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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!

I Survived a Full Day!

Well Praise the Lord! I made it through a full day and got home in one piece! Tuesdays are a great day for me--only one beginner group and most of my fifth graders. I was able to to keep my foot up for all of the lessons except the beginner one, so that really helped. The funniest one was at the end of the day...a string quartet of 5th graders, but I am the cellist. So here I was trying to play cello with my leg up and direct a lesson at the same time. Needless to say, it was quite difficult because my bow kept hitting the leg that was up, and if I took my foot down, it hurt right away. Fun times....

Just Some Thoughts on Union Publications

I was reading through an article in one of the union publications about the importance of family involvement when the kids are in middle and high school. Most of what was in the article seemed like common sense. There was a very interesting statement however. The article talks about a "new brief from the Harvard Family Research Project" and its recommendations for "policymakers, practitioners and researchers." One recommendation is to "facilitate parents' ability to monitor their adolescents' growth and progress." This seems to be a suggestion that says a lot in a few words. It sends the idea that parents are not capable of knowing what is best for their children and that as public school teachers/administrators, we need to tell them. How backwards! But this is the attitude I find in general after teaching for five years. And it is easy when you, as the teacher, spends more time with a child than his or her parents do. It is easy for the role of teacher to supersede that of parent. And perhaps that is why the Bible says that parents are supposed to raise, teach, and have authority over their children's development; because it sure is easy for a society with mass public schooling to think that it is the school's job to completely raise their children, instead of focusing on academics.

I Survived!

Yes, I did survive, but was very glad to leave after a half day as my foot was killing me. So far it has been happening that the first kid to arrive in the room has been setting up the music stands. Well today the first kid to walk in was the smallest kid in orchestra. As he walked in I was thinking, "oh dear, is he going to be able to do it?" This thought went through my mind because he is usually the first one to ask if we can sit down during a lesson (the kids normally stand). So I asked him if he wanted to help and he said yes. So he proceeded to move a cello rack and music cart that were both bigger than he was and then proceeded to set up all the music stands for me. Go figure!

Getting Ready....

Well, tomorrow is my first day of teaching my string kids with a cast on. I'm sure it will be an interesting experience if nothing else. I found out Friday that because I'm so short I can sit on a piano bench and put my leg up at the same time--not too much hangs over the edge. Where I will have to get really creative is teaching the beginners. This will be their second lesson and there is usually a lot of physical demonstrating and moving about on my end...so...we'll see how it goes! No matter what, I'm sure I'll have some good stories to share by the end of this whole thing.

Orchestra

Last Tuesday I had a wonderful first rehearsal with my orchestra kids. I was blown away how good they sounded as we did our first scales. It was a blessing to see that my work with last year's 3rd grade orchestra had indeed prepared them for this year. Of course, after that I went home and sprained my ankle, so I missed the rest of the week. But tomorrow we'll be back at it again, the only difference being I'll have a pair of crutches with me.

Stringfever Bolero

Recorder Music!

I've ordered some recorder music to use with my kids at church and it has come in! It's just the spark I need to motivate me to do some planning. Unfortunately, I think I'll have to wait until Monday, as I need to get to Eastman to work on my project today and tomorrow I have a family party to go to. So..am praying that my motivation will stick around until Monday. :-)

Things That Just Brighten Up My Day

It's always fun when kids complement you on something, because they are so earnest in giving the complement. The other day I was sitting at my laptop in school and two girls walked in and were surprised to see me sitting at my desk with my hair pulled up. (Usually I just leave it down..like 99.9% of the time, but it's been getting awfully hot in my classroom lately.) They both immediately exclaimed how pretty I looked with my hair up.

Tuesday night was our parent's night at school and the next morning I found a note from a former student who is now in middle school. She wrote that she was doing both orchestra and chorus this year, and that she missed me a lot. It was very sweet. And as a friend said--a good thing to have hanging up for all of the times when kids decide that they are not going to continue playing.

