||:  sleep, eat, music  :||

||:  sleep, eat, plan, teach  :||

||:  sleep, practice, eat, teach, gig  :||

||:  sleep, eat, score study, rehearse, reflect  :||

||:  sleep, plan, teach, reflect, eat, plan, teach, reflect  :||

||:  sleep, score study, plan, rehearse, assess, eat, practice, gig, have a beer  :||

||:  sleep, eat, teach, push, praise, cajole, reward, encourage, coerce, congratulate  :||

||:  lack of sleep, caffeine, paperwork, grumpy attitude, classroom management, caffeine, meeting, alcohol  :||

||:  sleeppracticesectionalscorestudyplanrehearsesectionalscorestudycomposesectionalpracticegig, OMG I forgot to eat today :||

Thanks to David Thomas over at The Buzzing Reed for the tip!

The package includes a very nice letter from the book’s co-author (and uber-composer) Brian Balmages, a ‘director information guide’, and finally a full copy of the series’ B-flat Clarinet Book One which includes two audio CD’s. As a collector of beginning band method books (at least it’s less geeky and more useful than collecting stamps or wearing movie costumes to comic book conventions) and a fan of Brian’s music, I have been waiting for the release of Measures of Success (MOS) for a few months now.

First impressions:

The design and production look good, as you would expect from FJH Music. The cover is black with blue, red and yellow designs; the inside is basically black and blue. The physical product is a soft-cover, consumable-workbook-style book (essentially the same physical presentation as the other major methods). The CD’s ride inside the front cover of the student book in a paper envelope with clear plastic window, again duplicating other previous publications.

The book is complete, in that its contents include concept introductions, short exercises, assessments, items which ask the students to write answers in the book (a la workbook above), and full-band arrangements embedded within the progressively-numbered ditties.

The only immediate, obvious differences between MOS and other leading methods (Standard of Excellence, Essential Elements/EE2000, Accent on Achievement, Band Expressions, etc.) are that MOS: (1) is organized into six large units rather than 20-30 small units, (2) includes six full-page assessments rather than two dozen one-line assessments, and (3) seeks to set itself apart from other methods in the quantity and quality of full-band arrangements.

I’ll dig in to MOS this weekend and give a little bit more detail in the coming week. Check back soon!

Cruise on over to MusTech.net to read the finest writing and the freshest thinking in music education in the past month. The Music Education Blog Carnival is back with a passion, and today’s March Carnival is one of the best editions since the Carnival’s founding.

Check it out!

We have the best problem, ever: our class sizes are too small. Thanks to superior funding and real emphasis on student learning from our school board, our school has achieved something in the neighborhood of 9-1 student-teacher ratio. The average class size in the elementary school is (by my very unofficial count) something like 15 students per teacher in grades 1-5; in the high school, advanced courses like IB and AP can have as few as two students and still garner a dedicated teacher, classroom and period. As is predictable from the plethora of class-size research - which is not within the scope of this blog, so I hope you’ll excuse me for avoiding the task of separating the wheat from the chaff - our school excels at boosting student achievement through student-teacher interaction. Our ESL students get dedicated subject help, our small special-needs population gets a specialist-staffed resource center as well as timely and professional status review meetings consistent with the best districts anywhere in the U.S., and behavior issues typically involve academic dishonesty or cursing. Tobacco, alcohol and drugs are simply not an issue on campus (despite the easy availability of just about anything in our host country). I have yet to hear the word ‘fight’ without ‘global warming’.

Who in their sane mind could have a problem with small class sizes?

Well, the music ensemble directors could. Especially when it means that the advanced, performing ensembles (Concert Band, or the newly formed Middle School Choir) are split between four separate periods. Each.

Having a class size of seven students appears to make middle school language arts teachers very happy. However, the middle school music faculty are finding it quite difficult to build rehearsal energy, group sonority, ensemble phrasing and matching interpretation in this setting. The Middle School Concert Band, for example, meets in sections of 19, 11, 7 and 7 students, the first two being eighth grade and the second two being in seventh grade. The seven-student sections of Concert Band each have three flutes, one clarinet, one trumpet, one alto saxophone and one trombone. This is a red-alert according to our ‘peers on like instrument’ measure; but in a performing ensemble the situation adds additional alarm, being that it strips the ‘ensemble’ out of the ensemble class. The music doesn’t make sense to the students as they rehearse it, and they cannot learn how to blend or tune with a group who isn’t there. The band director expends unnecessary energy and concentration singing the missing parts (which, in my case, may qualify as child abuse!) Ergo, in this case, we are asking to be given larger class sizes, especially for the advanced performing groups.

