Don't die on me, d*mmit!

So this past school year (and the second half of the year before) I decided that blogging wasn't really going to be my thing anymore.  Clearly I couldn't keep up with it, and clearly I was lagging in making updates and writing interesting and witty things.

Fast forward to today.

It occurs to me that if nothing else I need a space to explain some things that are available for the greater good.  My Teachers Pay Teachers store needs to be expounded upon, as does some of the ideas I have for my classroom, and if nothing else I'd like to have some sort of space to think out loud and see my ideas from another perspective.  So that's what I'm going to be doing.

In many ways, this is nothing new - I've been somewhat using this blog for those purposes all along.  In other ways, I'll be curious to see what (if any) sparks of inspiration can be gained from what seems to be a blog without readership.

If there's anyone out there, care to leave a comment?

Bueller?



Also, look back here soon to see an explanation of my brand spanking new 2107-2018 Planner of Awesome!

Midyear check in!

Oh, you sad, neglected blog.

At the beginning of this year, I posted my professional goals.  I intended to use that as a springboard to document the various things I did this year to meet those goals.  This implies that I would be posting more frequently.  Sadly, this has not been the case.  Something about working 4 jobs and always having to be somewhere does not lend itself to writing blog posts.  Such is life.

Back to those professional goals, though.  I've actually done some things with them.

First of all, I tackled my file cabinet as intended.  I now have my one functional file drawer organized in a useful manner. The first section is for emergency sub plans and procedures, with a laminated set of class lists, just in case.  The great thing about this is that if something comes up and I am not able to be at school unexpectedly (which means something along the lines of... a bear attack, I suppose?), there are enough plans and activities in that drawer (and in the office) to keep my classes busy for several days (while my limbs are reattached, I suppose).  I also tossed the old paperwork that was serving no purpose. Honestly, I don't know why it took 5 years to scrap the fundraising paperwork from 2009, but apparently it did.  I also organized my IEP/504/Medical Alert folders so they were clear and consistent and easier to access, put my copy masters together, and rearranged a few other categories as well.

Essentially, I feel like I started using a file cabinet like a grown-up.  Now if only I had a hanging frame for more than one drawer....

What you can't see is the frustration caused by trying to file things that have no place to be filed.  Argh.

The two middle drawers still have my pool noodle rhythm pieces, I need to find a time to use those again soon.

The bottom drawer is mostly sound-related stuff - microphones, cables, microphone boxes, etc. Some day I will go back through this and make sure everything in that drawer is organized, too.  But not today.

Second goal - organization of my table/desk space and mailboxes!

I am not going to show a picture of these.  They're currently a big jumbled mess.  This is partly due to just having a concert last night, and partly due to me being a mess when it comes to organization.  In some ways the switch to a smaller table has helped.  It frees up a little space in the room, and limits the surface area that is able to be cluttered.  In other ways, it didn't make a difference.  I still find myself with piles, I still end up perching things precariously next to my laptop, and sometimes that is a recipe for disaster.  However, thanks to the laws of physics, those piles are a bit smaller than they had been.

Yes, please.  But not the chair. It looks uncomfortable.

The mailboxes have worked great so far, especially since I have not done my usual routine with student folders.  I need to get on those folders, since my mailboxes are pretty much filled with student work.  I also have some things stacked on top of those boxes, but not as badly as it has been in the past.  Baby steps, I suppose.

Also, I ended up taking a large shipping label, measuring and marking out the small pieces I needed, and cutting them out and attaching them to the small binder clips to make labels for each class.  I think it looks pretty darn good, especially since my handwriting is a bit suspect at times.

Third - the hot rod music cart!  So having a PVC tube with drum sticks in it has been useful.  The problem I have run into is that zip ties and smooth PVC aren't exactly the most secure means of attachment.  What has happened is that one zip tie has slid off, which caused the whole thing to tilt.  The good news is that makes the opening point toward me when I stand at the cart.  The bad news is it also flops around and sticks out kind of awkwardly.  What I think I will do is drill a couple small holes in the side of the pipe, then lag bolt it to the cart to hold it in position at a slight angle.  Every now and then when I (or a student) move the cart those sticks will catch on something.  Not a huge problem, but fairly annoying.  Also, I don't like my slick cart looking kind of ghetto.

