Mr. B's Blog

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 ...

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 suc...

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 ar...

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 befo...

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 vi...

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...

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 t...

This year's Massachusetts Music Educators Association All-State Conference was one of the best I have ever been to. There were so many quality clinics going on at the same time, it was hard to choose what to go to. I will be blogging about each clinic and what I learned.