Amused

Olin, Veronica and John are headed to Chicago today for the Midwest Band and Orchestra clinic. On this episode we discss the value of local and national professional organizations and their annual conferences.

This is the first installment as we try to work through the new National Core Arts Standards and unpack them. Also on the table is how we incorporate the standards into our teaching and how we can do better.

We address the challenges we're facing and what we're doing to improve as teachers over this year and into next semester. The followup of how exactly we're doing with that will be coming in a blogpost on the website. aMusEdCast.org

This week we invited Clyde Quick to join us and he brought with him the desire to talk about who we are teaching rather than what we teach. This is brought about by watching his student teacher in the classroom and the work she is asked to do.

Our expected guest called in sick this week, so we turned the topic around to do a self check-in and figure out how we stay healthy and focused as each semester wears on.

This episode we evaluate our music selection process. This isn't a "You should be playing these pieces" sort of deal. Again, we're not experts, and we each have our own way of choosing music, mostly based on the needs of our program and our sudents.

Here it is: Episode 10! We're missing Sus this week but the topic is focused on Music Education Advocacy regarding both the public and students (current and prospective) as well as our beefs we have with the way Music ed advocacy has been done in the past.

Updated and audio corrected. 

Basically this is an "It Gets Better" for teachers in the middle of BTSA or other induction programs. The discussion leads to assessment and NCLB (this year is the year every student is to be proficient, according to the language of the law).

This week we take a break from being band nerds. Susanna leads a discussion on vocal health and choral techniques.

We bring on another guest, Tom Slabaugh the director at Davis High School to speak as a percussionist and band director and answer our percussion questions.

We touch on a few topics that could easily take an entire episode for themselves; focused more on the parts of our job that happen outside of the classroom. Olin talks about what it was like to host 10 high school marching bands and the work it took to pull of his Band Day. Sus shares horror stories regarding travel and busses.

This week we go over the some of the warm-up and technical exercsises we use in our ensembles as well as review some of the literature available as method books for beginning, intermediate and advanced instrumental ensembles.   The audio quality is poor this week, but the content quality is top notch!

We invite a guest, Travis Maslen the director at Christian Brothers High School, who has tons of questions (for Olin) about Marching Bands. 

We discuss the differences in experience between student teaching and our first weeks in our own classrooms, as well as discovering what motivates our students and a few tips and tricks we've pick up along the way.

Four music teachers all in their first 5 years of teaching discuss current issues in Music education, resources, tips and tricks as well as catalogue their growth and misteps made as young teachers. Join us for our first episode where we introduce ourselves and our programs, talk about our first few weeks of teaching each year, what's required to prep for the new year and discuss mistakes we made as first year teachers.