We have been round and round the schedule issue with our Middle School Principal - who, I must say, is the most honestly supportive most willing to listen administrator for whom I have ever worked (and I have worked with some excellent administrators) - but cannot find a fix within the current middle school timetable. Which brings us to the impetus for this post (and its predecessor, ‘Part One’): the Middle School Principal has asked the music department to come up with some suggestions for next year’s music class scheduling.

Join me again next week for Part Three, in which I will (really, this time) include the full text of our submitted document.

But one ad caught my eye this week. It is a brochure for summer credit hours. The brochure promises to develop in participants “a new vision for…education” and bring them up to date with “best practices for…motivation, brain research [and] games” through the ability to “generate exciting new learning formats” and the ability to “empower your students to have meaningful conversations”. This is powerful stuff! “Particular attention”, the brochure asserts, “will be given to the important roles that music, art, language and play have in the development of the neural networks” and to the ways in which “written, spoken, artistic, and kinesthetic…techniques” can be used “in your classroom to raise student achievement”. Participating educators will learn the “Keys to Developing a Motivating Classroom” and will certainly spend time “Rethinking Classroom Management”.

But take a look at the cover of the brochure:

Do you see what I see? Of three pictures, two are scenes of classrooms organized in the Industrial Revolution plan: student-workers, arranged in straight rows, facing straight ahead at the teacher-boss, who is the giver of all knowledge and sole locus of control. It is the teacher’s job to ask questions in these scenes, and the students’ jobs to quietly raise their hands and wait to be called upon to speak. But the classrooms are productive, and the proof of productivity is right in front of us: chalk on a green slate board, right where the knowledge-giver has placed it for the dutiful student-workers to copy it into their paper notebooks. And the classroom atmosphere in these scenes is positive, with smiles and eager raised hands. But is it the forward-thinking “new vision for what…education may look like” as touted by the content of the brochure? Where are the cooperative learning groups? Where are the innovative methods? Which of these images represents “Creative Science Instruction Through Inquiry”? Which image shows a divergent symphony of artistic, musical and kinesthetic learning styles? (Oh, I see the kinesthetic - it’s all of those young’uns raising and lowering their arms from their desks all day.) The pictures of silicon-powered “new learning formats” must be waiting on the organization’s website, with the course descriptions for technology courses.

And speaking of technology, why is the lady in the leftmost picture (whom I assume to be an educator reading in the grass on a sunny summer day) learning by old-fashioned book, rather than via internet or through dynamic hands-on activities? If the tech coursework offered at this seminar includes the creation of “exciting new learning formats” and attention to social, artistic and kinesthetic classroom methods, then is it not counterindicative for the cover of the brochure to promise cutting-edge 20th Century educators their PD via “familiar and effective text-based course formats”?

In all fairness, I must emphasize that it is the brochure, not the program itself, of which I am poking fun. The organization probably runs a well-respected and highly effective program, for all I know (I fully admit that I don’t know). It is certainly a forward-looking collection of course descriptions.

The staff who created this brochure are professional graphic designers, not professional educators. The design professionals who created the brochure were educated in the 20th Century system. They have never seen the classrooms of the edgy teachers who founded Learner’s Edge Inc., much less the wire-free, inquiry-rich techno-zone of James Frankel’s imagination. The graphic designers dug deep into their own 20th Century experiences to find the traditional mental image of “happy school”: creamy faces, pearly smiles, straight desks, raised hands, and nubs of chalk scratching across well-attended chalkboards. I wouldn’t be surprised if the images came from a stock photo service such as BigStockPhoto.com, Shutterstock.com or Fotosearch.com - or perhaps I would be surprised if the pics didn’t come from a stock photo service. I don’t blame the graphic designers; they were doing what any graphic designer would do. And the vast majority of the American public shares their Industrial Age paradigm.

