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.