End of the year & hardest things

Well, I think it's pretty evident from our lack of blog posts that the end of the year is BUSY for music teachers.  Final spring concerts, musicals, grades, turning in registration forms for fall events, planning next year's calendar, preparing for or actually doing beginning band recruitment, organizing rosters and lesson schedules for the summer and fall, picking music for marching band, cleaning out your room/desk, and all of the little administrative things all teachers have to do at the end of the year etc...the list goes on!   And it gets hectic!

It's all fun though, in my opinion, because the things you have to do to prepare for next year, well, that's exciting because you're thinking about your new year - your second year of teaching!  It sounds promising!    And the things you're doing to wrap up this year....while it's hectic, it's all coming to a close and it becomes quite a relief when you look at the calendar and you see that you have some free time during school because private lessons have ended for the year.  Or when you see "band party" on the calendar.  That doesn't sound too stressful!

For me, our district-wide concert is over and I only have one individual school concert left (tomorrow) and then I'm done.  4 regular days left of school and 7 "work" days (including our annual 6th grade band trip).  I love how things wrap up around here.  Summer is just around the corner!

I wanted to write about one more thing while it's on my mind.  I think that one of the hardest things I've dealt with this year is recruitment.  Numbers.  I think there is a lot of pressure for a first year teacher to have at least the same number of kids in band or choir as the year before, if not more!  It's almost a way to judge your success.  If you have less students in band than they did last year, then you failed somehow.  At least, it's easy to fall into that mindset.  While I know that is not necessarily true - numbers fluctuate every year - it is the hardest thing to deal with when you have kids coming up to you saying "I don't think I'm gonna do _____(band/choir/anything) anymore." 

I haven't had too many come up to me during the year, but today I just had a BUNCH of 6th graders that are moving into jr. high tell me that they changed their minds and are not going to be in jr. high chorus anymore next year.  It was a big hit; they are some of my best musicians and I had counted on them to be there next year for my first year of teaching jr. high chorus.  And so I had a really hard time figuring out how to react to them when they kept coming up to tell me they changed their minds about chorus. 

(Side note: the main reason they changed their minds, I think, is because yesterday they were allowed to sign up for classes and saw all of the other electives.  With this being their first opportunity to choose classes, they were excited and wanted to choose as many different and new ones as possible.  I understand why they would want to!  But still, it's hard to hear that they didn't want to be in my class.)

You know, it's just very hard not to take it personally.  Also, professionally, how are you supposed to have an excellent ensemble when you only have like 10 kids?  Numbers don't necessarily guarantee musical greatness, but they do help a lot, I think.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts on losing kids in your program.  I have no advice on how to deal with it other than to realize it's probably not a personal thing - kids have all sorts of silly or sometimes good reasons for not joining band or chorus.  I wish I could say I've won the battle, but it's only beginning for me.  I have to figure out how I am going to turn my future high school chorus with 52 girls and 4 boys into something more balanced.  Recruitment suggestions welcome!

Happy end of the year, everyone. :)

double trouble

Tonight I am blogging about two separate things... so, I guess the long title of this post should be "Things I should have figured out a long time ago and freaky fridays"

A continual gripe through my collegiate and now professional life has been the inability of most people to read music. By the time people came to me, wanting to join my church choir at the U of I, they had forgotten (or never learned) basic notes and rhythms. My usual complaint is " ALL KIDS TAKE AT LEAST 5 YEARS OF MUSIC. WHY CAN THEY NOT READ EGBDF and FACE????? HOW CAN A QUARTER NOTE BE SO HARD?????!!!!" With this in mind, I figured that one of the main things I would work on in my music classes was music literacy. Basics. Whole notes, quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes. one octave treble and bass. Student teaching helped me become more patient with this quasi quest of mine... usually music teachers only see kids once/twice a week.. Imagine teaching a child to read english only once a week. It would take FOREVER. So, I understand that it would take time... however, It took my 5th graders this week to help me understand that it takes a lot MORE than just a long time... I figured i was starting basic. steady beat vs. rhythm. Ta and ti ti .. stuff that my 2nd graders last year could do quite nicely... My 5th graders were so confused. They just didn't get it. I tried several different ways and they still didn't get it... so I did some thinking, and then it hit me... teaching kids to read music really IS like teaching a kid to read english (and most of my 5th graders only learned how to do that 4 years ago!). I completely take reading music for granted (I learned when I was about 7), but most of my students have close to zero prior knowledge with notation. They really DO need to experience it first. A kid couldn't READ the word "book" if he had never SAID the word "book". Do you get my drift? I was totally trying to jump into it too fast! (and I should have known that... I did know that...) Of course, that doesn't mean that I should stop trying get them to learn how to read music.. It's totally possible by 5th grade, and I really think that most 3rd graders could do it by May, but when teaching kids to read, you really really really really have to go slow. They need to DO music, and then the teacher needs to guide them, step by painfully slow step, until they understand the relationship between when they already know how to do and how it looks.

So, I'm back to the drawing board with 5th grade. I'm basically scrapping the stuff I started with them and am starting over a bit. I'm not sure how to get them to literacy yet. I think that's one of the hardest things about teaching music... but I really do think it is one of the most important. I'm excited for the new directions. I'm still going to work with them on reading music and soon, but I need to balance it and start with experience. Duh. (it took ME an experience before I finally got what people had been telling me... what do you know?)


In other news, my friday was the most eventful day of my student teaching or teaching this year. The whole day was absolutely insane. The morning was filled with everything from having to keep a 5th grade student after class to discuss respect (or his lack there of...) to a picture PERFECT second grade class. For my afternoon, those of you who teach elementary general music will not need much more of an explanation than "friday afternoon... recess duty for preschool and kindergarten on the blacktop only because of rain followed by two kindergarten classes and two preschool classes to end the day. And it was "beach day" for on of the K classes.. they spent all day outside playing." For the rest of you, a few highlights include: a recess crier who wouldn't let go of my hand, a skinned up knee, a cut and bleeding finger after a kindergartener found glass in the parking lot, a COMPLETELY out of control Kindergarten class (beach day.. I tried everything I had ever learned), cutting a kindergartener's lei and name tag off from around her neck because they had gotten tangled too close to her neck...just as the principal walks in with a perspective parent, another kid wetting his pants on my new rug, and about 20 MILLION unrelated comments from 4 year olds. At several points in the afternoon, i just stopped and laughed while I was teaching, because it was just one of those days....


whew, this was long. sorry.