24 Aug 2011
Written by Steven Ang
I had such a blast presenting our Caring for your Voice Workshop for Northview Secondary School. Presented under the banner of Athenarts Singers’ Club, the project was initiated when we got a call from Alen, a teacher of the school, who asked us to do a talk on this subject as the teachers are having a difficult time coping with the large amounts of talking they have to do on a daily basis. In addition to longer teaching hours, a condo construction next door and their managing their restless students have created a distressing environment which caused long-term strain for their voices.
As we have done similar workshops before, the challenge now is to expand what we already have into two three-hour sessions, adding more information and removing extraneous ones to make this event more action-packed. It took a long time to comb through the wealth of materials available online and off, arranging PowerPoint slides and fussing over every single detail, but eventually we did it.
Our starting point for the talk was a survey that was sent to the teachers a few weeks before. Over the National Day holidays, they were invited to share with us the problems they faced with using their voices, by answering about 20 short questions. After tallying their answers, we analysed the problems and came up with the main structure of our talk. In addition, we spent a day just hanging out in the school, observing various spots with a decibel metre to further understand the situation.
The solutions we provided are holistic-based and split into three levels: psychological, environmental and physical. We discussed the problems they faced, explained the anatomical structure of the throat, taught some simple vocal exercises, and provided some information on what you can do to keep your general health levels up; after all, vocal health is closely linked to your general health, and one cannot exist without the other.
Iris was not only a great teacher but also a wonderful host, keeping the energy levels of 70 tired teachers high as we played games, performed exercises, answered questions and received prizes. Three hours flew by in a whizz. We hope that all the hard work we have put in has ultimately communicated important knowledge of what our voices are like and how to better take care of it.
Despite having just wrapped up a long day of teaching, the teachers took it well in their stride, and were quite entertained by our presentations, especially the vocal exercises that had them stretching, doing lip trills and feeling up their own bodies to find out where the diaphragm is. We also handed out products that are helpful to them, such as breath sprays and a health drink called Activ8. At the end of the first session, they feel that they learnt a lot about their voices and how to take care of it. The only thing that they wanted more of is more vocal exercises, but that was easily taken care of in the follow-up session!
