Change happens. Students move, graduate, or are abducted by aliens. Whatever the reason, at some point you’re going to need some students to switch to tuba.
Building Community with Your Holiday Concert
We wanted to do something special for last year’s December concert. Among our goals was to increase attendance by attracting some new audience members.
When Classroom Management Goes to the Dogs
Nobody lands in a career teaching music on accident. At least nobody I know. You don’t sign on to wrangle a squawking flock of beginner clarinetists without a deeply held desire to help them learn and grow.
Music Performance Tips from a Dog: Stage Fright
If you’ve ever taught middle school students, you know what a truly unique challenge they can be. Opinionated, smelly, a little wild in the eyes .
Summertime Band Instrument Repair and Storage
School’s out and it’s time to look at which instruments need repair. Some of the key things that need to happen with instruments over the summer are:
Instrument cleaning (I recommend ultrasonic cleaning whenever possible) Cases vacuumed and cleaned Mouthpieces washed and inspected for damageToday I’d like to offer some tips, from my perspective at the repair bench, to help you both correctly store instruments over the summer and be ready for the back-to-school season which sneaks up on us so fast.
Help Your Students Practice This Summer
It’s an unspoken rule of music education that students don’t practice over summer break. As teachers know, the appeal of Netflix and naps can easily get in the way of productivity (be honest, you haven’t organized your library of sheet music or large instrument closet), but we also know how important it is that students do something on their instruments over the summer so that the long break doesn’t undo all the work that happened during the school year.
Music Practice Tips from a Dog
Sometimes it takes looking at something in a different way to truly understand it. More than a decade of private tuba lessons, symphony concerts, brass quintet rehearsals, and a music degree taught me a lot about music.
Help Music Students Discover Critical Thinking
We live in a time where the tide is turning. Instead of giving everyone a trophy, we’re beginning to teach students how best to deal with both the ups AND downs of life.
3 Exercises for Improving Intonation with Drones
Everyone who plays a wind instrument can probably remember a teacher saying, “Just work on long tones.” It’s easy for a teacher to see the advantages of building range, strengthening endurance, and developing tone quality with one exercise.
A Band Director’s Guide to Teaching Choir
In an ever-shifting job market, the ability to teach both band and choir has become a necessity for many music educators.