Fourth - greater student independence.  This is definitely a work in progress, but I have in many ways increased the things I have students do on their own exponentially.  Sometimes I still have to spell things out in ridiculously literal terms, but most of the time I can give a direction and set the kids to it.  It usually works out as planned, but not always.  One of the most helpful things in this area is definitely the use of band and strings students as helpers in general music. These are the kids who spend the most time in my room, so they are the most familiar with things.  They're also less likely to do silly things that they shouldn't, so I am able to trust them with more responsibility.  One more reason parents should encourage their kids to learn an instrument.


I have a confession to make.  It's terrible, yet funny all at the same time.

Thankfully, this is not my confession.

Funny.  But not mine.

One of my ongoing goals is to become more organized, to keep ahead of messes, to avoid creating piles, etc.

I had a student a few days ago ask why my room was so messy.

I kind of hung my head and mumbled "...I know..."

The good news is that I had it mostly sorted out with a couple days.  The bad news is that the struggle is very real and continues.  However, for my two remaining professional development credits I plan on taking a course on practical classroom organization strategies.  Hopefully if the course is structured like I understand it to be it will be a better resource than looking at music ed blogs and Pinterest.  If not, I'll at least have two credits out of it and my room won't be any worse organizationally.

If you have a great organization system, would you be so kind as to share it?  I feel that all teachers can benefit from the ideas of others, especially in our own personal area of weakness.

Until next time, keep up that good work, folks!

Professional Goals For This Year

Happy New School Year!

I am currently waiting to begin our open house in a few hours.  We will get to meet new families, see new faces, and see families and students that we have known for years.  I am excited to get a new, fresh start to the year, and there are a lot of things I will try to improve from previous years.

First and foremost, my main goal for this year is to finally be organized for more than the first few weeks of the year.  Sometime this week I will tackle my file cabinet.  I am dreading that, as it hasn't been cleaned out since I started at this school.

Looks so peaceful and inoffensive from the outside....

EEEEEEEEK!  So... much... unnecessary.... junk..........

 Last year I switched from  my teacher desk to a round table in the hopes that I could keep that better organized.  That ended up proving to be hopeless.  This year I have switched from the round table to a trapezoid table that is about half the size.  Less surface area means less clutter, right?  I plan on using my mailbox organizer to better effect throughout the school year, using it to stage copies for each class rather than hold random sets of papers that may or may not ever be needed again.  I've even added binder clips to the front of each slot to use for labels.  Now I just have to find tiny labels that will fit the tiny binder clips.

My hot rod music cart is still in service, and continues to evolve.  This year's evolution involves zip-tying my PVC drumstick caddy on one leg.  I am hopeful that keeping those sticks close will encourage my percussionists to stop losing them.

I have rearranged my word wall, though it still needs some tweaking.  Now everything is visible from anywhere in the room, and I hope to be able to use the various word wall categories to greater effect.  It's bugging me that a couple of them are a  little crooked, so I know what I'll be doing shortly.

So here it is. My classroom in all its almost-organized glory.  You can see where my girlfriend made her mark on the chalkboards, and the old piano waiting to be taken away, you might even be able to see the leak stains on the ceiling if you look closely.

Another of my professional goals for the year is to foster greater student independence.  I have pencils and other writing items set where students can easily get them.  I have placed my classroom rhythm instruments in open bins at the front of the room to make them easier to get to.  I plan on assigning students to be passer-outers for these items to help free me up and foster smoother transitions.  I am hopeful that anything I can do to encourage students to be more procedurally independent will lend itself to them being more independent in other areas as well.  Which as a music teacher really means I'm trying one more sneaky way to encourage kids to practice at home.

We all have our cross to bear.

My third goal for the year is to be more open to spontaneous performance opportunities and to schedule more opportunities for students to perform for each other and for me.  My girlfriend gave me a small lectern and folding chair, so I have them set up in the corner to use as a performance spot. I'm thinking that I will give students the chance at least once a month to perform something for their classmates, whether it is singing, playing an instrument, or some other kind of performance.  I think I may finally be getting past my feeling of not having enough time for that or not wanting kids to get up in front of their classmates and waste our time with a "performance" that is really just a chance to be in the spotlight doing nothing.  I'm still working out the logistics on this, so I would love to hear ideas and suggestions.

So that's it for now!  I am entering my 8th year of teaching this year, and feel like every year gets easier in some ways and more difficult in others.  I plan to be the best music teacher I can be this year, and do the best I can for all of my students.  That's really all we as educators can do, so here we go!

