I have been asked to pass along a request. Unfortunately, I had a pep rally this morning and a football game this evening.

I’m hosting the next EduCarnival at my blog (http://imadreamerteacher.blogspot.com/), and there aren’t a ton of submissions.  Since you have a widely read blog, I was wondering if you could post a short thing about how people could still submit today?  It’s too late to do it through the form, but they could email me links directly at imadreamerteacher@gmail.com.

EDIT: It’s now too late to submit…but check out the EduCarnival V2 Issue 11 anyway.

Well, I’m sitting here in a motel room in San Antonio. I am trading some of my time with a band director friend. I came here to teach trumpet and horn sectionals yesterday since I’m on spring break this week and he had it last week. In turn, he’s going to come in next week and clinic my band. Basically what that means is that he’s going to rehearse them for two hours and tell them stuff they can do to make it better.

It also gives me a chance to step back and listen more closely. When I’m conducting and everything, I hear things, but not everything. This is why I record my band regularly. As an aside, if you…

Turns out I’m not the only teacher out there who gets so busy teaching that he overlooks his blog somewhat. Perhaps you can relate. Oh, I’m sure you can! It happens to us all. We get bogged down with so many things in our life that the unimportant things shift to the back. Hopefully.

Sometimes if we’re not careful, we let the important things shift to the back-burner. That’s an altogether different problem there…

But now that I have a new design for my blog (that is growing on me more and more each day, by the way), I am inspired to get things really running on all cylinders. Or at least one a few more.

So I got a…

2008 was the first full calendar year that I ran this blog. It saw its ups and downs, and in some senses, it was a sort of anticlimactic year as far as my personal blogging habits went. Nevertheless, So You Want To Teach? continued to flourish.

January began with my hosting the Carnival of Education. That was also the kickoff of my new WordPress theme, which I had personally designed and kept playing with throughout the year. To this date, I still have not seen a blog theme even remotely similar to it. But I will be putting the SYWTT 2008 theme to rest sometime next week. More info on that later.

As I mentioned in the last article, the…

In case you missed it, the February 2009 edition of the Music Education Blog Carnival is up over at The Collaborative Piano Blog.

The carnival is still going strong after its 8th edition, and it’s exciting to see it perpetuating! Join in for the March edition.

1. July 2008 - So You Want To Teach? (22 submissions)
2. August 2008 - MusTech.Net (14 submissions)
3. September 2008 - Amy M. Burns (16 submissions)
4. October 2008 - Teacher in a Strange Land (16 submissions)
5. November 2008 - Composing Like Mad (13 submissions)
6. December 2008 - Discover, Learn, Play (12 submissions)
7. January 2009 - Theresa White’s Education In Music (15 submissions)
8. February 2009 - The Collaborative Piano Blog (26 submissions)

Don’t forget to submit your favorite blog article to the March…

I have an admission. If you’ve emailed me in the last year or so, you may have caught on. The thing is…I am behind. On like everything.

With work, church, and mariachi, I tend to remain pretty busy. But when I’m home, often I will sit here looking at blogs, playing catchup in Google Reader or my email, checking my blog stats, checking out Facebook, chatting with friends, and doing all sorts of time-wasting things. These things are all right in and of themselves, but when combined, they lead to me neglecting things such as basic housekeeping, laundry, filing my bills, cooking, and even sleeping.

Then I find a burst of energy, sit down, start sorting through my emails, and…

In what has turned out to be some of the best comment-produicing material on this blog, I wrote about Asperger’s Syndrome early this month. Amidst the comments, G. Broaddus dropped this little gem:

Fairness in the classroom is not always about giving equal tasks; it is sometimes about giving students an equal chance to succeed, and clearly a student with Asperger’s will need a different way to demonstrate learning than his or her “typical” peers.

He then later fleshed out that idea on his own blog with the post Fairness and equality in the classroom. Please check out his post to read some of these thoughts.

As we take this break and get ready to go back into our classes…

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

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In the Christmas break, I am looking back at this blog’s growth and development. I did this last year and it helped some of the newer readers to catch some of the things they missed out on. I know that since the year started with around 125 subscribers and is ending with around 600, many of you haven’t gone in and dug through the archives. These year-end summaries will help you out a little bit! As I look through the blog’s archive, it strikes me that there are some articles that have either been buried deep in the archives, or for whatever reason, have gone unnoticed by my readers.

So I am giving all of those articles a chance to…

The 5th edition of the Music Education Blog Carnival is up over at Composing Like Mad. Be sure to check out the wonderful music education resources and also submit your own article for the December Edition.

Also, if you are a music educator and you blog, let Joseph know and join us in our effort to have 100 ME bloggers signed up by the end of December. Only 13 more to go!

I have done a poor job lately of pointing out some of the great blogs out there that have included So You Want To Teach? in their posting. Thank you so much for considering SYWTT to be a great resource!

