St. Patrick's Day Teacher Guilt

It occurs to me that I haven't been around here much this week! Sorry y'all! I haven't forgotten about you, I've just been super busy. You see, I had this brilliant idea on Sunday night to clean my office... and... well... here it is Wednesday and my office is an even BIGGER mess, because I decided to completely rearrange and reorganize it.

I never (ever) do anything half-way.

Anyway, in the process, I completely disappointed some of my students. I bought some lovely smiling shamrock stickers last year, and I ended up forgetting about them completely when St. Patrick's day rolled around. This year, however, I remembered and got them out! Except then I decided to clean my office, and... you guessed it, misplaced the shamrock stickers. Shame on me.

AND... We didn't play my St. Patrick's day game at all today. It's all good and well, we've been playing it all month, but lessons today went by SO FAST! It honestly felt like my kids walked in the door and walked right back out.

To relieve some of this guilt, I told all of my students that we'll celebrate St. Patrick's day next week. Mostly because I am NOT holding onto those stickers for another year. No way, no how.

Despite all of this, I DID remember to wear green today.

Anybody else having "one of those days?" (Or, in my case, "one of those weeks.")

Enthusiasm for Learning

Note: Something a little different today, since it's Friday!


I love teaching my younger students for so many reasons, but my favorite reason is their enthusiasm.

One particular six-year-old student has so much energy and so joy. She started lessons less than a month ago, but each week, she comes bouncing in my front door, huge smile on her face.

"Oh Miss Rebecca," she says, "I couldn't practice my piano today because I had to go to dance, but guess what I did!"

"What did you do?" I ask.

"I pretended like I had a piano in front of me, and I practiced my finger numbers!"

We sit down at the piano, and she proceeds to place her red and green Twinkle Stars (used to mark C and G for "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star") on the piano. I help her fix their placement, ("Oops!" she giggles when I correct her) and she starts to play. Her performance is far from flawless, but overall she does beautifully, her confidence making up for a hesitation here and a skipped note there.

I tell her to keep practicing, and we turn the page. Her books come with a CD of all of the songs, so I stick the CD in the stereo. We sing along with one song, playing the piano as we go, then the next. Ending each song with a dramatic flair, hands in the air and an excited "hooray!" she never wants to stop.

"Let's do another song!" she says.

She's mildly disappointed when I tell her that I can't give her that many songs, but it doesn't take long for her to get right back to her cheerful state. After all, we have to work in her workbook, a prospect which greatly excites her.

As I get out the colored pencils and find the page in her workbook, she dances around the room, singing the songs and making "graceful wrist rainbows" - our topic of the day. She makes up her own songs, too. 

"One key, skip to the other!" she sings, then pauses to explain: "That helps me to remember the black keys!" Though I’m not entirely sure how it helps her, I smile and offer my encouragement.

Then, too quickly, it’s time for the lesson to end. I close her assignment notebook and pull out my sticker sheets… stars, smiley faces, tiny frogs and big sparkly frogs. She selects a red smiley face, sticks it to the front of her notebook and bounces right back out the front door, pausing for a split second to smile over her shoulder and call out, “see you next week!”

I smile as I close the door, wishing that I had half of her energy and enthusiasm.

A Video (...and a story)

Guess who our composer of the day is!



My students make me smile:

     "Wow! He's REALLY old!"
     "He died WHEN?! 1971?! My DAD wasn't even born then!"
     "How do we have videos from that long ago?"
     "Wasn't that before video cameras?"

Embracing the Silliness

I have to say, I have some of the most creative students you will ever meet. I've been using a combination of the composer notebooking pages from notebookingpages.com, the composer bios from the book The Story of the Orchestra and various listening examples I've compiled. It seems, though, as hands on, interactive and exciting as I try to make it, it's evidently not quite enough for my students.

Last week, we learned about Bach. I learned all sorts of things I never knew about Bach while looking over their notebooking pages at the end of class. For example: Did you know that Bach was a space alien? He had blue skin, and green eyes, with orange hair! Furthermore, it turns out that his name wasn't even Bach, it was... Are you ready for this? Chew-BACH-a!

This week I decided that I was not going to give them the chance for such silliness. I elected not to give them the full page coloring sheet of Brahms. But, that didn't stop them. This week, they dubbed Johannes Brahms "Santa Brahms" and informed me that he looks "scary," and proceeded to relate him somehow to the Godfather (I didn't quite understand, probably because they didn't understand).

My first instinct was to be frustrated. However, upon more thought, I've decided to embrace it. Call me a bad teacher, but they remember the facts. They read the information. Even though they colored the great composers crazy colors, I bet that if I showed them pictures of Bach and Brahms, they would be able to recognize who was who... and (most importantly) they are learning that classical music can be fun, and doesn't have to be stuffy.

I'm pretty sure that Bach and Brahms will forgive me.

"The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music, they should be taught to love it instead."

-Igor Stravinsky