This evening, I decided to do something I’ve been toying around with since the summer. I finally deleted comments from my blog entirely.

Where it all began
I began this blog as a hobby back in the spring of 2007, shortly after I began to learn more about the potential that blogs held. Life was much simpler back then. For one thing, I taught 6th grade beginning band only. My obligations outside of school were minimal, and the amount of time I spent in front of the computer was similarly low. Life was much simpler back then.

I long for that again.

Where it has taken me
In the fall of 2007, I moved…

Yesterday, I picked up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink (purchase on Amazon). Dave Ramsey has been recommending his latest book Outliers (purchase on Amazon) on his radio show lately but when I got to Barnes & Noble, I realized Blink was available in paperback and so was therefore quite a bit less expensive. I’ve heard Dave recommend it before, so I decided to go with the less costly alternative.

I began reading it this afternoon and came across the following paragraph on pages 12-13:

Whenever we meet someone for the first time, whenever we interview someone for a job, whenever we react to a new idea, whenever we’re faced with making a decision quickly and under stress, we use…

I’ve been thinking lately about trying to have each day be a sort of theme day. I don’t intend on posting every day (that’s not realistic for me at this time), but I would like for things to be a bit better aligned. So for instance, if I write a list article, I’ll schedule it for the next available Monday. If I have a blogging article, I’ll schedule it for the next available Wednesday. Or something along those lines. Here’s the ideas I’ve come up with:

Monday
Music Monday - I am a band director. I haven’t posted a whole lot about teaching band. I would like to overcome that and really begin to place a bit more emphasis…

This post has absolutely nothing to do with teaching or education. It’s totally about blogging. More specifically, WordPress. If you have not yet discovered the wonders of WordPress, I recommend checking it out sometime.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I’ll start out by listing the hacks that I have done, explaining why I did them, and then explaining how I went about adding them. Here goes:

1. Added a featured article
2. Put Featured & Latest images on home page only
3. Thumbnails of all images in main and archive pages
   
4. Moved most ads to search visitors only
5. Added social media links to individual posts and searches
6. Retweet button
   
7. Reader submitted links page
8. Added links to the

…

This Thursday, I will be taking my Middle School band to our UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest. For those who don’t understand how the band world works (and even for those who don’t understand Texas UIL), here’s sort of how it works.

How UIL works
I will be taking them to perform a concert program of three pieces that we’ve been working on since February. Following the concert, we go to the sight reading contest. In that, each band is allotted a certain amount of time to look at a brand new piece of music. As a director, I can spend the first part (four minutes for my band) talking them through it and pointing out key changes, accidentals,…

Calebteaches got me thinking about this today.

How old are you?

Do you have a girlfriend?

Do you have a MySpace?

I love working with middle school kids. When I was teaching 6th grade, I got a lot of these weird questions. Now that I’m working with 7th & 8th graders, I get less of them, but the rumors become more elaborate.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my 7th graders asked me if I was going out with a band director at another school in our district. I told her no. But as I thought about it, I realized this is probably the best rumor that I’ve ever heard floating around about me. Much better than the typical…

On Wednesday, we looked back at some of The Loneliest Articles of 2008, today, we’ll go to the other extreme and look at the busiest articles of 2008. These are the articles that generated the most comments. I’ve gone through the articles and found those that received the most comments. After boiling down that list, I have come up with the 20 most commented articles.

1. Teaching: Part Time Job At Full Pay Wages???? July 2nd, 2008 (28 comments by 26 authors) (28)
2. Double Your FeedBurner RSS Numbers Overnight January 27th, 2008 (13 comments by 10 authors, 14 trackbacks) (27)
3. The First Ever Music Education Blog Carnival July 1st, 2008 (12 comments by 11 authors, 8 trackbacks) (20)
4. 152nd

…

Life has with it certain milestones that we reach and we stop briefly to analyze where we are going and where we have been. I recently turned 30 years old and have been thinking quite a bit about a great many topics. I think I will occasionally share some with the readers of So You Want To Teach? as I think they may prove helpful for others.

Experience is the best teacher
As much as we like to claim otherwise, most of the greatest learning that happens in our life is from when we either completely mess things up, or else when we totally run into an amazing streak of good luck.

