It's been awhile...

Reflections:

Well, it’s been a roller-coaster ride these past few weeks full of fun stories and interesting tidbits, so why not dive right in eh? (PS, sorry for the belated update, it’s been long overdue, so here we go).

First story: I find myself in a bus heading to a choir competition about one hour late with only one student auditioning despite assuming and hoping that three would show up. The sun is rising in the east and the sky is orange as the bus goes by cotton fields and farm houses towards our destination: Pine Bluff. How did this happen?

I learned a valuable lesson about a few “teacher” things that I hadn’t known about previously or simply didn’t act on earlier. Number 1: always always always triple check transportation plans. I awoke around 5 a.m. that morning hoping to leave at 6 and assuming the bus would be at the school. I arrived at the school that morning to find the front gate (that lets traffic onto campus) locked and closed, but there was a large bus at the nearby gas station. Lo and behold, that was my bus, but much larger than what we needed for the trip. What we needed was a Harrington School District sized bus, or in most other cities the “Special Bus” which would be more than sufficient for three intrepid travelers.

Well, I had hoped that all three of my students would arrive on time at the high school and assume that the bus was the one parked at the gas station, so they would turn around and come to the bus. That didn’t happen. In fact, by about 6:10 none of my students had shown up and I knew where one of them lived. Lesson number 2: get phone numbers and addresses of your participants. This should’ve been a given and should’ve been something I had moved on earlier. I ended up dragging my single participant out of bed (not literally, but I did wake his folks up and they drug him out of bed) so he could be my sole participant in the SE regional choir contest. He had a decent audition but unfortunately did not make the cut.

Ah well, lesson learned. Next year I’ll be sending way more students and will have the music at least a month in advance and have my transportation plans nailed down. Sometimes we just have to live and learn. I did get some good contacts with other choir directors and got to do some judging, which consisted of sitting behind a black curtain with other directors (most in their 40s and 50s and all females…had great conversations about grandchildren) and listening as nervous altos and basses sang the same sets of music over and over.

Story #2: the class. As far as the classroom, in the past few weeks I have implemented a few new strategies to keep my kids engaged: class points and class jobs. The class points system is more for my choirs: the two periods compete with each other and start out each day with 10 points. They hold onto these points if they’re following procedures and rules (not talking while I’m talking, being respectful to one another, etc). At the end of each period I tally the points. The first class to make it to 200 will receive McDonalds from Mr. Moneybags himself: their choir teacher. Ahh, bribery. It’s pretty effective, but I need to be more punishing with my individual consequences. So far we’ve been able to cover an sight-read three songs in each class (I’m putting the choirs together for the concert so we can have a nice, full sound). This weekend I spent some time looking at our Christmas music, and found two pieces that should be very easy to learn and will be a lot of fun to sing. One of my fellow teachers suggested that I let the kids pick which songs they will sing for the concert, and I think that’s a good idea but we’ll see. I’ve found that one of the difficulties for me teaching choir is that I have many assumptions about how a good choir is run and the mindsets of my students: when I’m in a choir I always differ to the director and always take the pieces that are given to me. I’ll grumble if I don’t like the particular piece, but I’ve always found (with a couple of exceptions) that no matter how much I hate a piece early on I learn to appreciate and eventually love it by the time the concert rolls around. These kids see things that way, and I think it might be a good investment strategy to give them more ownership of their music (“Ok, you’ve decided to sing this, so lets pull it off, etc.) I need to give it more thought, but by tomorrow I’ll have a decision for sure.

Class jobs are coming off to a shaky start, but on the whole are working well. The way it works is that I “pay” my kids in tickets every day. The average kid will earn 5 tickets barring behavioral difficulty (I take away tickets if they’re not following instructions, talking, given dhalls, etc). However, I have since hired (and they actually filled out applications) a few students to carry out classroom jobs (passing out papers, taking roll, lining the kids up outside, etc). The job part has been very successful. My roll takers are faithful and do exactly what they’re supposed to. My line enforcers are honest about how many marbles we earn (marbles are my class reward) and I have a very easy system of tracking how many tickets students have either earned or lost each day. The trouble is that the kids use their “pay” to buy things at the class store, which is currently run by an overwhelmed manager with a faulty cash register (me). My new challenge is to find a way to streamline the store so it only takes, say, 10 minutes for me to “sell” my various bribery items to the kids without having to take too much time in figuring out how many tickets are left over.

I’m still having difficulty with classroom management, and am realizing more and more that I simply put up with too much backtalk. Last week I implemented a pretty harsh consequence for backtalk, and it’s proven effective (they get three dhalls every time they back talk). Musically the munchkins have started to learn how to sing notated music using the skills that they’ve (hopefully) developed the past nine weeks (knowing the line and space notes, amount of beats for a quarter note, etc). We’ll be diving into more music this coming week and will probably be doing some music history as well.

Story Number 3: the weather (because everyone talks about it anyway). Weather-wise it’s been pretty windy and “cold” down here in Arkansas. The weather got down to the 40s a few days ago and there was a really intense thunderstorm that barreled through on Thursday knocking down some trees, but otherwise I’m enjoying the fall weather. The night with the thunderstorms was scary: there was a tornado warning to the south of us and around 2 a.m. the town alarm went off (it goes off every time someone calls 911 though, so it probably wasn't serious) but I was afraid that a tornado was coming and quickly got online to check the weather. Luckily we were in the clear.

That’s all for now, but stay tuned, maybe I’ll be better about keeping this thing up to date as next week rolls around.

Cheers,

-Nate

“They see me mowing, my front lawn. I know that it’s obvious I’m white and nerdy. Think I’m just too white and nerdy.” –Weird Al