Week 5

This week was rough. My cooperating teacher and I both got the head cold that has been going around the building. Teaching beginning band students with a sinus headache was pretty awful, especially the woodwinds. I almost finished my EdTpa this week, I only have one more video that I want to do and one more lesson to teach. I think that my cooperating teacher was correct about teaching half notes and quarter notes for my EdTpa lesson, the students were engaged the entire time because this was a completely new concept for them. When we got to quarter notes and they saw their first real song "Hot Cross Buns" they were so excited and could not wait to play it.
That moment of excitement really snapped me out of a bad week. The whole band was excited that they finally made it to a real song. They begged me to play it and even though it did not go as they thought it was going to, the happiness that they got from playing reminded me why I want to teach music. They were so proud of themselves for getting to a real song and being able to move their fingers fast enough to change notes and have a real song come out of their instrument, they talked about it with me all the way to the bus that takes them to the elementary school. That excitement was super contagious and it kept me in a good mood all day. My cooperating teacher and I go to the elementary school in the afternoon to do pull out lessons and during the mini-lessons, with me, my students begged me to only play real songs and wanted to know when they are going to play more songs and when they are going to learn more notes to play more songs. Going into student teaching I thought that I wanted to teach high school, but seeing the excitement on these beginning band students is starting to change my mind. I really like how excited they are about everything because everything is new and shiny and fun. Most of them want to be there still and want to learn as much as they can as fast as they can.
This week I also taught the worst lesson so far. I was teaching the concert band after school and I lost control of the whole band, they were not playing, and they were talking to each other, and everyone was confused and didn't know what we were doing. It got so bad that my cooperating teacher had to step in and take the class back. I was really embarrassed, but I wrote a different lesson plan and the next day I tried again and it went a lot smoother. I have taken over all of my cooperating teacher classes and I forget that I'm still learning and things aren't going to go as smooth as I want it but it still stung to have something go so poorly even when you plan it so carefully. But I brushed myself off and got back up in front of the band the next day.

Chapter two this week was all about Eptness and behavior.  Laurel Schmidt's Classroom Confidential states: "Eptness is a combination of capacities and meaningful activity. It resides in potential in all students, but it's unleashed through the deliberate efforts of their teacher."Eptness is mainly achieved when the teacher is putting an effort into their teaching. 
I plan on using and have been using, expectations, encouragement, and feedback in my classroom. 
I choose these three because I feel like students in order to succeed need to know what is expected of them, once they know that they can be encouraged to meet those expectations and use any feedback to meet expectations. I feel like those three create a nice chain of events that allow for successful student learning. 

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