whilst you concentrate on everyone else, and go through the lesson plan with a teacher at the school beforehand, with plenty of time to start from scratch. (you definitely won't get anyone to sing anything either i'm afraid!)

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incidentally if you're stuck with the format as it is, what I would do is book a job lot of laptops (if the school has them) and install ejay on all of them with a few samples/loops on them and after a bit of an introduction split the lesson into two parts, production and DJing, get 2 kids up for 5 minutes at a time in the lesson letting them touch the decks and beginning to offer the absolute basics, the ones that are really interested would stand out, start practising during their break times and become teachable, the others will be satisfied by being able to put something together that sounds reasonable and do a bit of the sort of terrible scratching that we've become so used to over the years.