arrange • compose • conduct
Posts discussing education, both in and outside of music
Be flexible with your expectations, so that students can try as many activities as interest them. Offer retakes on all tests and quizzes. “If they haven’t learned, you haven’t taught,” so let them keep proving that they’ve learned, as many times as they care to. Help them get back up […]
I am a firm believer in offering grace for our students. Grace for their struggle, grace for their growth. Here’s why. I want my students to bite off more than they can chew. I know they won’t know their limits until they blow past them, and when they figure out […]
Change isn’t always bad, and we’re often bad at separating the positivity of the change from our resistance to it. The road to my kids’ middle school is full of truly unbearable pot holes and shoddy repairs. I should say was. The road has recently been repaved. My first time […]
The idea of a perfectly efficient education system is an oxymoron. The best teachers know that there has to be a give-and-take in the pacing, including sufficient slack and downtime, because humans don’t process learning at the same pace. The push to make learning more efficient comes with several big […]
I’ve seen repeatedly the following education aphorism: “Getting mad at people for making mistakes doesn’t teach them not to make mistakes. It teaches them to hide their mistakes.” If tests can’t be retaken, then students are not rewarded for learning except on a prescribed timeline. Don’t you want them to […]
Recently asked online: “Are part recordings cheating?” That is, does providing part recordings diminish an ensemble experience because we don’t force our students to develop the reading and keyboard skills to learn the music on their own? The answer is: of course not. In fact, I think our music education […]
The last time I was on a retreat was in 2019, and this weekend I’m (with school approval and as safely as I can) on a retreat with the Rockford Aces. I’ve noticed a trend in my own retreat planning towards more human connection and away from actual musical rehearsal. […]
In rehearsal, I heard myself say, “It’s your group – I’m just here to help you achieve your potential.” I really believe that. I call them “my students” or “my singers” but they don’t belong to me. On the other hand, “their director” is a good description – my role […]
Our society has long been obsessed with marking the differences between “Generations” (basically arbitrarily marked) like Z, Millennial, X, etc. The obsession has seemed to ramp up in recent years. The truth is, there are some noticeable and consistent differences in generations over time, though I think that they’re detectable […]
A lot of the students I teach and conduct in ensembles end up spending two, three, even four years with me in the same ensemble. How do I handle the problem of repeating myself? My impulse is to either apologize to returning students for the repetition or to skim through […]