Look Who’s Talking Now! General by Joel Wagner - April 7, 2008July 2, 20103 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 the voting so far, just under half of my readers have taught for five years or less. Answer the poll question at the end of this article and let me know if you’d participate. There have been lots of comments on here in the last week. The most prolific article was my April Fools Day joke. Sorry to scare all of you! The comments that it produced were great, though. As I mentioned, you folks have been busy commenting on my stuff. Some thoroughly thought-provoking comments have come my way. Your assignment for this week is to read these articles, read the comments, and respond to something that someone (myself or anyone else) has said. Extra credit will be given for writing about it on your own blog and linking to it, or for commenting on one of the other sites that link to one of my articles. Check these out: Links The State of the Blog 03/30/08 Audio: 03/28/08 Do I Really Want To Teach? I Give Up! 10 Reasons Why I Am Quitting My Teaching Job UIL Sight Reading Success April 2007 The State of the Blog 03/30/08 4 Tip’s For Being Respected 50 Reasons To Love Your Job As A Teacher The Honeymoon Is Over: What Killed My First Job And 7 Tips For Getting Your Next Job Less Stress: Don’t Take Work Home You Better Smile Before Christmas! A huge thank you goes to the following posts for linking to me in the past couple of weeks! Not funny, people, not funny. « Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere I Hate this Gosh-Darn Job, and I Don’t Need It « On the Tenure Track Betty’s Blog : Not just lettuce March blog numbers way up « JD2718 And the blogosphere keeps marching on… « Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere Sorting Out Science » Blog Archive » Carnivalia 3/19 – 25 Younger, But Not Little — The Jose Vilson Carnivals! at Joanne Jacobs The Latest Carnival of Education | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… Betty’s Blog : Lack of respect Part 2 – Blogging as Professional Development for Teachers Thanks to Week 128 SOBs See also April Fooled You!!!!One of the coolest things that has happened to my blog recently was that V. Keith Mason has included So You Want To Teach? along with some other blogs and websites in the Music Tech for Me Podcast #024. Other sites mentioned include: Celemony “Direct Note Access” Mustech.Net Make the Most of Notation Software MusicEdTech Be a Techie Music Technology in Education Music Is Not for Insects F Sharp B Flat Double Bass Blog Draper’s Blogspot John Wilborn’s Webblog Great stuff! Lots of new reading to explore. I have UIL Concert & Sight Reading this Thursday, so please bookmark this article (or better yet, Stumble it) and come back to it throughout the week. I have added “Reader Favorites” to the sidebar. If you like or dislike one of the articles you read on here, please help other readers find the best articles on the site! Extra extra credit if you rate 10 posts this week! Speaking of audience interaction, now on to the poll I promised earlier. [poll=3] Joel WagnerJoel Wagner (@sywtt) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting. He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. So You Want To Teach? is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.
Thanks for linking to my blog (Double Bass Blog)! Much appreciated. What a cool layout you’ve got for this site–I’ll be checking back regularly.
Hey Joel! Thanks for the mention. I’ll have to spend some time checking out this site. It looks great! Barb
Welcome to both of you. I look forward to learning more about some of the music ed bloggers out there…