11/18

Recall two things:
1. The Theory class jokes with me about big words.
2. I love to expand on unrelated subject matter [when appropriate].
Then share my joy in showing savethewords.org to them.

Some weird things happened in my last General Music class.  There's one student who is, frankly, weird.  He doesn't respond to social cues as others do and has his own brand of nervous humor.  He spends a lot of time with a guidance counselor and gets bullied.  It is extremely difficult to keep the class from shamelessly laughing at him during an embarrassing moment, as well as to keep him from intentionally doing strange things to get their attention.  I spoke with the counselor that the boy works with and got an interesting background story on the boy and some of his relationships.

I very often find myself saying, "Gee, I wish I had been informed of that earlier!"  There are some very relevant details about some students that don't get passed on (I don't know if this is always the case or if it's because I teach a "special").  Enough, in fact, that I have to be very cautious to not approach or discipline a student for something that they may feasibly have some explanation for (this extends beyond discipline, too; I recently had a student cry when moved to sit next to somebody that she is apparently very uncomfortable near (this has been addressed)).  However, as I already talk about being overwhelmed with IEP's, a system of passing on this type of information may also be overwhelming.  I'm just tired of chasing down learning support teachers and guidance counselors to get answers.  At least the ones I know are helpful (mostly — I recently had a girl act out who has a behavioral plan, so I sent an e-mail and never heard back, only to find out through the grapevine that her learning support teacher spoke to her, but he never told me and I easily could have given her a double-dose of reproach.)

In Theory:

9/7 - The Element of Style

My dear readers, thank you for trudging through my previous posts.  I was vacillating as I was writing regarding whether I should be making things easy on myself and writing exactly the words that I intend to turn in later or be moderately more blunt and slightly more entertaining in style for the sakes of honesty and reader enjoyability (I also wrote them all yesterday afternoon).  I think I've decided to proceed according to the latter, and submit abridged versions of these posts to the department in the end.

The choir did their first bit of singing from music today; a piece that Mrs. D intends to use for next semester.  This was interesting, especially considering we've not yet identified the voice parts of all the singers.

I had a lot planned for theory today; a review of the quiz, the dotted half note, ties, and slurs.  First, I must mention that I had difficulty deciding whether I should teach the dotted half note specifically or if I should just teach the dot and apply it to multiple note values.  I went with the workbook's method of introducing the dotted half note on its own, mostly out of fear that adding eighth notes and dots at the same time would be too much.  It seems I was right to worry, because I didn't even get to the topics of ties and slurs.  The good: this made writing tomorrow's lesson plan really easy.  The bad: progress is slow and repeating oneself is tiring.  The ugly: I have students who've been using dotted eighth notes in orchestra and choir already, but I also have students that struggle to differentiate 4/4 and 3/4 meter.  I used the Tiersen and Sting pieces from the quiz for listening today.

GM went well, except my voice was tired at the end of the day due to talking over the 3rd section of students.  One student in that section was a proper brat today...grumble grumble mumble grrr.  I got a kick out of everyone's responses to the listening we did (see video).



Oh, and I know that you're dying to hear today's "oops, my bad" story.  I was teaching the 2nd section of GM about mnemonic devices for EGBDF and remembered one I'd once heard, "Elvis' Guitar Broke Down Friday".  I don't care what you think of the phrase, the point is that bringing up Elvis apparently always leads to, "Didn't he die on a toilet?" followed by raucous laughter.  Laughter in class is great, but after I said, "Yes, he did," the next comments were a flurry of "My grandma died on Christmas eve," and "Speaking of death...", etc., which I had the pleasure of learning to recover from.  Sorry, Elvis, but you are no longer a part of my GM teaching ideas.