"Everyday's an Adventure, Good or Bad"

This is one of the best quotes of my CT and she has said it since day one. I have found that one day is never like the next which can be both frustrating and interesting. In someways, it gives me an ability to see which classes my lessons will work for but, if it is a bad day, a lesson that is perfectly fine may fail leaving my not completely sure if I should retry the lesson for the next days classes with some modifications or if I should simply scrap it because the lesson was not very good. It also frustrates me when I see students one day and they love me and the next they refuse to work and just glare at me for no real reason. I do use this as a way to learn about the students' lives which is the positive side of what can be a fairly bothersome occurrence. This week I had a class that was far beyond the normal level of talkativeness. They were completely out of my control and it was the day my supervisor was there. I tried every strategy I knew to get them to stop talking. Nothing worked for more than a second and it left me completely at a loss. I had tried to do a new type of lesson where I taught a general music idea and then went on from there to portray that idea in the warm ups. I can now see that it threw off my pacing which set the class up for failure and I asked them too many open ended questions that allowed them time to talk. By the time I got through all of the things that had gone wrong in the beginning, there was no chance they were going to be able to learn any part of their songs. I hated to end without finishing even one song but it would have been useless to continue. I saw that day that I was to blame and that what I did could be easily fixed but it was discouraging to have a class like that in front of my cooperating teacher and supervisor. I have had to do some real soul searching to try and determine what I want to do with the rest of my life and how to come back from such a terrible event. My plan is to take it slow. Inching forward, not jumping in head first. I will still continue to teach full time but I will not change my whole style of class in such a drastic way and I will work on speeding my pacing up to match the class. I had really only been planning for the best classes and while my lesson plan worked fantastically well for that, it left me stranded when it came to the more challenging, less dedicated classes. I will, in the future, plan out a less stressful lesson for those classes that just cannot handle the regular lesson as well as a more advanced lesson so the classes that can really sing get to learn more quickly. I am hoping this clears up the management difficulties I had but who knows. Everyday is an adventure, good or bad.

The Things I have Seen...

So...I was conducting the concert last Tuesday and there was one of the strangest occurrences that I could imagine. I was standing outside the auditorium and I watched a service dog walk in leading a man into the auditorium. I thought little of it except for simply noticing it. As I stood up on the stage helping to corral the students onto the risers I saw that the dog was in the front row. Everything seemed to be going fine until one boy tried to go past the dog to get on the stage. I was turned around at the time and all I heard was a loud bark and a growl. Apparently, the boy had gotten too close to the dog and scared it, causing it to lash out and bite him. The boy was fine and the dog never had any more problems. It was a lesson to me though. Any time you think you know what is going to happen or that everything is going to be fine you are setting yourself up to be caught off guard. I was so sure that I was ready for the concert and just when I let my guard down something went wrong. Thankfully, the principal saw and stepped in as there will most likely be a legal issue involved and the concert went on just fine. I also have to say I was equally surprised when one of my students gave me a hug and a stuffed Koala along with a card saying how much she loved choir and how she thought I was a great teacher. I had never directly talked to her but it felt great knowing that I had made things better for her. I felt more justified in my teaching just because of that and I needed that validation. Strange as it will seem to some as I am very optimistic about life in general, student teaching has made me feel pretty down about my teaching. I do not always feel like I will turn out to be a very good teacher or that I am ready to be a teacher yet but this event really helped. I am going to finish out student teaching strong and see what happens. Everyday is an adventure, good or bad.

I think these videos are fitting.

 

Words, Words, Words

Last Tuesday was the concert for Roosevelt Middle School. The "concert" was split into three parts, one for each grade starting at the hour that corresponded to their grade level. The concert went well in my opinion. I got to conduct all of the pieces. I learned a lot about conducting from this as I realized that the students couldn't follow a pattern. It was not that they couldn't have learned to follow it but the majority of them had never been in a choir where the music was conducted. Their best way of staying together was to listen to the piano and follow that. My job became very different then. I still conducted a pattern and I cued the students with my hands but I it was the words that they really needed. We performed the whole concert memorized and that was just fine for the most part. Sure there were a few mistakes in rehearsals but I was able to help that with my conducting. I learned how to lip sync the whole concert so that I could mouth the words to them as I was conducting in order to remind them of how the words went. When doing it, I had to mouth the words earlier than they arrived to give the students time to learn them. This really tested my memory of the music and forced me to study it hard and think a lot. I would say that it was actually harder to conduct in this way and also much more effective for helping the students than simply waving my arms. I also began incorporating unusual gestures such as rubbing my eyes to show the word crying or faking laughter to represent the word laughing or pointing at my ears to represent the word hear. This way of conducting a group is perfect for a middle school or elementary school. When the groups get into harder music such as high school and college level works, it is more important to show the other musical aspects and only mouth the words at a tricky or new part. Knowing what my choir needs will be important and I find that situations can often vary by location. When I conducted the concert for Xavier's ninth grade boys, they began forgetting the words at one point. I wish that I would have had the forethought to mouth the words for them. This is another trick I will add to my tool box and use when I find it useful.

This first video is a song I would NOT like to try and mouth for a choir.

and this one is something I would love to do! (and it is a little similar to what I did)