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.

Thunder Soul blog

     Creating a love for music is pretty important for a music class. Music is a great class for students express themselves and have fun, with this being said it is important to maintain a positive vibe within the music classroom. There are many ways to to create and maintain a love for music in the classroom. One of the best ways I feel is to use technology and play a motivational movie. It's not a hard task to show a movie in class and more than likely the students will be on board with watching a movie for a class. Whats more important is selling the movie to students and making sure they are interested, paying attention and getting a message from the movie being played. Teachers should not just show movies to pass time by but rather show a movie that students can connect and learn something from.

      I watched a very good/motivational movie over the weekend. The movie was called Thunder Soul. To summarize the movie quickly, the movie is a documentary of students who played in a stage band in a school named Kashmir in Texas. The students went to school in the early 70's when playing Jazz in school was popular. The students in the school are from an inner city location and these students took an interesting approach to the high school style “ big bands” by mixing funk music with jazz. The students in the movie got together after 30 years to play a reunion show for their aging band teacher and for the students that attend the school now.

What makes Thunder Soul a great movie to show in class?

      There are a few reasons why this movie would be a great movie to show in class. For one thing Funk music is extremely active and exciting. Student will love to listen to and learn about good music. The music in the movie is so originally and interesting that it should motivate students to play and create their own music. A motivating aspect of the movie is that it shows people who haven't played their instrument in 30 years practicing and actually remembering how to play their old songs. It shows that once you learn something well it is hard to forget. One of the more important messages from the movie is that the musicians in the movie wanted to prove a very important point. The point was that they came from the same urban community as the students today and they were able to overcome diversity, become successful in life and all thanks to the help of music. This is an important message I would want to send to my students especially because I also work in an urban setting school district.

Time signature lesson

On Monday March 3^rd I gave a mock general music lesson for 8^th graders. The students in my class were the pretend 8th graders. The experience was interesting. Although we had ten minutes to teach our lesson, at first I thought I would not have enough material teach the full ten minutes. Turns out I did not even get through half of what I had planed. When teaching a lesson ten minutes flies by.

I wanted to go with a creative approach. My topic that I had to teach was time signatures. I thought I was lucky because I had what I thought was an easy topic to teach. Time signatures is not a hard concept but it is a broad concept. While I started preparing I realized I can talk about so many things and use so many examples of time signatures. One of the first mistakes I made was trying to teach more than one time signature in ten minutes. I can teach more than one if I had a full class but for the purpose of starting the class I should of stuck with common time.

Another thing I did wrong was way too much explanations. The students were supposed to be in 11^th grade so I should of expected more background knowledge from the students. Since I wanted to focus on creativity I handed out blank sheet music for the students to write rhythms down in the given time signature. When the students were done I would call on a couple to write their example on the board. This I think would have been a great activity if I got around to it with more time.

One more thing I could of done better was prepare examples for the class. In stead of preparing examples and printing them out I made my own examples on the bored and that took way too much time. That was probably the biggest time waster for me. If I were to do this lesson again I would prepare my own examples, and focus on one type of time signature instead of trying to cram them all into one lesson.

blog post 6

What to do about getting money for a music program? This is a question I never really put much thought into until class last Monday. But starting a music program is very expensive. Not all of the time will a new teacher start his/her new job and have everything perfect and in perfect conditions. So the new teacher might not have to figure out how to buy a new band but figure out what the band is missing and obtain it. Some things needed for a music program are, the instruments, P.A. System, stands, chairs, practice books, sheet music, pencils etc. And don't forget money for when the instruments break! This starts to add up to a lot of money, where is it coming from?

We cant rely on just Mom and Dad to fork over the thousands of dollars needed to start or maintain a music program. Especially in low income areas, some parents cant afford to spend extra money in music when they are trying to pay for their house. I can think of two places where this money should come from, the community and the administration. As mentioned in class we the music educators should know about much we would need that year for our program and how much we will need to have it grow. Administration sees us as the professionals in the situation and we as music educators need to professionally state how much we need to administration in order to obtain funds. The other way of getting money for programs is through community performances and fund raising. Getting the community involved is super important. The school BOCJ should not just represent the school but represent the community. If you the music teacher takes the school band to play out in the community once or twice a month and even hold alumni concerts, community members will start to get involved and enjoy the music programs and be more inclined to donate support.

