Blog post 6-21-2023
I've been reflecting on the 2022-23 school year and why it was so draining and overwhelming. I realize it was overwhelming because I gave up my prep period to split my Intermediate Orchestra into 2 classes. I'll never know if that was the right decision, but halfway through the school year, it felt wrong. Now I know. The other overwhelming part of teaching is a generation of children trapped by the pandemic missing valuable and critical year(s) in a school environment. I don't blame parents. Parents were trapped trying to figure out how to maintain family finances, keep everyone safe, and hang on emotionally. Some had it easy, but most were in a fragile situation. So, I have a plan for the 2023-24 school year. I will go back to basics and use the teachings of Dr. Shinichi Suzuki as a beacon throughout the school year. This quote, in particular, stands out in my mind: "Teaching music is not my main purpose. I want to make good citizens. If children hear fine music from the day of their birth and learn to play it, they develop sensitivity, discipline, and endurance. They get a beautiful heart." ― Shinichi Suzuki I want to focus on growing good citizens with beautiful hearts. I will update this blog to dissect my progress and hopefully have experiences and understanding that will help other teachers grow our wonderful children through the medium of music. Cheers!
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If I had all the time in the world, I would read for at least four hours a day. Actually, I would read all day, but we all know how unrealistic that would be! Novels are my favorite reading, but I have been branching out to read non-fiction of various genres. One genre I’ve been trying to focus on is books that help me as a professional. I have a bookshelf full of these books that I have read or want to get to, and I plan to share short reviews with you, my colleagues. I won’t be posting the reviews in my blog but rather on a Book Review page on this website: BOOK REVIEWS. Please check back for future book reviews or like my Facebook page for updates.
The first book I want to discuss I won’t actually put in my reviews. It tangentially discusses topics related to teaching. I’m a Malcolm Gladwell fan, and I love how his mind works. I’ve read several of his books, and the latest is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. The chapter I felt related most to music teaching was Chapter Two: “Teresa DeBrito,” which tackles the impact of class size. Many of us will laugh about the class sizes he discusses because many of us have ridiculously large classes. My largest class ever at Billinghurst Middle School was 64 students in Advanced Orchestra, which is 8th grade. We barely fit into my orchestra room, and sadly, I felt like I didn’t get to know my students that well. My smallest class was 17 in a Beginning Orchestra class of mostly 6th graders with a sprinkle of 7th graders. The students made incredible progress, but, oddly, many of them did not continue into Intermediate Orchestra. Gladwell talks about how a class with too few students lacks the richness and diversity of a larger class. Teachers report that students don’t express themselves, and it doesn’t allow quiet students the luxury of being quiet. A French-language teacher remarked, “The momentum just isn’t there” with too small a class. Too large a class and teachers “can’t maintain the magic all the time.” We music teachers may have just a little different view of class sizes. For me, the term “critical mass” has impact. In January of 1992, I took over the direction of the local Suzuki program. It was a small program, and the group class had about 5 students total. The students were of similar age and ability level, but they didn’t interact. They walked into class quietly, got out their violin, and waited for me to start. It was chilling! I wanted chaos. I wanted the kids running around and laughing. I wanted to have to get after them to get ready to start class. You may think I’m a little crazy for wanting this, but it was too quiet; there was no energy. For years, I worked on expanding our program, and eventually, it was the vital, energetic Suzuki program I wanted. In 2008, I transitioned into classroom teaching. Again, critical mass means something to me, and I wanted a larger program to have that energy, focus, and charisma. I started with 125 students and quickly expanded. Thinking about the points in Gladwell’s book, for me, a small class size