Week #1

It is has been a long and hard week. There have been some really good points to it, but overall it has been discouraging. Year #6 of teaching has begun, and in some ways I am restless. When I graduated and first started teaching, I never saw myself lasting more than five years. Well, here I am--I love the work with the kids, but all of the peripheral junk that one has to deal with in the course of the teaching profession has left me discouraged. While this was only the first full week, it feels like it has been a month. For the first time since I started teaching, I find myself randomly having fleeting visions of other things I could be doing with my life. At this point in time, the thought of staying in the profession until I have to retire seems like a life sentence. It is truly my hope that the Lord will remove me at some point from the whole teaching thing. I need a break. But until then I must wait.

"But they that wait up the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." Isaiah 40:31

Beginning of the Year

I think the beginning of the school year is probably crazy for every teacher, no matter what subject or grade level one teaches. Just a small example of what life is like: As I was driving home today I was thinking, "oh great, I'll have time tonight to go through my bag and get dates put into my calendar as well as weed through all of the catalogs I've gotten. Wait a minute, I have no food in the house."

So, the demands of basic, everyday life are calling my name and I music now go out to the grocery store if I want lunch tomorrow.

New Year

Well, I bit the bullet and went into school yesterday. I had been dreading it, not ready at all to start the new year, but once I got there things went ok. I won't have 3rd graders this year (sniff, sniff), and as it stands right now, if every kid from last year were to continue (which probably won't happen), I would start with 59 kids. In the works this year is a Chamber Orchestra, for my kids who need a severe challenge--I actually have quite a few who will probably jump at the chance--so that is exciting. Because I won't have 3rd grade, I will have very few beginners, which will make next year very strange. But I can only take one year at a time right now. For now I am just hoping they don't cut the music program further.

Orff and String Teaching?

So here I am in the Eastman library with my favorite Java's drink in hand (iced chai) and supposed to be reading music history, reflecting for J, and creating a lesson for MH--and the library closes in two hours. Yeah, I got a late start, sleeping in to nearly 11:00. I don't think I've done that in ages, but lydee was kind enough not to shower and as a result I got much needed sleep this morning. (The shower is right next to my room and makes this horrible screaming sound.)

Anyways, it occurred to me yesterday that there are many things I learned in Orff that I automatically incorporate into my string teaching. On a very basic level, the level of interaction I have with my kids during our orchestra rehearsal is reminiscent of Orff. My kids are very involved and have a sense of ownership in the rehearsals as they choose our rhythms to use for scales, experiment with different ways we can play in rounds and make suggestions for improving our performances. I take the first 10 minutes of our rehearsal to do scales and sightreading. I've done scales with my kids since I started teaching, but this was the first year I've incorporated sightreading. And it happened at the suggestion of a student. I had ordered some easy duet books; a whole set that I could use during orchestra and was playing some with my fifth grade cellists. I briefly mentioned that I wasn't sure how I was going to use them with the rest of the kids, and one of the girls promptly said that we should use them for sight reading in orchestra. Our chorus teacher did something similar with her kids this year, and this is where she got the idea. It worked like a charm and was wonderful because my kids needed something more than scales to do for warmups. My kids could probably play scales in rounds in their sleep.

When we do scales, I have the kids choose the rhythms--slightly reminiscent of the building blocks we use in Orff--the kids choose different pizzas if we are in duple and pies if we are in triple. In Orff the idea is to stick to nature related things for the building blocks, but I have found that these two work great. What I have thought of doing is using the building blocks as the beginning for improvisation and composition in an ensemble. We've been doing a lot of that in Orff this week and it would be fun to use with my string kids, especially right at the beginning of the year when we don't have to prepare for a concert right away.

More thoughts on this later....

Blogging

I am thinking about setting up a blog to use with my string students. I am considering using Blogger, but am also looking for other suggestions. Got one? I would love to hear about it!