Week 6

This week was a busy week. The before school and after school bands have started sight-reading Christmas music. This is the first time I have walked a band through sight-reading, I know how to sight-read and I know what to tell students to get them to understand sight-reading, but it is still difficult to try to get this idea across to the band. They are not going to play it well the first time they see it and instead of powering through the piece and trying to play as much correctly as they can, most of them give up. The point of sight-reading is to figure out what is going to difficult in a song so that you know what you need to practice. My students got discouraged pretty quickly and kept saying that they hated the pieces that were picked for their Christmas concert.

A big thing that I have been working on is being able to comfortable work with a large group. I am very good at teaching the students the mini-lessons during the day, and I am also pretty comfortable in front of the 5th-grade band, but the symphonic band and concert band I am struggling a bit with. I know what to do and what I want in the lesson, but I am mainly having a problem with my conducting which confuses the band and keeping the band on task. When I stop to fix a section I lose control of the band. My cooperating teacher claims that I will get better at it with more experience, and it is ever so slowly getting better, but it is frustrating. I forget that I am student teaching to learn and that I am not going to do everything correctly the first time, or even the second time. I am going to have lessons that I plan really really well and still come up short and fail at. I am starting to accept it but it was frustrating for a long time. 

This week the school did ALICE training, which is active shooter training. On Tuesday the school had a drill with students, and then on Wednesday, the students had an early release and teachers had an in-depth ALICE drill. We were told to continue business as usual, have meetings in your departments and use the day as a plan day and sometime during the next hour or two something will happen. The police and fire department were there and they were using two by fours to simulate gunshots and they were trying to break into rooms, we needed to figure out what to do and when to evacuate. It was very lighthearted and fun before the drill, everyone was slightly on edge but we were all joking around and not taking it seriously. But when the drill started everything became really real, and I couldn't help but imagine what it would be like if it was real and we had twenty-something students to keep safe. The fact that the world has come to his is mind-boggling to me. Our students have to do drills just in case someone comes into their school to hurt them. It is one of those things that you don't learn in school but is a possibility and something that every teacher needs to think about. 

Chapter 8 of this weeks reading resonated most with me because you can think of music history as social studies in music. So much of music history can be paralleled with what is happening in history. Certain eras of music were directly impacted by what was happening in the world around the composers. Most of the composers that are studied in music history had extremely interesting lives and learning about their lives gives a good idea of why their music sounds the way that it does. Getting students interested in social studies of music history is the tricky part. There is a lot of cool things that happened in music history, my challenge as a teacher is to try and paint it in a way that students will want to learn it.