is perfect for the first year. I can give all students individual attention and give the students a solid setup with good note reading skills. The downside of smaller classes is that you have fewer students to recruit for the next-level class. A larger class size is better in the following years because the more advanced students effectively drag the slower students along. For me, a perfect size second-year class, 7th grade for my school, is about 30 students. With this number, I usually have several strong players, which help the more meek players along. If we have less than 25 students in second and third-year classes, we may have very few leaders. It is so obvious when those students are absent! For my third-year class, I find 30-45 to be a good number. The 8th graders need that hyper-social environment of a large class and the full sound of the orchestra with big numbers. For a math or social studies teacher, these would be huge numbers. Unfortunately, in my district often our class sizes near the 40 student mark in middle school. I could jump up on my school funding soapbox, but I’ll spare you for now. What are my numbers for this coming school year? Post-COVID, they are definitely lower. I usually have 180-220 students in my orchestra program for grades 6-8. This coming year I will have 140 students with 31 and 28 in my Beginning classes, 25 and 27 in my Intermediate classes, and 39 in Advanced Orchestra. Not perfect, but not bad either. In addition, I teach an eclectic ensemble, Golden Strings, with an enrollment of 42. These students are also enrolled in their grade-level orchestra classes. While the Beginning classes are a little large and the Intermediate classes are just on the shy side of perfect, and the Advanced is close; I think this year will be able to set the stage for getting back to where we were before the pandemic. On the Book Reviews page on this website, I list some of the books I will review in the coming weeks. This blog will continue to discuss general ideas and thoughts about teaching music to students in the school setting and in private studios. I would love it if you left a comment about the ideal class size for your teaching situation. See the comment link below. Cheers! Caryn I recently posted on ASTA Connect asking for suggestions for easy fiddle tunes to teach to students by ear. The responses were fantastic and knowing that I wanted to gather them all in one location, I realized it would help if I shared that information on this blog.
If you have further suggestions, please post on Cliff View Music on Facebook or add to the ASTA Connect post. Cheers! Caryn SUGGESTED EASY FIDDLE TUNES Boil Them Cabbage Down Soldier's Joy, Little Liza Jane, Cindy Cindy, Shady Grove, Cluck Old Hen, Possum Up a Gum Stump, Turkey in the Straw and Arkansas Traveller Angeline the Baker Black-Eyed Susie Lights in the Valley Stay All Night May Song SUGGESTED BOOKS Basic Fiddler’s Philharmonic (Alfred) Old-Time Fiddle Tunes Celtic Fiddle Tunes Fiddler’s Philharmonic (Alfred) Fiddler’s Philharmonic Encore (Alfred) Fiddle Tunes - Irish Music for Strings (Barenreiter) Fiddle & Song, Bk 1: A Sequenced Guide to American Fiddling, Book & CD (Alfred) Easiest Fiddle Tunes (Mel Bay) Complete Irish Fiddle Player (Mel Bay) Irish Music for Fiddle Made Easy (Mel Bay) SUGGESTED WEBSITES Heather Fiji’s website. This woman has so much to offer. https://www.musicforyoungviolinists.com GROUP TO LISTEN TO ON YOUTUBE Chelsea House Orchestra The wealth of knowledge in our community is tremendous and generosity abounds when sharing that knowledge. Thank you to the following people who offered suggestions on ASTA Connect. Petra Woodfull-Harris, Vivan Wickam, Stephen W. Burch, Miguel Martinez, Christen Blanton, Teresa Bailey, Helen Tuckey, Susan Bechler, Celine Gietzen, Jed Fritzemeier Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is so effortlessly integrated into the ensemble classroom we sometimes don’t even know we are encouraging those connections. Just by students’ placement in the orchestra, students get to know those around them. I play viola in one orchestra and violin in another, and I noticed that I socialize differently in each orchestra. When I’m playing viola, I socialize with friends on viola, cello, bass as well as oboe, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, and tuba. In the orchestra where I play violin, I socialize with friends on violin, flute, and percussion. Certainly, not exclusively, but I did notice a trend.
