New Schedule=Big Growth!

Growth With Scheduling!

It's always nerve-racking when you fight for something, get what you wanted, and then wait to see if it is actually successful. Four years ago the Pentucket Regional Middle School 7th and 8th Grade Band sported around 40 members. Band and Chorus were happening during a "Skills Period" which is a time blocked off for students to make-up tests, quizzes, do homework, and get extra help. Basically, this would compete with Band and Chorus. Each day I had over 15 students leaving to go to other classes for Skills. To help solve this issue, I served on a scheduling committee at my middle school. Change occurred as a result of this committee and the leadership of the Principal,

Dr. Debra Lay.

This year we have split the 7th and 8th grade into two separate bands meeting Monday-Friday. Why did we do this? Firstly, so we would not have 30 percussionists in band at the same time which takes away from the experience for everyone. Secondly, so we can now focus on a teaching the "special" instruments to the 7th graders while creating a more challenging curriculum for the 8th graders. When they were combined, we would be teaching fundamentals to the 7th graders and were not able to challenge the 8th graders. It was somewhat comparable to trying to teach physics and biology in the same class.

Another big change is that the term "Skills Period" has been abolished. It is now called "Advisory." Students not in band or chorus stay in their homerooms and do silent reading, Second Step, etc. No students are allowed to do homework or make-up tests/quizzes. All must be done after school now. Our band students no longer feel like they are being punished for being in an ensemble while other students get a leg up on extra help from teachers.

What happens when you have this much positive change in a schedule:

37% Growth in One Year!

We now have a record 81 band students between the 7th and 8th grade. This is double the size of the band four years ago. We are hoping that this will result in a really large high school band in the coming years!

Year 4, I Can Hardly Believe It!

Just last week we had band camp and I was talking to the accordion player Lee. I asked him what year he was and he said "I'm a senior." It hit me...the students I had as freshmen four years ago are now seniors. I am very proud of this group of students as they have stuck with band through the thick and thin. We've made many positive changes in the program and it is thanks to this group of seniors and the group that graduated last year.

This year is all about refining, refining, and refining. My goal is to accomplish more in the school year with a higher level of efficiency. I think the biggest change for me will be having the high school students using binders. Each student will receive two copies of music, one that stays home and one that stays in the binder. Too much rehearsal time is lost when trying to hunt down music that a student lost. Hopefully this will help them keep organized more. We piloted it at the middle school last year and it was highly successful!

Our Middle School music department has gone through a major change. When I started teaching the middle school 7th/8th grade combined band four years ago, there were 41 students in the band. Each year there has been a steady increase and last year we had 60 students in the band. As a result we are going to be splitting the 7th and 8th grade bands into two groups this year. I am hoping this will give me more time to spend on teaching the "special" instruments to the 7th graders while being able to move my 8th graders to a higher level of musicianship. Also, my colleague David Schumacher is going to be getting a teacher edition of Smart Music. We will both be giving assignments. Once again, we will be using binders which helps out a lot.

I am very excited for the upcoming year! I am hopeful that numbers will remain positive and that musicianship will be as high as ever. So many great things to look forward to!

MMEA Conference: Lessons Learned from Established Programs (Lexington and Longmeadow)

This was a very worthwhile clinic featuring two of the top educators in the state, Jeffrey Leonard who is Director of Fine and Performing Arts for the Lexington Public Schools and Michael Mucci who holds the same position for the Longmeadow Public Schools. Both fantastic programs, Jeff and Michael shared their stories of how they built, maintained, and enhanced their programs.

Both clinicians talked about the importance of building a music culture within their district. We have built this somewhat at Pentucket, especially in the high school building where we have A Capella meeting before school and 6 jazz, percussion, and string ensembles meeting after school. This is in addition to our in-school concert band, chorus, and two music electives. However, we need to do more at the middle school level. My new goal for the middle school next year is to have small chamber groups meet after school either taught by me or from someone else via Community Education.

Private lessons are integral to both programs in Lexington and Longmeadow. Jeff Leonard pointed out that the best thing to do is create a lesson program that is collaboration between the music department and community education. This way cori checks and payments are handled through community education while the selection of faculty and what they teach is handled via the music department. I reached out to Jeff three years ago to learn more about his program along with Peter Tileston from King Philip Academy. We have copied this model and now have "The Pentucket Music Academy." We are hoping that more students will join this growing program. Both Lexington and Longmeadow require all of their students to take private lessons if they are accepted into their highest honor wind ensembles. They also offered the idea of having your top high school students give private lessons to the elementary school students for $10 an hour which I will talk to Sharon Pacenka, head of Pentucket Community Education, this week.

