So this week that just passed was my first week of the new school year. It was pretty much amazing. I have a new completely positive approach. I am a brand new Joel this year. There are two things that are paramount in my mind as I stand in front of the class every day. I want the band to have:

1. A culture of encouragement
2. An expectation of excellence

If I can model those two things, I am convinced that I can ensure the rest of the students follow suit. We don’t criticize other students, we encourage them. We don’t laugh at mistakes, we learn from them. We don’t point out problems, we provide possible solutions. As I’ve…

This totally has nothing to do with teaching, but it’s an interesting question. If you had one super power, what would it be? How would you use it?

If you’re wondering where this question comes from, I was listening to the latest podcast of This American Life about Superpowers and it struck me as something interesting. I thought I’d see what my readers thought. Plus it’s a nice change of pace from the beginning of school and inservices and all of that stuff.

Go check out more about the podcast here.

So again I ask; if you had one super power, what would it be? How would you use it? Discuss in the comments…

I just listened to a recent podcast of Radiolab entitled Words. They included a bonus video along with the podcast. Powerful images and sounds here. The video is below. If you haven’t listened to Radiolab, now is a great time to start.

As I approach my ninth year of teaching, I have begun to wonder about the effectiveness of my classroom management plan.

A brief summary
When I first started out, I allowed way too much stuff to go on. In the middle of my second year, I cracked down like nobody’s business and began what I might term my “dictator days”. Basically, I was a bully and made sure I was in charge of my classroom. I still wholeheartedly believe…

This week, I went to San Antonio for the Texas Bandmasters Association convention. I attended some really good sessions and took a few notes on my iPhone. Without spending a lot of time to expand on these notes right now, I thought I would post them so maybe someone else can benefit from them. After the convention, I’ll sit down later and flesh them out a bit more. Here are the notes from Days 2 and 3.

• Meet with parents prior to testing 5th graders
• Parent orientation at beginning of year 4-6 weeks into school year
• Take a class period to discuss procedures
• Teach basic reading skills and introduce counting system early (8th notes asap)
• Open cases on the

…

This week, I am in San Antonio for the Texas Bandmasters Association convention. I attended some really good sessions and took a few notes on my iPhone. Without spending a lot of time to expand on these notes right now, I thought I would post them so maybe someone else can benefit from them. After the convention, I’ll sit down later and flesh them out a bit more. Here’s Day 1.

• Raise your level of absurdity. If something doesn’t sound stupid, you won’t address it.
• Come up with a warmup rotation. Same concepts per day of week. Lip flexibility, scales, tone production, articulations, intervals/listening
• Same with journals. Music appreciation, rhythmic dictation, music/rhythm copying, free writing, theory exercises
• All bad

…

If you’ve read much on my blog, you know that I do not have the traditional mindset of most educators. I have no problem with kids dropping out of school as long as they are doing so as a means of furthering their education. I don’t think that a college education is essential for success in the world. In fact, I know that it’s not.

I recently was watching to a TED Talk by Cameron Herold (@CameronHerold on Twitter) that challenged me and also reinforced some of my previously-held views and articulated them in a way that shed new light on them. The talk was entitled Let’s raise kids to be entrepreneurs. You should watch it. If nothing else, you…

Don’t quit teaching. It could be that every single struggle you’ve ever faced as a teacher has been leading you to an amazing breakthrough that will happen this year. Make it happen!

Fear
I’m…

I used to hate running. But I tried it this year and have become convinced that running is the gateway drug of the fitness world. You can walk forever without feeling the need to do anything more. I find it exceptionally difficult to make a concentrated effort of running and not have visions of marathons, triathlons, or being in South Africa playing for a World Cup team.

Back in January, I came up with this crazy idea to set out to run a 5K. I say it’s a crazy idea simply because I was somewhere around 100 pounds overweight. Simply the thought of running anywhere was absolutely unreal. But I have a handful of friends who run marathons and I…

This morning I allowed a guest post to go up on this blog that many readers felt was inappropriate for this blog. In it, the author listed three reasons mothers should become teachers:

1. You’re assured of more than two months of vacation every year
2. Your schedule is perfect when it comes to looking after your kids
3. The stress level associated with the job is minimum

Now, anyone who has actually been a teacher (whether a mother or not) knows these reasons are ill-conceived at best, and mostly offensive. I am reminded of two years ago when a troll called J Frap came over and posted a comment wherein he asserted that one reason people should be a teachers…

If you haven’t stopped by the actual website for So You Want To Teach? in a few months, er weeks, er days, er hours, you may not recognize it. I have used my summertime to really put in some solid effort into adjusting the layout of the blog. I haven’t done a full-on redesign since March of 2009. Since that time, I’ve added a few widgets here and something else over there, but never really spent a lot of concentrated time really thinking about the layout of the blog. Until recently.

