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Tag: Many Things

Why Experience Is The Best Teacher

by Joel Wagner - 0
Why Experience Is The Best Teacher

"You'll understand when you're older." We tell that to our students, and they don't like. We hear it when we start out in the teaching world and we don't like. I remember an experienced band director told me once that he would tell me how to be a better teacher if he knew. He just knew that experience would help me get better. That frustrated me to no end. I'm a step-by-step guy (if you haven't noticed by reading other articles on this blog). "Just figure it out" is annoying to me. The way I like to figure things out is to look up the answers and work from there. "Experience is the best teacher" didn't quite do that for me. But...he was

The Hunt For The Missing Carnival

by Joel Wagner - 4

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

TGIF, That Means It’s Almost Monday!

by Joel Wagner - 8

Please don't tell me this picture represents your views! As a teacher, and specifically as a band director, I am not a big fan of Mondays. As a worker, I really love Monday. Why? Great question. Why I don't like Mondays Kids generally don't practice over the weekend. This means that part of Monday is spent recovering and getting the band to sound the way I want it to sound again. Anecdotally, I find that the students are less focused on Mondays than they are on Wednesdays or Thursdays. Those days seem to be the best teaching days of the week. Often, I will plan my schedule with that assumption. More on that later. This week we didn't have school on

On The Brink Of Quitting

by Joel Wagner - 10

Lisa writes: I googled "bitter about teaching" and came up with your blog.  I was recently let go from a school I busted my a$$ in for a whole year (my first year) - constant criticism, cattiness, and pointing out and embellishing the negative things I had done while minimizing the positive (all the while they were telling me to stay positive!). She concludes her email: I just wanted to let you know that your blog picked me up a little bit.  I still have a lot of healing to do, but I'm glad that I'm not the only person that this has happened to. What an awesome thing! In case you missed the story, here are a few articles

Less Stress: Only Work At Work

by Joel Wagner - 0

Each morning when I come into the band hall, there are always a handful of students who come to drop off their instruments before school. Often they will come in and stand around talking. Because our custodian runs the vacuum each day and doesn't fix the chairs after he finishes, the entire classroom has to be set up each day. I would prefer that they either practice their instruments or leave, but my coworker wants his students to come in and socialize or whatever. Since he gets to school later than I do, I have come up with a plan that works. I tell them to find something productive to do. That could be setting up chairs and stands, practicing,

Efficient vs. Effective

by Joel Wagner - 1

This week, I began reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. It's an outstanding book. One of the points that he makes in the book is that of being efficient versus being effective. I have prided myself in some ways on being very efficient in most of the things that I do. There is definitely a place for efficiency. But is efficiency to be the goal of everything that we do? I propose that it is not. This can be seen in many things in life. An efficient pitcher in baseball is the one who throws the least pitches. And effective pitcher is the one who has the most results. Now, clearly being both effective and efficient should be the

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