2010 Week 3 = Power Outages and a raining ceiling

Talk about a crazy week... Monday and Tuesday we had power outages in school.  This knocked out the air conditioning for almost the entire day.  It also lead to a complete lights out in the middle of my CO class.  CRAZY @_@.  But we managed and the kids behaved and handled well. 

On Wednesday, as I worked in my office, I heard what sounded like pouring rain in our room.  Looked out and saw the ceiling leaking and flooding the downstairs.  It was also crazy... we had to quickly find buckets, move valuable instruments out of the way, and then mop up once it was done.  @_!

Hopefully the rest of the week will be okay.  Tomorrow I begin assessing the students for the first time.  It's going to take quite a long time, but I am excited to see them one-on-one and hope to get to know them better.

Goals:
Finish drum break
Work on curriculum maps for my 3 classes (this will take a while)

2010 Week 2

Another week has passed and boy was it a long.  We had a booster meeting on Monday and open house on Wednesday.  Crazy.

Classes are going really well.  Got all the routines finally set in my big orchestra classes.  This has made everything run much smoother.  We have already begun to work on music and I am very satisfied with where we are starting off the year. 

The weekly workouts have been working out well.  I'm getting faster at writing them and the students are making improvements very quickly within them.  

Piano classes are going well as well.  I am focusing on trying to give each student individualized feedback and attention.  We had our first round of assessments this week.  These were intended to be formative in nature and gave me a good opportunity to see exactly where they are.  I am also very happy to see how far they've progressed already.  My only concern is addressing the new students who have been transferring in late.  I think next year I might tweak my lessons to start after the first couple of days to avoid this.  As an alternative I'm thinking of focusing on listening activities and such with the students in the beginning so that if anyone else comes in late they won't miss anything essential for later.

I've begun doing more detailed planing for marching band, similar to the planing  I do for my daily classes.  I think it's really paying off and making our practices much more efficient.  Time will tell though if it really makes that much of an improvement.

Things to work on for the future:
- Implementing snap grades into my routine
- Finish arranging 3rd movement and drum break for MB
- Work CO/CS officers into the fold more

2010 Week 1 = Finished!

Week 1 of the 2010-2011 school year is done.  What a week!

Most of the classes were focused on the nitty-gritty things at the beginning of the year.  Syllabus, classroom procedures, get to know you activities etc.  I know that these things are really important in setting up the expectations and routines that will help later down the road.  The only thing that I don't like about it is that it's a lot of didactic, me giving out information, teaching rather than a more hands-on-approach.

I'm hoping that the procedures I set-up for the CS class (of 130+ students) will be effective and efficient in getting us going.  I'm also using Sibelius to create a "Weekly Workout" for both orchestras.  Hopefully this will help to build the technical, rhythmic, and theoretical sides of their music education.  That way when we get to the real music, it'll be a walk in the park.

Goals for the near future:
- Continue to create/implement weekly workouts
- Get my Snapgrades and Blackboard accounts going
- Seating test! @_@ (130 + 85 students = a lot of time)