Teacher Appreciation Week and Teachers Pay Teachers Sale!

Today marks the beginning of May.  For some, that means that Spring is in full swing, the birds and bees are out doing their thing, the weather is nice, plants are starting to peek their leaves out, and the pollen is in full force.  For me, it means that I am coming ever closer to the end of the school year and all of the work that brings with it.  I have grades to enter, assessments to give, paperwork to file, certificates to create, 5th grade promotion to run, one more concert to put on, etc. etc. etc.  The end of the school year always becomes a mad dash to the finish to try and squeeze everything in.

One of the best parts, though, is that the beginning of May also brings Teacher Appreciation Week.  This is a fantastic time around my school, as the PTA comes up with a lot of very thoughtful ways to show how much they appreciate the teachers in our building.  Usually we have lunch provided (and sometimes breakfast) most of the week, a few odds and ends that show up in our mailboxes, and the occasional note from a student or several.  These are all fantastic ways to re-energize to the end of the school year.

It's always good to feel appreciated.  Especially at the end of state-mandated testing (which may prove to be the death of me).

On top of the Teacher Appreciation activities at individual schools around the country, TeachersPayTeachers is offering a site-wide sale!  This is always a good thing.  On top of their discount, I will be offering every item in my store at a 20% discount.  That means you can get anything in my store for a combined total of 28% off!

What could be better than that?

Well, in celebration of a milestone for me (I just checked, and I have 40 products available!), I am going to offer an extra day of sale immediately following the TpT sale.  The official site-wide sale will run May 5-6.  My sale will by May 7, and will be a 20% off sale on the entire store.

I highly recommend if you've been looking for Boomwhacker activities that you check out my Boomwhacker Bundle, this will be a fantastic chance to get it at a great price.  Also, if you purchase it now and I update it to include more in the future, you'll get all of the new material for FREE!

I don't know about you, but I like free.

Ok, that's enough of the sales pitch.  I hope you have a fantastic conclusion to your school year, and I'll be back with actual educational writing soon!

It's the little things...

I just spent about 15 minutes making a set of diagrams that I hope will solve one of my most annoying general music problems.  All they are is a layout of the bars for my Orff instruments. One has blank bars, one has all the bars labeled for C major, one is labeled for G major, one is labeled for F major, and the last is set up for C major pentatonic.

I don't know about you, but time lost explaining which bars go where is one of the most annoying aspects of my job.  Never mind that we talk about the musical alphabet.  Never mind that the bars are obviously sized to go in order largest to smallest.  Never mind that the layout of the bars is logical and visually obvious.

Asking students to use their powers of observation and problem-solve is sometimes just too much.

And I sigh heavily.

I don't know why it has taken me so long to think of providing a clear visual of each particular Orff bar set up that we use.



Thankfully, they are in my TeacherspayTeachers store now and ready to use.

 

Tada!

My first thought is the obvious - post this on the Interactive Whiteboard when having students change the bar configuration.  No surprise there.  My second thought is to use them to discuss scales and key signatures.  Also no surprise.  Third, these might come in handy for a class that is too big to have everyone on an instrument.  The third grade at my school is definitely the largest, and to get them all on an instrument would be a challenge (except we're almost exclusively doing recorders now). Having kids use their fingers to find the bars on a printout of the instrument is almost as good as playing if it comes to that.

Another thought is to have students fill in the blank bars as an assessment.  Can they remember what every bar is?  Can they label just the bars that are needed in a one-octave C Major scale?  Can they remember what bars to remove to do a C Major Pentatonic scale?  Can they remember what bar changes to make a G or F Major Scale, and what note/bar becomes do?  There are quite a few assessment possibilities here.  I plan on using many of them, particularly with my fourth and fifth grade students.

The most amazing thing about these diagrams?  They're such a little thing - such an insignificant effort - but I think they will make a big difference in my classroom.  At least I hope they will help alleviate one of the most annoying things that happens in my room.

Hopefully you'll find these useful!  Good luck, and we're in the home stretch of the school year!

Why I don't agree with standardized testing as THE TOOL for evaluation.

Today was a first for me.

Not that I did anything different in my morning routine, or that I did anything out of the ordinary when I got to my classroom.  The first was much more subtle and surprising.

I agreed with a news article from Texas regarding education.