But that is the point: despite calls (and some impressive funding) for educational reform from outside the profession and the leadership of brave and innovative pioneers within the profession, the vast majority of the American public shares the Industrial Age paradigm inherent in the photos on this brochure. Let me say that again: Even the brochure selling vanguard techniques to the front-line teachers “in the trenches” shows the old vision of what school should be. Do schools kill creativity? Yes. Does it have to be that way? Only in a 19th Century school.

One of my favorite education quotes of all time comes from a clinician, whose name I never caught, who gave the keynote address at summer inservice in a small, rural district in which I used to teach. She was a great speaker and an energetic motivator, and I have long wished that I had written down her name next to the sizeable list of one-liners on my notepad that day. Among the golden nuggets that morning, she said that

Learning is noisy. Death is quiet.

Wow. That idea resonated (no pun intended) with much of the audience, and so much more for a percussionist and band nerd like myself. Having dedicated my life to Varèse and Coltrane indoors and to DCI outdoors, chaos and noise felt like home to me. (Anyone who has taught a full-time year will agree with that chaos and noise are the natural state of both kindergarten and high-school seniors.) That was the beginning of my understanding of the need for the American education industry to break free of the Victorian-era model of school. And does it not describe what we, as music educators, do? Does it not describe our goals, methods and motivation, all in one quip? Learning is not quiet; nor is personal growth; nor the solving of unique and asymmetrical problems in the real world; nor teamwork, creativity, sports, business, family vacations, fun parties, tasty food, hot sex or anything else on this planet that makes life worth living.

The third law of thermodynamics applies to humans of all ages. Why fight it? Let’s stir those kids up and see just how far they can go! Excellent teaching is not like operating a factory, it’s like herding cats at a higher pace with higher stakes.

To close - and this is a post in serious need of closing at this point - I hereby put out the call to arms: Educators of the world, unite! We are on the leading edge of a revolution in education - nay, all of American culture - in which creativity, problem solving and interpersonal skills become the core of intellectual training for adult life in a real world where success requires - say it with me -  creativity, problem solving and interpersonal skills. Music and movement are to the software of the mind what oxygen and glucose are to the hardware of the brain. Onward, pioneers! The wagon trains of American culture are pushing their way across the vast territory of “a new vision for…education”, slowed by the bumpy trail of politics and funding, but striving unstoppably towards the manifest destiny of “generat[ing] exciting new learning formats”. But the first step is for us, the educators, to bravely rip the old vision from our heads and hammer in its place a blank slate (or iSlate, or iPad or iTablet or whatever) on which the future can paint itself. Music in every classroom! Every student into music! Let’s “Blast!” apart the brick walls of traditional definitions of theater, art, science and history are. Let’s pull those desks out of those clean, straight lines and get our hands dirty. And at the vanguard of the revolution will be the band, choir and orchestra directors who teach real-life success skills through the study of the most beautiful - yet asymmetrical and undefinable and unfathomable - discipline in the school: music.

I realized last week that the analogy is ever so slightly askew. Flexing the bottom lip, controlling the reed with the muscles on which it sits, is NOT like a soft pillow for the reed. The proper muscle-ly embouchure is like a firm mattress. A very firm mattress. A soft pillow squishes when you sit on it. A firm mattress has give, but doesn’t squish flat under its occupant. Likewise, a “soft” lip is one that rolls limply over the teeth (squishes flat under the contact of the reed). The soft, squishy lip produces the thick, flat tone which, in my early years of teaching, I knew was wrong but which I couldn’t explain to my students.

Henceforth, the lower lip of the clarinet embouchure is like a firm mattress, not like a soft pillow. One more tool in my toolbox.

QOTD: What’s your best analogy, exercise or trick for teaching beginners to play soft dynamics without sacrificing tone quality?

You strive for high standards. But your younger students just do so many things. . . well, wrong. My professional ear demands perfection and I have to stop and fix all of those imperfections. . . right?

I would encourage my peers and colleagues to see a little bit of “glossing over the rough spots” as “lesson pacing” rather than “lowering your standards”. You see, I used to stop and fix every wrong note, every embouchure weakness, every misplaced articulation. If I found more than one student lacking fingerings or failing to use the alternate fingering that I knew they had previously learned, I would throw my whole lesson plan out the window to hammer out the relevant scales…and lecture the kids on practicing. The result was a slow period that day, followed by a disappointing lack of improvement (and more remedial work and lectures) the following day, followed by totally losing momentum on the repertoire.

