Leaving for Australia on Friday!

For the past five weeks I have been up in the woods of NH at Camp Birch Hill as a camp counselor. With limited internet and electronic use, I will be switching gears as I make way for Jamskolan, the first International Symposium and Development Workshop for Network Jamming to be held from the 3rd-12th of August 2009 at the Kelvin Grove campus of Queensland University of Technology.

You can follow my blog and follow my educational trip to Australia!

Comments

Unknown said…

We'll be looking forward to your updates - have a safe trip Tony!

July 27, 2009 at 2:58 AM

steve said…

Have a safe journey, love dad

July 31, 2009 at 10:03 AM

Band Room: A New Design

Just in case we ever get a new or renovated high school (I might be dreaming), I wanted to be prepared for helping input the best design possible for a new band and chorus room. I ended up attending a clinic by the Wenger group. Wenger is the company that made the acoustic shells on our high school auditorium stage along with the two "soundproof" practice rooms that were installed back in the 1960's. The company is now the standard company used in the United States for music room design. I learned many things at this clinic. Firstly, I learned that most bands and choruses have their own rehearsal rooms, practice rooms, and offices. We spent a long time focusing on where sound goes after it leaves the instrument. Our music room has a ceiling that needs to be at least four feet higher. Additionally all the equipment in the room cuts down on reverberation. It is suggested that any closets or storage areas in a band room have open grilled doors so that air and sound c...

Learning Theory through Pop Music by Matthew F. Finnegan

Did you know that most pop music has a four beat pattern where the snare drum usually accents beats two and four? Example: "Get a Grip" by Aerosmith! At 8:00 am I attended what I consider my favorite clinic thus far at the MENC All-Eastern Music Educators Conference. Titled "From Simple to Complex: Leading the Listener to Learning," clinician Mathew F. Finnegan gave great examples of how popular music can be used in the classroom to teach music theory. The idea is this: teaching music theory through the old school fashion of notes on a page and through classical music does not work in today's classroom. In order to create the motivation for students to want to learn theory, we need to reach out and use the music which relates to them the most and connect it with the content we want to teach them. I found this clinic to be very inspiring. Here we just focused on the beat, but this clinician has already established how to incorporate pop music with the teach...

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