What?  Is that possible?  How can it be?

No, really.  I have never before read an article about education out of Texas without feeling like it held a deeply flawed view, or perhaps was promoting some sort of twisted version of how school should be.

But today I read an article about Pearson and their stranglehold on the current educational climate in the US.  Not only that, but how they have gone out of their way to discredit those who find fault with their standardized testing products.  In particular, the article is about the efforts of Dr. Walter Stroup, and his testimony before the Texas State Legislature.

Here's the link to the article: http://www.texasobserver.org/walter-stroup-standardized-testing-pearson/.

If you'd like the summary, essentially it goes like this:  Pearson's tests are highly accurate, but not at measuring student learning or student growth.  Instead, the tests are highly accurate at measuring a student's ability to take a test.  And for this finding, Pearson has largely discredited a tenured UT professor and seems to be doing what they can to end his career.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, in that the current educational climate reflects a belief that what schools need is more testing, not more instruction of higher caliber.  I teach in a school system that had to conduct a system-wide infrastructure test that lasted roughly two weeks in January just to see if the computer resources in the county could handle the load from state testing.  In short, it worked, but just barely.  Students were kicked out of test sessions because of computer issues left and right.  Teachers had to scramble to keep things running.  Essentially the system only worked if enough people could frantically keep the plates spinning to avoid everything crashing down on them.

This took two weeks.  State testing will last another 3-4 weeks starting next month.  This means that the collective time spent just administering this test is growing.  To top it all off, this doesn't even touch the issue that many of the standards are flawed, or developmentally inappropriate, or just outright unrealistic.  Tell me why Kindergarteners are expected to know what had previously been taught in 1st grade.  Tell me why the term "Rigor" has come to mean "Difficult for the sake of difficulty."  Tell me at what point do teachers get to teach what they are supposed to teach.

In many ways, I count myself lucky.  I teach elementary music, which means that I do not have a standardized test to administer for my subject area.  In previous years this has led to an entirely ridiculous notion that in order to be taken seriously the arts must come up with some kind of test for ourselves.  Thankfully this year we have been allowed to use performance assessments based on rubrics and student performance of actual age-appropriate skills.

Hallelujah.

Is it too much to ask that educators be allowed to make educational policy?  And is it too much to ask that educators make that policy based on what is BEST for our students?  Best as in a truly appropriate educational decision is one that helps students learn, think, and grow?  I, for one, do not care what kind of money is in it for testing companies like Pearson.  Instead, I care for my students.  I care for my fellow educators.  I care for the families that see their children stressed out by high stakes testing at the ripe old age of eight.  Why should an eight year old child have to worry about performance on a standardized test?  How about instead they worry about learning the best approach to solving a math problem, or the type of reading they like best, or what instruments they want to learn to play, or how best to paint or draw, or what physical fitness really means.  How about they learn what happened at important moments in history, or where in Europe they can find Austria, or what kind of chemical mixture might cause an interesting reaction?

Who cares about standardized tests?

The companies that write them.

And the politicians who enforce them.

Hopefully those politicians can be shown the way of true education and meaningful learning and assessment before it's too late.

In the meantime, anybody want to make some music?

TeachersPayTeachers Sale Extended!

Good snowy morning!

Ok, I'll admit it, I am NOT thrilled about the snow that is currently falling outside.  Partly because I need clear part of my roof to avoid making the leak worse that I discovered during the last snow melt.  But mostly because we were just getting back to having everyone back into the routines of school.  Things were finally getting back to normal, projects were underway, learning was happening.... And now... more snow.

Sigh.

But there is a bright side to today.  TeachersPayTeachers has extended their Teachers Are Heroes sale another day.  They are offering up to 28% off sitewide for an extra day!

Thankfully, teachers are the kind of hero that doesn't wear tights.  Well, mostly.

For me, that means that you can snag absolutely everything in my store for 28% off using the discount code HEROES at checkout.  Want to save almost $3 on music education resources?  Try the Great Big Boomwhacker and Orff Collection!  Looking for some beginning band arrangments?  How about Chameleon or Kookaburra?  You could also go straight to my storefront and browse the items that are on sale for less than a dollar! 

So hopefully this TpT sale will help keep you warm on a snowy Winter's day.  And fingers are crossed that the snow stops soon and melts this afternoon and we're back on track tomorrow. (A teacher can hope, right?)