Now, when something is not right, I make a quick triage decision: If I can fix it in ten seconds or less, I fix it and move on with the lesson. If it would take more than ten seconds and is not absolutely critical to the present lesson, I leave it and move on; I then reflect on what pieces are missing for those students and work it into subsequent lessons or units. If the present lesson will just not fly without fixing a flaw, then it was my fault in the first place for not doing a thorough analysis of my students’ prior knowledge; I alter my lesson plan on the fly, move to a remedial exercise smoothly (as if we were finished with the day’s objectives on the first piece), and spend the rest of the period re-laying the foundation for the original musical objective.

It is true that we need to cleanse our ears daily, and to strive for high standards with even our beginners. However, don’t confuse the long-term objectives with the short-term objectives. There’s “a time to sow, a time to reap. . . A time to rend, a time to sew.” There’s a time to stop and hammer an articulation, and a time to move on with the scheduled lesson about ternary form.

All high standards in their own time. Turn, turn, turn.

My colleagues and I have been asked by the middle school principal to write out schedule suggestions for next year’s middle school band and choir classes.  There is no promise that we’ll get what we want, but WOW what a refreshing way to do business! This week my colleagues and I have been hammering out multiple plans based on mixed grades, separate grades, mixed instrumentation, separate instrumentation. . . you name it. . . and crunching the related numbers.

I am most proud of our data-driven metrics. We tried to represent our concerns in a systematic way, using data to show the dramatic effect that class makeup has on the classroom environment. Currently having small band classes split into two periods (i.e., fourteen 7th-grade Intermediate Band students scheduled into two sections of seven and seven, with a mixed bag of instruments in each) for the sake of PE and ESL scheduling, we are very concerned with class groupings.

The most important data metric we will rely on in our campaign for music-centric scheduling is “peers on like instrument”, or the number of students in any given class period on a given instrument. For example, in the aforementioned 7th-grade Intermediate Band, which is taught by one of my colleagues, one period has five flutes and the other period has four flutes. The “peers on like instrument” for this situation is essentially an average: n = (5+4) /2 = 4.5 peers on like instrument. The ensemble has two euphonium players, neither of which had ever heard the other until days before the December concert, as they are in opposing periods. Therefore, the 7th-grade Intermediate Band has a “peers on like instrument” score of ‘one’: n = (1+1) /2 = 1 peers on like instrument. It is not surprising that the flute players in this situation feel less exposed and a little more willing to take little risks (go for the high note, go for the 16th notes, etc.) Since the “1″ is not a buddy sitting next to him,  the term “peers” is probably poorly chosen, but it nevertheless gets to the point. In all, the “peers on like instrument” score for our 7th-grade Intermediate Band is currently 1.75. If the two periods were joined (they are the same course, after all) the “peers on like instrument” score would be exactly double, or 3.5.

The “peers on like instrument” is not rocket science, nor will it change the world. My colleagues and I are certainly not statisticians. The “peers” concept is only valid as a comparison, and probably only within one school. It would not help us to compare our 153-student school’s “peers” numbers to those of a AAAAA Texas school (at least not without additional calculation to take the overall enrollment into account). It also doesn’t make me want to add four additional bari saxes to the ensemble out of concern for the existing bari sax player’s feelings. But it does help us get an idea of how an adolescent might feel in one situation versus the other. Remember, after all, that the brain grows wildly in the hypothalamus, or social-emotional area, and largely static (some middle school teachers might even say completely dormant?) in the neocortex, the center of intellectual thought, during the adolescent years. It would be foolish not to take the students’ social experience into account, and the (albeit poor) metric for that would seem to be “peers on like instrument”.

Tune in later this week for Part Two, including the full text of the proposal we sent to admin.

Who goes for contrast, and who goes for continuity? Who is fastest and who is slowest? Who has the most terrified sounding Alto soloist? Let’s listen….

On behalf of all of us, Kenneth, thanks for digging through the stack of discs and harvesting the gold!