I saw this cartoon posted on The Yellow Board yesterday and thought some of my musician-type readers wouldappreciate it. The cartoon is by John Bogenschutz (www.johnmusic.com).

Over the Christmas Break, a few of the band directors from around the area got together and played some quartets around town. I’m the only one who has played seriously since college, and it’s been about 5 months since I did that too. We were all suffering by the time we got to the end of our gigging. So the “Wonders how much longer he can keep his streak of not touching an instrument going” comment really made me crack up when I first saw it. Anyway, I hope you enjoy Dissection of a…

This blog is about sharing ideas. The ideas and conversation are far more important than me personally. For that reason, you are hereby free to take any articles or comments that I (Joel) personally have produced for So You Want To Teach?and use them in whatever way you so desire! Call it Open Source Blogging, call it Uncopyright, call it Public Domain. I call it No Rights Reserved.

Absolutely.

Unequivocally.

If you want to take an entire article, or even a series of articles, and publish them in a book, magazine, newsletter, newspaper, ebook, or whatever else (edited or unedited), go for it. Let the information flow!

What if I want to sell [insert witty clever teachery item]?
Feel free…

Mr. Teacher has one of the most entertaining blogs I’ve seen. In fact, I recommend his blog Learn Me Good to most of my friends who are looking for restroom reading material! I have recently written a guest post for him that will be appearing over there sometime in the next week or so.

While I normally write useful tips and hints for educators, his blog is often filled with humorous anecdotes gleaned from the life of a third grade teacher. I figured I would cater my guest article to his audience and made sure to remove all potentially useful information from it. It’s an amazing story about one of the most unique Christmas gifts I have ever received from…

This has very little to do with education, but the concept is brilliant and bears sharing. Foodista is a cookbook with a wiki approach.

Some of the cool features include:

1. User-generated and user-edited recipes
2. Easily link to recipes from your blog
3. Click on an ingredient, and find recipes that include that ingredient

For instance, here is a link to a recipe for Christmas Pudding.

Feel free to explore the site while you have some time off for the Christmas Break!

My Christmas concert came and went. No, I don’t have a “winter concert” or “holiday concert.” We don’t play winter music at the concert. We don’t play Easter or Halloween or Arbor Day music at the concert. We play Christmas music. So it’s a Christmas concert. Why is it so difficult for people to understand that concept? Why are so many people scared of offending people that they let fear dominate their lives?

My concerts used to be offensive, but that was because my bands didn’t know how to play. Now, they sound pretty good, and all that stuff. We have fun. We perform both secular and sacred music. Of course, none of them have words, so there is really…

Found these on the Yellow Board. Enjoy. If you’re a band director (especially in Texas) and you don’t read the Yellow Board, you should.

Q: If athletes get athletes foot, what do astronauts get?
A: Missletoe!

Q: What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?
A: Frostbite.

Q: Why was Santa’s little helper depressed?
A: Because he had low elf esteem.

Q: Why does Santa have 3 gardens?
A: So he can ho-ho-ho.

Q: Where do polar bears vote?
A: The North Poll.

Q: What do you get when you cross an archer with a gift-wrapper?
A: Ribbon hood.

Q: Why do birds fly south for the winter ?
…

I love competition. I thrive on competition. I love being able to get a group of kids to create a powerfully musical performance. These are tremendous things. But I have come to realize that this is not the most important thing we can do.

If we lose sight of why we are in education and focus solely on winning (having the most kids pass TAKS, getting more kids in the all region choir, having an undefeated volleyball season, or whatever), we miss out on an opportunity for some of the greatest education we can provide.

As a band director, I struggle to ensure that my pursuit of musical excellence does not overtake my desire to provide a high quality education…

November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? This year’s focus is First Year Teaching Tips. There’s still room if you want to participate! Contact me and let me know your answer to this question:

What are some things you wish you had known before you started your first year of teaching?

Today’s response is from David Warlick, the author of the wildly popular 2¢ Worth.