This is one reason I don’t do chair auditions but change the seating arrangement of my school orchestras every 4-6 weeks. I often view it as a social experiment and separate the talkers and try to find friends for my quiet students. I’ve been trying more and more to find moments in the classroom to have stand partners interact productively - and socially. But now there’s a pandemic, and all of those classroom strategies are out the window. I have a unique teaching situation. My district is on a hybrid plan with A and B groups attending alternate days, and I have included what I call “double Zoom” with the students whose parents have chosen full distance learning. The extra catch is that I am teaching remotely. I am Zooming into the classroom with a substitute teacher in person. I have two large TVs fed through an iPad, and I can see the classroom via two iPads and a camera on the classroom computer. Yes, this is a ton of equipment and fortunately, most of it was in place before the pandemic hit. I also have a lot of equipment at home, including a 2008 computer and the brand-spanking-new computer I bought myself before I knew I would be able to teach remotely. Back to SEL. Not knowing what teaching and learning format our school board would choose this summer, I began dreaming of ideas to keep the students connected. Our Zoom lessons and use of TEAMS worked okay in the spring but didn’t seem to reach out and grab all of the students. My mind went to work. My big idea was to create Harry Potter inspired houses. I didn’t want to copy the Hogwarts houses because 75% of kids are labeled Gryffindor, and I didn’t want an “evil” house like Slytherin. So, I came up with four house names based on composers from around a thousand years ago (similar to Harry Potter). I wanted two female composers and two male founders (like Harry Potter), and I wanted to avoid composers with steamy histories. The chosen composers are Iseut de Capio, Hildegard of Bingen, Jaufre Rudel, and Bernart de Ventadorn. Through what could only be a dash of dyslexia, I re-named two houses Caprio and Bingham. It was too late when I noticed my mistake and had to incorporate the changed name into the backstory for those two composers. At the beginning of the school year, I changed my mind and realized the house idea wasn’t going to work. The eighth-graders showed obvious signs of apathy and attitude. No way was a goofy idea like houses going to work for SEL. But then, they started coming around. I could see them interacting and I could see them slowly changing their attitude and approach to class. It was then, I decided to go for it. The first step was setting up a website for the “castle.” All summer long, I struggled to find a name for the castle and ultimately settled on our school mascot. You can see the website here: www.bighorncastle.com. There are some password-protected pages because those pages include student names. Each house has a motto which vaguely indicates the characteristics of the students in the house. All are very positive and hopefully will inspire the students to emulate those qualities. Then, I set up a house sorting quiz for the students to divide them into houses. Well, this didn’t work very well because most of the students had scores in a similar range. I took the answer to the question, “What is your best quality or characteristic?”, to sort the students as best I could. I also paid attention to having a relatively equal number of girls and boys and grade levels on each team. We’ve had a lot of smoke from the California fires in Reno, so we had a “Smoke Day” distance learning day for all students. I set up a Zoom meeting to reveal houses that ended up being a lot of fun. We had the house reveal in class for those students who couldn’t or didn’t come to that Zoom meeting. A few students didn’t take the quiz due to tech limitations, and I had a few new students. Those students took the house quiz on the classroom computer (with sanitizing before and after!) I did the house reveal right after they took the test. Next, I set up TEAMS for each house and created websites for each house. I paid for the websites so that I could have password-protected areas, but you can do this on a budget with free website hosting through Weebly and others. The kids like the passwords because it is similar to having a password for the houses at Hogwarts. I bought a ridiculous trophy as the house cup, and I think I will buy the winning house members little trophies for the end of the year. I’m tallying points on the main page and giving points for participation. Like Harry Potter, I am giving points rather randomly, but the general theme is participation points. We just got through with elections for house leadership, which included 8th-grade students as head girl and boy and 7th grade as prefect. 6th graders weren’t eligible because I wanted them to have something to look forward to. I want to keep student engagement going, so I’m trying to unveil my ideas weekly or bi-weekly. With the house leaders' addition, I hope these students will have ideas to keep engagement throughout the school year. I plan to write an article for ASTA on student engagement and SEL. If you have interesting or unique ideas, please send those ideas to cliffviewmusic@gmail.com. Cheers! Caryn |
Caryn
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