11/15

There's a newly hired  sheriff  administrator in town whose job covers the yet-dealt-with office referrals we've submitted.  Two of the girls were not in Choir today and things went better (they did get in a physical fights, after all).  I'm being optimistic...for now.

I conceded today that I am prone to making Theory tests/quizzes too difficult.  I try to keep them short, and in doing so choose to skip questions of medium difficulty and include a couple easy ones and many hard ones instead.  Related to this, I discussed with a friend today the exam that we had to take for state certification in music; it was very challenging, but we consider it to have been a well-made exam because it had enough foundational/easier questions to establish that understanding before using the difficult questions as the real measures of who is advanced and who is not.  I've constructed a moderately elaborate scheme to get these students' test grades up, including providing them with some much more extensive and repetitive skill-building exercises.  Practice is as vital to Theory as Math, and I haven't given them enough.

The General Music class that I expected to be the slowest to progress is keeping up quite well.  All of the classes did an excellent job absorbing my lecture and applying it to a worksheet that I made for them.  I'm a little bit proud of them, and hope that their understanding is demonstrated in the next quiz better than the last one (which had a 0% - 100% bell curve).

It's almost 10:00 and time to go grade workbooks, create exercises, create worksheets, and create lesson plans for tomorrow.