Next we talked about the importance of having students listen to quality music. Growing up, a high school baseball player most likely went to a Red Sox game or at least watched them on tv. How can we expect to tell our kids "keep practicing to sound better" if they do not know what better is? We must provide excellent modeling of sound for them. Michael uses a subscription of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Online Digital Concert Hall at a cost of around $200 a year. How do we handle listening at Pentucket? David Schumacher, Director of Jazz, and myself have uploaded music onto the ITunes of one of our practice room Apple computers. However, this room is used non-stop and can only fit about three people at a time. I now get the point more than ever that our students need to be listening to quality music. As a result, I have contacted our high school librarian to see if we can create a listening library for our students using the 20-plus computers in the library. The idea would be for me to assign a few listening assignments for the students to complete in the library with the hope that overtime they would want to do this on their own and come to the library during study halls or after school to listen to music. I currently assign online listening assignment via School Loop however I do not think that goes deep enough into gaining appreciation of quality literature. Jeff also brought up the importance of having your groups listen to different ensembles (i.e. have the band listen to the choral pieces). Michael stated he spends about 10%-20% of his rehearsal time each day with listening and relating it to the day's lesson.

Michael brought up a great point about sharing students. Sometimes band directors do not like to share their students with chorus and vice versa. However, it is great for band members to get into chorus where they will get more ear training and for chorus members to be in band where they can get better at rhythm and balancing. We as human beings tend not to just stick with one art, but practice at least two. Sharing students only helps your music department, not detracts it. We are proud at the middle school especially, to share students between band, chorus, and strings.

MMEA Conference: Newer Ensemble Directors Helping the Newest Directors

This clinic was with three ensemble teachers who have been teaching for five or six years. The clinicians included Kristin Chartier (Orchestra Director in Shrewsbury), Jason Bielik (Band Director at North Middlesex Regional High School), and Ashley Nelson (Choral Director at Norwood High School).

This session focused on learning the tricks of the trade for teachers in their first three years of teaching (that's me!). We talked about gaining administrative support, getting along with your school secretaries and custodial staff. Parent support took up almost half of the clinic. We talked about how we put ourselves out there for parent complaints when we "do" more activities. If we just stuck to the school day and performed twice a year, our programs would be mediocre and would not offer much for our students. Sometimes we make mistakes and sometimes it is not our mistakes but parents misunderstanding. Jason Kristin, and Ashley have all receive parent complaints before and their advice was not to let that depress you as it often can. The best advice is first to not make mistakes and secondly if you do make one, admit to it immediately and solve it.

MMEA Conference: Integrating Film and Video Game Projects into The Music Classroom

This clinic was with Sean Hagon of The New England Conservatory. Focusing on creating music for film and videogames, this clinic brought lesson plan ideas that could be used in any music classroom.

In order to create quality music, we talked about the value of listening to quality music. The way we used to teach music was here is the composer, here is his biography, here are five of his songs, memorize this! Sean's technique is to ask the students critical listening questions to music, however it is not just the same old same old. He will have multiple pieces for students to listen to from many different genres including the classical era, movie soundtracks, and videogame soundtracks. By slipping in new music with the old, students will be able to draw connections between them and thus appreciate them more.

I currently use a Bugs Bunny cartoon as part of our film soundtrack project in Music Technology I. I learned about archive.org in this clinic which offers public domain videos, pictures and music royalty free. I will be using this to create new film projects in my course.

MMEA Conference: Avoiding Music Teacher Burnout

This clinic was with Dr. Kenneth Raessler, Director Emeritus of the Music Department at Texas Christian University. Dr. Raessler gave many ideas on how to cut down on music teacher burnout. Ideas included creating positive relationships with your administration/fellow faculty, learning how to polietely say "No" when asked to do too many thing, and remembering that we are here for the kids and the music.

Dr. Raessler noted that often music teachers are asked to conduct and teach a lot of students all at once. It is important to try and not be the one conducting/teaching everything. Reflecting at Pentucket, it is excellent that David Schumacher is here to give his talent and energy to the jazz program. Zach Field and Paul Dumas do the same with the percussion ensembles. This helps me focus my energy on the concert band, marching band, and musical pit orchestra. Marching Band alone takes up almost 9 straight Saturdays of performances in the fall. If I were to offer some more ensembles, I would like to bring in specialists to start chamber groups through community education.

MMEA Conference: Making Music with MixCraft

As you may know, the Mac Lab was overbooked this semester so the district purchased 12 laptops loaded with MixCraft 5 for us to use in Music Technology I. One benefit of having 12 computers instead of 5 with a class size of 25 is that there is more individual learning/creating time.

This clinic was with Jim Frankel from SoundTree. I will be purchasing a new book he just co-wrote entitled Making Music with GarageBand and MixCraft. This book features lesson plans for music technology which is exactly what I am looking for.

I asked James about some of the issues I was having with MixCraft. The main thing was that I could not take my mp3 files from my Mac and import them into MixCraft. I kept getting error messages. James then told me the problem was that I was taking Mp3s from my Mac computer and sending it to MixCraft. For some reason which is not written anywhere on the MixCraft pampflets, I need to download these Mp3s from a pc Itunes. As a result, I will be sending my mp3s to my office Dell computer and loading them up onto Itunes there. I will then put the files in the district server dropbox for uploading by the students.

New things I learned about MixCraft was how to change tempo and key.