How it all began
Quite frankly, I got bored of looking at the blog each day. I had some stuff there that just really didn’t make sense. It was more cluttered…

You are currently reading the 501st article on this site
Over the past few years of my time in the blogosphere, I’ve seen some blogs come and go. I’ve seen some great ones start up and hopefully even been able to send out some positive blogging encouragement to some of these folks in the process, either via Twitter or by linking to their blogs. Whatever the case, it’s always encouraging to see new bloggers start into the effort.

With all things, there are numerous people who start out but simply fail to follow through. It’s just the human propensity we have for starting something new and moving on after it loses its newness. I’ve had times in my blogging…

Emails like this are the reason this site exists.

I am an 11-year high school English teaching veteran in the Los Angeles area. Most of my teaching was done in the trenches of suburban, low-SES “nay-bah-HOODS” and the fringes of, um, gangsta lands. (I teach English … go figure.) I’ve had my share of awesome kids, classes and experiences, and I’ve had my share of kids who practice “learned helplessness” and come to school looking like Snoop Droopy Drawers. Overall, I love my subject matter, and love working with high school age kids, especially helping them to “read, write and think your world” (one of my class mottoes).

I wanted to thank you for your no-nonsense, honest site that both…

This Sunday is Father’s Day. It’s not too late to buy that last-minute gift if you haven’t already. I read at least four books this school year that were amazing. If your father reads and thinks, these would be ideal. :)

I read some others, but some of them were music education related, and others just wouldn’t be quite as Father’s Day specific as these, so here we go…

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (Paperback available new for $9.35)

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking By Malcolm Gladwell (Paperback available new for $9.35)

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (Hardcover available new for $11.72)

Outstanding!: 47 Ways to Make…

One of the greatest parts of being a band director is that what I do really matters. Beyond the students acquiring a skill of playing an instrument or working together as a team, there is this aesthetic element of education in the arts that is just absent in most every other line of education.

I’m not discounting the importance of grammar or math or science or social studies or athletics or technology education or whatever else might be offered. Were it not for those, I wouldn’t have the amazing opportunities that I have. Plus, Texas law says that students have to pass all of their classes in a grading period before they are even allowed to participate in extracurricular activities….

The background
It took me about three years. I heard rumblings of Twitter way back in the fall of 2006 when I was getting into blogs. “Who cares what you ate for lunch?” So I ignored it. I finally got on in the spring of 2008, but never really got around to doing too much with it until then.

Evidently my first tweet was something about an enjoyable weekend. How fun. It was so much fun that I blogged about it. This all came less than two months after I reached a subscriber count of 150. I was excited.

Fast forward
Now even despite the incredible slowdown of RSS subscribers (and even RSS reading in general) due…

I have a few things planned for the summer, but one thing I really would like to do is feature a series of articles by first-year teachers reflecting on their first year of teaching. If you have a blog, feel free to quote liberally from your posts throughout the year. If not, that’s okay! You can write one post or even a handful of them. I’d really like to be able to get these thoughts out there and share them with future first-year teachers.

Maybe you’ve been teaching for longer. Maybe you haven’t. Either way, you are also welcome to submit guest posts. Anything that might remotely relate to teachers is welcome. For ideas from previous guest bloggers, check out…

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. Now we come to the most modern marching shows available. Props continue to be more thoroughly integrated into the show, and the color guard continues to be used to add color and visual contrast, as well as actual actors in a story. Electronics are now integrated into the DCI shows as well, and we see the drum majors of Phantom Regiment’s 2008 production being used as characters throughout the entire performance. Many corps are now…

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. As we moved into the new millennium, the color guard moved further from the hornline and drumline as far as uniforms, but began to interact much more with the individual members. Where the early 90s has included an occasional soloist interacting with the guard, now large groups of the hornline were doing full out ballet moves and poses throughout the shows.

Though it had been before, the marching show is now even more dance- and…

Ivy writes:

I am in my first year as a Special Education teacher. My class is out of control. Kids are yelling at each other. Nobody is focused on their work. I am yelling and screaming and they are talking back and yelling back at me. Everybody is trying to help me out. Some say I need to be more positive, some say I need to be stronger and more strict. I do not know what to do. As a group, they are against me. The situation is very confrontational. I can not stop them going crazy. The kids know it. They are going crazy but they do not care. Some kids even have a lot of fun of it….

As we close out the school year and begin looking toward the summer, band directors turn their minds toward marching arts.

This year, I’m going through some history and exploring The Evolution of Marching via YouTube. I’m taking you along for the journey as well. As music selections moved away from the more traditional Broadway and Latin Jazz themes that had dominated the early years of drumcorps, corps began focusing more on classical-type (mostly Romantic era and early 20th century) and concert band music. This development continued through the bulk of the 1990s, with the addition of more elaborate props and other visual elements.

1994 – Blue Devils
Video unavailable. In 1994, Star of Indiana left DCI and began touring…