Blog post 5

Technology has already made a change in the school system and has become very beneficial in the music class room. Working at my internship in Bridgeport I have noticed that technology has already made the learning experience different for students. One of the most beneficial additions to the class room that I find has improved music education is the smart board. Smart boards were something that my high school was just starting to install when I was in eleventh grade. Most teachers were intimidated by them and I remember my band teacher thinking it would be a waste of space in the band room. I don't know if she is using it today but the music teachers at the school where I am doing my internship love using the smart boards. Smart boards can play live performances and other videos. This is priceless especially at the elementary level. Students can now see pictures and watch performances of practically every instrument. The smart board can also be used to show music videos to show the musical culture of other nations.

Another area where technology has improved music education is in the music theory room. Many high schools have music theory classes that have keyboards in them for the students to play. Electric keyboards are cool but whats cooler now is the MIDI input. Students can now play their keyboards into a computer program such as pro tools or finale and make their own songs/ compositions. The sounds on these interfaces range from classical instruments to electric rock instruments so the possibilities are endless.

Something that caught my eye while I was searching on Google was the use of I pads in the music room. This is something that will definitely change music education the more popular they become. I was reading that a lot of music educators are asking their principals for I Pad grants so this method of teaching seems to be working. There area number of free and cheap apps for the I pad that are beneficial to music education. Also I pads can be used as a “students instrument” and a whole class can perform a show on their I pads. Technology is growing every year and it is creating good improvements in music education.

Midterm blog

What A Music Teacher Needs

There are many things that come to mind when thinking about what makes a great music teacher. Fortunately for me I have had great music teachers and professors my whole educational career . Even if some of my teachers were not my favorite I still respected them and saw that they had a love and passion for music education. Some of my most memorable experiences in school were in music class. This is something I think more students should experience and for this to happen teachers must have specific traits. Three things I think music teachers need are, the right personality, they need to be actively making music, and a good music teacher must have a good “bag of tricks” or a big personal archive of music.

In the chapter titled “With out you, there would have never been a journey” from Peter Boonshaft's book “Teaching Music with Purpose”. Boonshaft is at a slow point in the year. He is tired and feels he has bitten off a little more then he can chew with his expectations for the ensemble. A student comes in and notices something is wrong. A few days later she returns with a letter. The letter stated the students journey and how important Boonshaft was as a teacher. Part of a students educational experience is the impact a teacher has on a class/students. This is why it is important for music teachers to have the right personality. A music teacher needs to be calm, funny, and patient. Music is hard at times and can make students want to quit. A music teacher with a great personality would want to make that student come back to class the next day and try harder.

Another thing that I think music teachers need to have, or in this case need to be doing is actively making music. Referring back to Boonshaft, music students are heavily influenced by their teachers, and they look to us to pave the way for them. In most cases the music teacher is the closest person to a rock star for students. With this being said music educators should set good examples by having good practice habits, playing with friends, and performing. Music is a special way of communication. It is important for teachers to be able to communicate the musical language with their

students.

The third thing that I think music teachers need is to have a good “Bag of Tricks”. What I mean by bag of tricks is a personal data base of songs. These are songs that are for ensembles to play, listen too, or watch and analyze. The purpose for this bag of tricks is management. Music classes can have large numbers of students and it is important to have good management skills. Start the day with some fun sight reading songs. And if an ensemble is just having a hard time or is getting frustrated one day, switch to an easy song that the students enjoy playing. When I teach I will have a bunch of these of these “go to” songs and learn new ones every year. Looking up and transposing popular songs for students to play in class or at home is also a great management strategy and addition to your personal archive.

These are only Three things a Music teacher needs. The list does not stop here and there are many different qualities a music teacher should have.

Trumpet and choir lesson

Choir warm up and trumpet lesson

Last class I gave a trumpet “first” lesson and then gave a warm up high school choir lesson. Both were very interesting experiences and it was a fun time doing both. The assignment was to teach about five minutes of a intro to trumpet lesson, (professor Schneider would be the fifth grader) and a high school choir warm up lesson, (class would be the choir).

The trumpet lesson did not go exactly how I wanted it to go. I realize now that I spent too much time in the beginning explaining the trumpet and talking about it. I also think I spent too much time on correct posture and breathing. Students will probably start to loose interest if they don't even see their instrument on the first lesson. In my lesson the five minutes were up as soon as I pulled the trumpet out. So definitely next time I would start with buzzing on the mouth piece and start teaching the student how to play easy notes .

The choir lesson was very interesting. I was never in choir in school so at first when I got to class I was not sure if what I had was going to be good enough. I went 4^th or 5^th and I noticed that a lot of students in the class had the same ideas that I did and that made me feel good about my warm up lesson. Something I did not use a lot of was the piano and it was because I was unsure if I could pull it off. The piano actually helped me with the lesson and it was not as hard as I thought to play scales and sing solfege and major chords with the class.