Blog post 7

 Building an audience

     There are so many things a new BOCJ teacher needs to worry about and plan for when starting their first year. Some of these concerns include, budget, student instruments, getting sheet music and choosing songs to teach. With all of these big issues to deal with it can be easy for a teacher to forget to think about the actual attendance of a school show. School shows are very important, but a show of any kind is not much of a show if there is no body watching or listening. In some schools the auditorium is humongous. These auditoriums can have hundreds of eats in them. In can actually be embarrassing to a student to play a show expecting people to show and then there are about 30 people in a 500 seat auditorium. But how does a new teacher raise attendance and why is it so important.

      Starting at the administration level. New teachers must dazzle their principals at their school shows, (especially is they want to keep their new jobs). If a school show is done right and has a great audience, the school and the community look very good. Even as anew teacher principals will have high expectations for school shows. This means that administration is aware how many seats are in the auditorium and expect them to be mostly full. So besides putting on a good show, the other issue is how are people going to here about the show and come?

      Mr. Earl MacDonald has come up with and used a couple good ideas that I really like to gain attendance to his school performances. Ideas I definitely see me using in the feature are, setting up a facebook group, E-mailing parents, Student made flyers to post throughout the school, and making youtube advertisement videos, or posting previews of school show on youtube. These ideas are a great use of technology. Also most of these forms of advertisement can be made by students. If advertisement is made by students rather than adults I think it will yield a bigger turnout in the audience. One more idea for advertisement is by advertising the show on local public radio. Another way to use public radio is by having the station play recordings of the students so community members can listen and appreciate the students music before the show.

      Attendance for a school show might not be on the top of every new teachers priority list. But it is something that is important and a responsibility for the music teacher. Not many people will show up to school shows if the teacher is not putting the work into gaining an audience.