When I student taught, I was told…

1. Freedom from oppression
2. Doing what I love and making money for it
3. Freedom of faith
4. The Bible
5. Hymns
6. My family
7. My friends
8. My dogs
9. My home
10. My blog
11. Clarinet
12. Learning
13. The opportunity to learn
14. Dave Ramsey
15. My iPod
16. My laptop
17. Summer “break”
18. Spring break
19. Christmas break
20. Trumpet
21. My students
22. Making music
23. Mariachi
24. Text messages
25. My iPhone 3G that I’ll be rewarding myself with next week
26. WordPress
27. The color blue
28. Enchiladas
29. Cheesecake
30. Texas
31. Drum & Bugle Corps
32. Preaching
33. Teaching
34. Accomplishing things
35. Creating things
36. The feeling of being organized
37. Water
38. Horn
39. Making progress
40. Learning to play golf
41. IHOP
42. Winter
43. Rain
44. Clouds
45. Happy memories
46. Abstract Art
47. Shostakovich
48. The look on someone’s face when they are learning something
49. The look on someone’s face

…

In the music performance world, we have sightreading competitions. My band will be going to the UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest next week. In preparation for that, I have created a simple handout that I passed out to my band students. I thought I would share it with some of you in pdf format.

Download Winning The Sight Reading Game (download Adobe Reader here)

How do I create my PDF files?
I use the absolutely free program PDF Creator. Great stuff that every educator should have!

Have you noticed that

People

really

don’t

like

As I prepare my bands for the UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest that is now less than a month away, I have noticed that they seem to have a big problem with rests. For the uninitiated, rests in music represent silence.

If I reduce the amount of noise that I make, my students will be more likely to hear the important things I tell them

As I was talking with one of the classes on Friday about the incredible importance of the rests, I made a correlation about how we don’t like rests because people…

Get your commenting skills ready, there’s lots of material to be discussed here. I will be offline for most of this coming week and would love to hear the thoughts of my readers on these subjects.

This week, I will be traveling to San Antonio for the annual Texas Music Educators Association clinic and convention. I’m excited. That convention marks the beginning of the heavy push as we prepare for the UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest, which will be held in early April. It also signifies the end of my relaxed life. The next two months will be extremely hectic and crowded for me as I focus on making sure that everything is taken care of as I prepare…

Even if you ignore the majority of this article, check out the last sentence.

I am absolutely loving school since coming back from Christmas Break. Even so, I am beginning to get burned out. If you want to know why, go read this. He’s still not back yet and it’s all but certain that he will not be coming back next week either. Still no clue when I can expect him.I wrote an email to my principal today, some edited excerpts follow:

I love teaching and I love rehearsing the bands, but I am very tired. The students suffer as a result. More than anything else, that is what breaks my heart about the whole situation.
It’s not that…

November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? Today’s featured reader is Athena.

Name: Athena
Location: South Texas
Occupation: ELA 9th & 10th grade
Blog: http://athena81469.blogspot.com/

Tell me some of your favorite things about your job
I like the freedom of the job. I used to be in a cube job where I had to punch a timeclock all the time. Every moment of my job was timed. I sat and stared at 4 grey fuzzy walls everyday.

Now, I come to work at my own time. Nobody is watching.

Plus, I have control over my job. I decide what and when I teach. I decide if I am going to stay late. I can…

This past Tuesday, I took a day off of school. This is not normal for me, and I even had to fight my urge to go up to school and make sure things were running smoothly. I even drove up to the school and chose not to get out of the car.

Why? Because I had a chance where I knew I could relax for a day and things wouldn’t fall apart. I suppose it’s sort of a building process for me of letting go of my band.

I don’t like to miss school. I remember my parents encouraging me when I was in high school to miss a day when I didn’t fell well. I have been debating missing…

November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? Today’s featured reader is Eric Turner.

Name: Eric Turner
Location: Tennessee
Occupation: History/Secondary Ed Student
Blog: Secondhand Thoughts

Tell me some of your favorite things about your job
I love learning and I love the interaction between professor and students

Tell me some things you loved about your favorite teacher(s)
Whew, this is a hard one. I think the things I loved about the teachers I loved is the high standards they maintained, yet were also compassionate, fair, and understanding. Oh, and they each had a great sense of humor. They each inspired me in their own way. How they inspired me is hard to define….

I’m taking a break today from my Stress Reduction series and getting back to some real teaching issues. That’s why we’re here anyway, right?

So August and September have come and gone with great behavior. Now the students are beginning to do a lot more testing of the limits. It’s been a while since I have taught 7th & 8th graders and now I remember how much they like to get away with. Even the good students do things from time to time that just boggle my mind. WHY DID YOU DO THAT? It’s crazy.

How do I handle these misbehaving miscreants?

1. Stick to your rules
   Consistency is the only way for success in this area. Just

…

The new school year is two weeks and two days away. This time last year, our week of inservices was well under way. Thanks to the Texas legislature, we will not begin staff development until August 20th and are not allowed to begin school before August 27th. That’s fine with me, but I am ready to begin the school year.

We started our middle school band camp this past Monday and it is so much fun there. As I’ve mentioned before, these are students that I taught in 6th grade. I am moving from the sixth grade campus to the 7th & 8th grade campus this year. It’s so much fun for me to see all of these kids whom…