Time Management

As I somehow make my way through the end of term flurry of tests, quizzes, projects, and final exams I have been thinking about time management a lot. If I think I'm busy now, how much more busy will I be when I have report cards to write, tests to make, lessons to plan, trips and performances to organize, etc. etc. etc. One of the greatest things I have learned at university is how to manage my time well. I continue to learn more about it.
As teachers, and music teachers specifically, our schedules are packed. Keeping organized and planning your time well is essential. The sooner we develop systems and attitudes to deal with the load of things we have to do and the stress that comes with it the better. 
One of the things I continue to struggle with is finding a balance between work time and relax time. Everyone has different requirements for relaxing, but we all NEED to do it. You cannot push yourself indefinitely. It's important to learn when you have done enough and need to rest your body, mind, and emotions. This is something that I still have to conquer, but I hope to figure it out before I start my career!

Humor, and a really, really bad orchestra

I think we could all use a little humor, right now being exam time. Humor is also essential to your classroom. We all relax and learn better after laughing. Humor also builds rapport among you and your students. With that in mind take a listen to this! It is a professional orchestra that switched instruments:

Mistakes, Creativity, and the Future

In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson gave a talk at TED (if you don't know what that is you need to Google it ASAP). He spoke about education, and how it is "strip-mining" children of their creativity in the pursuit of what we as a society deem important. He questions the hierarchy of subjects which now falls in this order: math and the languages, humanities, social sciences, and the arts.  

The statement that caught my attention the most was a comment on how education systems praise the "right" answer and create a fear of being wrong. Robinson said in response "...if you're not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original". This statement struck me most because I see  this ideology in my own education.
I personally am afraid of failure. I want the best marks not because they mean I have understood the material, but because I want to be right. Somehow through my childhood I came to associate giving the right answer with succeeding.
 But isn't it true that we learn most through our mistakes? Especially in music, where often you must take risks. I fear improvising for this very reason; it requires taking risks and being wrong sometimes to learn.
For me what I got out of this talk was that we need to teach students that being wrong is not a bad thing. It is a learning opportunity. I also learned that we should encourage students to experiment, and change things, and explore. In music that means that yes, they should be able to play music from what is written on the page, but they should also be able to improvise, arrange, compose, and experiment.
I have placed the video below for those of you that want to see what this talk means for you.

Score Study: Doing it Right

A unit project I am currently working on involves creating a unit resource package for a beginner band piece. I have chosen to do British Isles Suite by Larry Daehn. This package includes: a piano reduction of the entire piece, notation of the important melodic lines (including solfege), a one-page "map" of each theme, and a marked score (measure numbers, important cues, secondary melodies, main melodies, phrase lengths, dynamics, and interpretive ideas). After this comes the lesson materials like rhythmic flashcards, warm-up scales, additional musicianship activities, etc. 
I have recently finished the first section of this assignment and it made me think differently about score study. I don't know that I would mark my score as thoroughly as I had to to complete the requirements for that section, but it served a useful purpose. Looking at that marked score, I can clearly identify every bit of important information. 
The sections I found the most useful were also the hardest to do. This would be the one page "maps" and the piano reduction. I had to go through my 30 page score and analyze it very closely and carefully. Through this exercise I learned a lot about the cadential movement, harmonic movement, and the climaxes of the themes. The piano reduction forced me to go through the parts and identify what was really essential to the overall impression. When I played the reduction it was so much easier to discover where the harmonic progressions occured and where they lead. 
Going through this process taught me a lot about how I need to approach a piece. Hopefully I won't have to do every step every single time I look at a new piece, but at least now I know what to look for, and how to find it.

Let it be LIVE

Yesterday I attended a performance of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. As I sat in the hall with it's beautiful acoustics and watched the passion on the musicians' faces, I started contemplating how we listen to music. I blogged before about how we should take advantage of the convenience of technology for sharing music, but there is a danger in that.
There is no replacement for watching live music being performed. The best recording technology and HD video cannot replicate that experience. If you had a choice between listening to your favourite band on your iPod or going to their concert for free, which would you choose?
There is something about seeing music performed in front of you that is impossible to describe. Feeling the wave of sound pass through you, seeing the expressions on the performers' faces, hearing the music echo through the hall, watching the musicians warm-up, seeing the conduct of a professional...these things and many more all make up a unique experience. We cannot afford to depend solely on recordings and videos to expose students to music. They have to be there and see it happen right in front of them. This is an experience all student musicians can't afford to miss.
           (I still think that recordings and videos have a vital role in the music classroom, but I strongly believe that students should see as much live music as possible)

Blogs: Skepticism to Conversion

I was thinking this week about blogging, and how my attitude towards it has changed. I used to think blogging was weird, and kind of egotistic. Why would anyone want to put their personal thoughts out there for everyone to see??
Then I was shown a bunch of different blogs, most of them created by people in education. I started to see how blogging could be useful to instigate reflection and provide information for others.
Now that I have been writing my own for about two months now, I have completely changed my previous attitude towards blogs. Now that I understand how to use them, it is immensely useful! During the day I am reflecting on what I've learned so that I can post about what changed my thinking the most.  I am reading other people's blogs and benefiting from their experiences. Already I can see it being a tool to network with other people in my field. 
When used productively, blogs can be extremely rewarding, just like all technology.

Emotional Availability

Yet another issue that confronted me at Tempo was the concept of emotional availability. One of the sessions I attended was two new teachers talking about the challenges of doing all the things you haven't been taught. One challenge they described was dealing with being emotionally available for your students. 
Because we teach something that is by nature a social and group activity, students can find it easier to connect with us. We have a responsibility to be open to students when they need to talk, and you are the only one they feel comfortable talking to. This is one aspect of emotional availability.
Another is that we need to be comfortable with our students seeing us as real people. That means that we do have bad days, and we also have exciting events in our lives. It's okay for your students to know that you have strep throat and can't talk loudly, or that your sister is getting married this weekend and you can't wait to stand with her at the front of the church. Knowing these things about you won't hurt your professional relationship, and it can even strengthen the teacher-student bond. 
The other aspect of emotional availability is knowing how far to go. It can be hard to build and keep proper boundaries between you and your students. But they have to understand that although you are there for them, it isn't appropriate for them to text you every detail of their lives, or send you pictures of their party on the weekend, or come to your office ten times a day. And you have to understand that you can't own their problems. Be there for them, help them in every way you can, but you can't allow a student problem to overcome you. It isn't fair to the other students that depend on you if you are unable to teach your best. 
This is one part of teaching that I think I will find difficult. I tend to want to fix everyone's problems, but that isn't always possible. I have to learn when to get involved, and when to let someone better qualified handle the situation. Being aware of this challenge will at least let me go in with my eyes open.