If you have linked to me and asked me to do something, I’ll get to it. It is on my back-logged list of things to do. I expect a series of responses to some recent emails coming soon, and I would also expect me to be returning some of the link favors soon.

As you may have noticed that So You Want To Teach? has slowed down quite a bit lately. This is to give me and you a break…

Well, my summer has come and gone. I want to first of all extend my appreciation to all of the bloggers who posted while I was out. I am interested in hearing some impressions of the little experiment from the community here. If you posted something (and even if you didn’t), let me know if you enjoyed reading the other perspectives and the whole experience.

I had an incredible trip. It was nice to get away for almost 10 days. But alas, high school summer band has started up now. With that goes my summer vacation. I am simply wrapping everything up now and getting things under control as the new school year rolls in. I will do a sort…

This article was recently featured in the Carnival of Education, #180. Check it out if you haven’t already!

I was recently asked about how I handle student absences and make-up work. As a band director, generally an absence simply means they missed out on a rehearsal and we don’t have a lot of make-up work to assign. This gives me limited experience dealing with the issue. I am confident that most of the readers of this blog have far more experience in this realm. So it got me thinking, and I want to throw some questions out you you.

1. How do you handle make-up work for students?
2. What steps do you take for students with excessive absences?
3. What

…

On July 1st, 2008 the very first Music Education Blog Carnival was featured on So You Want To Teach? This is something that Joseph Pisano over at MusTech.Net and I had been discussing for a couple of months, and we finally got around to starting it up.

What is it?
Much like the Carnival of Education, the Music Education Blog Carnival features blog articles from around the blogosphere. These articles all focus on music education and topics that might remotely be interesting to music educators.

What do I do?
I want to encourage anyone who has an article somewhere in their blog’s archives that might relate to submit it. It doesn’t have to be a recent article…

There come times in life when we need to find something to do. There come times in life when we need a break. There come times in life when we need to cut back some things so we can find that perfect place.

This is one of those times for me.

With the end of the year approaching, I am so busy with school and concerts and trips and contests and planning and everything else that goes along with it. In addition, I am playing trumpet in a mariachi now, so that is starting to require individual practice time as well as rehearsals and gigs. Plus, I have been doing quite a bit of preaching in church lately too.

So…

For reasons beyond my control, my blogging time will be extraordinarily limited this week (lots of concerts and exhaustion has begun to catch up on me). For these reasons, I will be putting the Blog Revolution Project on hold for this week. It will presumably resume again on Monday the 19th. Thanks for bearing with me.

While you are waiting, I invite you to check out these outstanding blogs that have linked to my articles recently:

1. Betty’s Blog : Friends
2. Resource for Bloggers Carnival – 12th Edition | My lucky number 13
3. Tag: I’m It! Guitar Building, The Daily Grind and a Lottery Wish at www.matthewktabor.com : Education and School Issues, News and Analysis
4. A Little Personal « The

…

I have had quite a few sites link to me lately and I have not returned the favor. If you have linked to me at any point, please trust that I will be linking to you within the next three months. I’m telling you, this site will go crazy after the school year is over. I may be able to do some more catching up over spring break in a week or so. We’ll see what happens.

Joseph Pisano has posted the latest Official List Of The ME Bloggers.

jd2718 added me to his March link updates. He also said I’m a great idea and very helpful. Awww, thanks!

Wow, where has the time gone? I’ve been featured in a…

Welcome to the January 2, 2008 edition of The Carnival of Education. I have been asked to host this party, so fasten your seat belts, tighten your shoelaces, batten down the hatches, and let the good times roll. How’s that for a cliché riddled sentence?

Last time I hosted, I got quite a few positive comments. So hopefully you will enjoy this time around as well.

If this is your first time visiting my blog, welcome! I’d love it if you stick around, subscribe, and contribute to the conversations! Looking for somewhere to start, check out The Busiest Articles of 2007, then if you’re in a real commenting mood, go visit the poor Overlooked Articles of 2007 and The…

I have been working for about a month now on redesigning So You Want To Teach? I want to make it even more reader friendly. I’m excited about the changes that will be coming this week. In fact, the redesigned site has now made its debut! If you’re reading in a RSS reader, come check it out. Let me know what you think.

Wow, look at the colors!
I have changed the color scheme and the heading graphic a little bit. The goal is to add some more color and make the site more inviting and more reminiscent of actually teaching children.

Why is there a question mark next to my comment?
Because you haven’t set up a…

On Sunday, we looked back at some of The Loneliest Articles of 2007, today, we’ll go to the other extreme and look at the busiest articles of 2007. 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 15 most commented articles.

1. 148th Carnival of Education December 5th, 2007 (9 comments by 9 authors, 4 trackbacks) (13)
2. The State of the Blog: 08/01/07 August 1st, 2007 (11 comments by 11 authors) (11)
3. 5 Surefire Tips For Handling Misbehavior September 12th, 2007 (8 comments by 7 authors) (7)
4. The Purpose Of A Personal Mission Statement July 26th,

…