It is important to note that when I interviewed for my first teaching job and was offered the position, I didn’t know that I had been interviewing for a Math vacancy, and they didn’t know that they has been interviewing a Social Studies teacher. I accepted the job, however, and…

When I first started out teaching, I desperately wanted the kids to like me. To this end, I ended up letting my classes get out of control. A handful of things contributed to this:

• Concerning myself with every matter that was brought to my attention
• Allowing kids to mesbehave
• Trying to get the kids to like me
• Yelling at kids
• Arguing with them

…

Greg recently commented on an article my site. As I typically do, I went to look at his blog Total Music Education and see what he’s all about.

His blog intrigues me. I didn’t have time to read through his entire site, but what I can gather is that he is a music education student in Minnesota. He’s still in school but is getting an opportunity to teach a local summer band camp. With the exception of his observation of the horn section in the camp, I haven’t found anything on his blog that is offensive. Haha.

Nevertheless, reading some of his experiences helped remind me how differently I see teaching beginning band now than I did when I was…

April is already shaping up to be a record-setting month for So You Want To Teach? We are well on our way to seeing 16,000 visitors or more this month. I am way behind on emails. Please forgive me! I am way behind on comments. I am way behind on reading other blogs. UIL is this Thursday. After that, things begin to resume some remote semblance or normalcy. Please don’t expect me to begin catching up until Friday.

The comments are taking off on here! I want to consider starting up a message forum and really transforming this site into a wealth of knowledge for teachers. I especially want to help out my new and prospective teacher buddies. According to…

As we begin the month of March, I want to take a look back a year ago and see where my thoughts and focus were oriented. For me, this is productive as it helps me to see the progress, or more accurately the changes, that have happened over the last year.

For me, this is productive as it helps me to see the progress, or more accurately the changes, that have happened over the last yearLast March I seem to have been really focusing on motivation (both with the students and with myself). This time of year can really begin to drag on, especially as we look to spring break and realize that there are few if any three day…

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…

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…

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,

…

In the Christmas break, I am looking back at this blog’s growth and development. I began writing a little bit for the blog in February, but didn’t officially launch it for real until June. Since that time, growth has been pretty consistent. I now seem to regularly get a small number of comments for every article I write, with some eliciting more than others. 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 redeem themselves, come up to the light of day. Here is…

This may well be the first time I have written about my teaching life without really setting out a solution or providing much helpful information. Let me know what you think.

Last Friday, the other band director I work with had a mild stroke. He is recovering and is at home resting now. The doctors told him to not return to work for six weeks. As you might imagine, Christmas is a terrible time for band directors to be out like this.

I got to take his band on a Christmas Tour on Thursday, and my band today. We have to make arrangements with other band directors to come over from other campuses to cover the classes that are here…

Today is my sister’s birthday. Happy birthday Joel’s sister. :) My birthday is also this Wednesday.

It’s not an education post, but the organization stuff covered is great. I love Zen Habits, and Leo once again hits a homerun here. How to Simplify Your Filing System; or, Why Stacking Just Doesn’t Work. How many teachers need to read this one? I am specifically thinking about my high school and middle school English teachers here…

John Pearson over at Learn Me Good has written his 300th blog post. It includes a wonderful review of his recently published book of the same name, Learn Me Good. I think I want to buy me a copy of that book. Or maybe John will…

As my fifth year of teaching came to a close, I began thinking back on my teaching career. When I student taught, I had wonderful teachers to work with. I got to conduct a piece on the Christmas concert (in the semester I was supposed to be observing), and even got to fully rehearse one piece for the spring trip. That’s not too common these days, from what I have gathered.

So in that sense, I have been surrounded by great educators from the beginning. As teachers, we really need to consciously endeavor to surround ourselves with great educators. These can come in various ways, some of which are not what you might expect.

The most obvious place
Whatever subject…

As we begin the summer vacation, I am looking back on what went really well this year, what didn’t work so well, and what needs to change for next year. Below are some of the positives about this year:

Having a plan before the year began
Even before the school year began, I had a pretty decent idea of what music I wanted the kids to perform throughout the year. What this ended up doing is that it allowed me to gear the daily teaching to make sure that those goals could be accomplished. I had an idea of what Christmas music we wanted to do. That helped us to determine what skills were absolutely necessary, and which ones…