jedscott

I want to make a sign to hang over our office door. It will read: IT TAKES LESS TIME THAN YOU THINK! What takes less time than you think? Almost everything. Writing a blog post, finishing your homework, mowing the lawn, replying to that email, planning a rehearsal. What will […]

What are two opposing thoughts you hold in your head? Tonight in rehearsal a student mentioned that they had mistakenly sung a different pronunciation of Christmas in class. We usually pronounce it with a short i in the second syllable (rhymes with Swiss Miss) but in class they often pronounce […]

Active listening is a skill I often find lacking in my students. I tend to blame the soundtracking of our culture for this: we have so overloaded our ears with constant background or mood music that we have trained our brains to not pay attention to what we’re hearing. Here’s […]

I’ve just returned from a weekend working and connecting at the ACDA Michigan Fall Conference in Flint. And my drive home was spent thinking about the people. Not the presentations, not the performances, but the people in my profession. Many I only see at conventions – how great to share […]

It seems like at every conference you attend, there is plenty of opportunity for “convention snark.” Nitpicking the performances, criticizing lecture sessions, or just dishing about colleagues and what they’re doing: they are all ways of making yourself feel better about what you do. But I refuse. I celebrate the […]

Learning to practice is the most important skill we can develop in life. It’s the only way to get great at anything. I’m working with a former student who is trying to develop a personal practice regimen. Here’s what we settled in on: He texts, “I practiced.” I text back, […]

My Twitter friend Gary Abud (past Michigan Teacher of the Year) recently asked me on Twitter to recommend a tool to use in recording choirs during class. He told me, “I have a choir teacher who wants to record and play back his students’ singing so they can ‘review film’ so to speak.” In […]

Overheard at a sight-reading-centric rehearsal last night… “I can’t wait till we can just get up and sing this.” Me, neither. (And the better you read, the faster we get there!) The truth is, while I love putting a new piece in my choir’s hands, and I love performing music […]

Getting to good isn’t hard. You can get to good pretty fast when the pressure is on. But you can’t get to great when your back is against the wall. To get to great, you need to be doing the hard work when your goal is far in the distance.

I’ve now seen Disney’s Frozen several times with my family, and we’ve all enjoyed their re-telling of Andersen’s The Ice Princess with wonderful animation, songs, and comedy. But I was struck by one moment in particular that speaks to our current a cappella cultural phenomenon. The film opens, before any action, with the wonderful Norwegian choir Cantus singing Vuelie, […]