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Stress

So it's been quite awhile since I've updated my blog. Middle of May=most stressful time of the year. Both my school calendar and my personal calendar are bursting at the seams. If I can make it until next week, it may be a miracle. Today's problem: kids missing lessons. We are not only into field trip season, but the time of the year when gym classes go outside and recess is outside. While its great for the kids, it's a nightmare for your local instrumental teacher. Even after a reminder this morning to check the lesson schedule, I had many repeat offenders today. But finally I've gotten a bit smarter. Instead of fretting over it, I simply e-mailed the parents and left a note for each child that they will receive tomorrow. Why I didn't think of this earlier in the year is a mystery. Oh well. Live and learn.

Today's Stress Meter:
One cup of coffee
One Mt. Dew
Too many pieces of chocolate to count

Night of 1000 Strings

What do you get when you combine over 400 string students and 9 string teachers? The annual district wide String Festival, which thankfully, only comes once a year. Tonight was the night, and as nice of an experience it is for the kids, I am glad to say that it is over! It's officially 12:03 am and I am just heading towards bed.

Scary Article

Here is a scary paragraph from an article sent out from the Berean Call, "But perhaps the most important point concerning Susan Douglass' past work is her role as the principal researcher and textbook review for the Council on Islamic Education (CIE), which has been pressuring American textbook publishers to revise their respective curricula to promote an extremist and revisionist view of Islam. One CIE campaign was directed at Houghton Mifflin Publishers, which resulted in a number of changes to their public school curriculum, including open promotion of Islam and requiring students to participate in Islamic worship activities. Gilbert Sewall of the American Textbook Council has documented the changes to textbooks resulting from CIE's efforts, and the changes made to textbooks under CIE's direction has been criticized by former Secretary of Education William Bennett. One published estimate states that Douglass and CIE have also trained more than 8,000 public school teachers."

Click here for full article.

Tell me..

how does a school run out of it's supply of copy paper in November????

Exciting Happenings!

I won't write tonight as it is nearing 11:00, but I'm incorporating some things I learned over the summer in Orff with my 4th & 5th grade orchestra kids that are going really well. So..I'm hopefully going to post more about it tomorrow!

Scales

Each string teacher I know focuses on different things in their teaching. One of the things I concentrate on is teaching my students scales. By the time they get to 5th grade they can play at least 3 scales rock solid. There are so many great reasons to do them and I like to have fun with the kids when we do them. My hope is to help them make connections between the scales we learn and the songs we are playing in lessons and orchestra. And ultimately...show them how to use their knowledge of scales to help them figure out notes and fingerings in a given piece of music.

Last week one of my 5th graders randomly said (very enthusiastically) in the middle of his lesson, "I love doing scales!" It was rather amusing because this is the same student, who, as a 3rd grader in one of my music classes played a harmonic minor scale instead of natural minor because that was what he was taught in recorder. (i.e. when we were playing the a minor scale on the keyboards, he started throwing in the G# because that's what his ear was used to hearing). So...I explained to him the difference between natural and harmonic minor as a third grader. The "scary" part is that he understood it.

Also last week, one of my more advanced 4th grade viola groups came in and started bugging me to learn how to do the A scale. I usually don't teach the violas this scale until later in the year because the finger pattern is different from our normal finger pattern. But they were not liking the fact that they had to sit out during that scale in orchestra. So we changed the lesson plan a bit and I showed them. After that one of the kids goes, "That's it?" "Yes," I replied. "Well, we thought it would be really hard." Go figure!

Playing the A scale on the cello is a whole different story, and I don't even broach the subject unless I've got an advanced player. So it's the one time in orchestra where they get to just sit. For the most part they find it quite humorous. Many days I'll have a cellist say they want to do the A scale just because they find it so funny.

Ok, that's enough technicality for one evening!