Licenses and food: not (necessarily) mutually exclusive

When all you've got paying the bills is a minimum-wage job, $50 can seem like a lot of money, especially in that awkward time after rent and before your first paycheck of the month. And, when you've got some distance from college and stopped regularly writing checks with four or five digits in the "pain box," money gets a whole new scale and scope. The "NASA effect" no longer applies (that is to say, "Oh, we're spending a billion dollars already; what's another million?") and the several hundred dollars you end up spending on a license is no longer dwarfed by tuition.

I'll choose to believe that the licensing institutions' hands are tied when it comes to charging teachers $50 here for fingerprinting and $50 there for background checks and, the one that I understand the least: $30 for mailing $2 worth of paper, envelopes, and postage for an out-of-state license packet that is free and online for in-state graduates. I have to choose to believe that their hands are tied because otherwise, it starts looking like some kind of xenophobic scheme, and this blogger becomes rather cynical. Not to mention that another state requires a full-blown license (as in, not a typical starter, 3-year provisional license that many states use for new teachers) before they ask for over $200 plus other, hidden, miscellaneous expenses. I choose to believe that that one happened because of cautious legislators.

So, what's the moral to this story?

Plan your finances.

I'll say again: Plan. Your. Finances. Dave Ramsey, creator of the Seven Baby Steps, has a practitioner of those steps build a couple of financial "buffers" for unforeseen expenses. First, a person gathers $1000 for an "emergency fund," which covers medical bills, car repairs, and other things of that sort. Second, he has a person pay off existing debt, and third, he builds a second buffer of 3 to 6 month's of living expenses.

I would instead amend this so that there is a step one-and-a-half: build a $500 to $1000 buffer for licenses and interviews. That way, when you find out that you're going to have to shell out another $100 for gas to get to an interview 8 hours away (plus $60 for a hotel, if you want to be able to think during the interview), you won't have to give up meals for the next three weeks.

Other things you might not know about getting a teaching license:

• Some states require fingerprinting, and that can take 6 or more weeks for law enforcement to process. After that, my home state says it will take another three-or-so weeks to process the application itself.
• Moral: Start early. Very early.

• Most states I've seen have different (and usually more expensive) rules for people who graduated in another state. These are called out-of-state or provisional licenses, and they may valid for a shorter period of time, during which a person may have to take other classes or complete other requirements.
• Moral: Do your homework, and do it early.

• This also applies to job applications: most places will not take your word that you graduated with these classes, that student teaching, and those grades; they want official transcripts. In fact, I think that every place to which I've applied for anything has wanted an official transcript. They also can take some time to actually get to the people who need them; figure a day or so for the request to go through, a day or so to get processed at your institution, and several days for USPS to their thing. Note: these are business days, between 9 and 5, when the Registrar isn't busy with a hundred other things.
• Moral: Get a bunch. Get more than you need. Seriously. Probably 20. Maybe more, depending on how many schools you apply to. If anything, they stay good (as far as I know?), so keep the extras filed away in case you need more later on. You can just drop the envelope you received it in along with everything else you're mailing to your myriad different schools.

Happy hunting,

-Greg

P.S.: In other news, the officer who fingerprinted me knew has personally met and chatted with Bob Crane, and personally knows the D.P. for the old Hawaii Five-Oh series.

7 Interview Tips

Wahoo! I'm back from a year-long sleeping spell with a promise not to make any more promises on this blog, especially about "going to post something soon." Whoops.

So, I've got an interview! Rock on! Not my first interview ever (Third ever, maybe? Fourth?), but my first music teacher job interview (maybe second if you count summer band, but that was sort of already a done deal). A little advice:

1. Don't eat an entire pizza right before going to bed. This is a good piece of advice in general, but it's really not doing me much good right now.
2. Do relax before-hand. Right now, I've got about 1 hour before breakfast ends, 2 hours before check-out, and 4 hours before the interview itself. I'm thinking a good long walk and some fresh fruit from the local supermarket will do the trick.
3. Do familiarize yourself with the town. Don't go driving around in the dead of night. I was waiting for my pizza and wanted to find the school, but I did feel like kind of a creep; History Channel in my hotel room probably would have been a better option.
4. Speaking of hotels, don't get up mega-early, drive 6 hours straight, and then interview. Get a hotel room for the night before, relax, swim if you can, and don't eat an entire pizza. I feel like I made most of the right decisions in this one.
5. Do take the easy route to get there and the quick route to come back. I tried taking the quick route to get there and got lost, found my way only to discover a bridge out, got lost again, got found again, and got there an hour-and-some late. Fortunately, because of #4, I still had about 18 hours to burn before I was actually late.
6. Do choose good music. As a music-teacher-to-be, you know how powerful a good soundtrack is, so choose tunes to get you in the right mood. If you want, its fun to experiment by putting on different songs for each of the cities you drive through.
7. Don't worry. [Do] Be happy. No interview is the end of the world, and no job is the "only" job. If they like you, awesome; if they don't, just take it for the experience of interviewing and move on. No biggie.

Anyway, time to catch some of that breakfast. Later!

-Greg

P.S.: Do the kids say "no biggie" anymore?

Day Off

Seeing as today is a holiday and there is no school, the start of my student teaching (for which I am beyond excited!) is delayed a day, and I'm finding myself with a day off. So, teachers out there, what do you do on your days off?

In other news, I'm starting student teaching tomorrow and could not be more excited. I'll be chronicling the experience as best I can here, and hope that it provides some insight for pre-teachers and for teachers hosting their own student teachers.

In other other news, I still plan on actually writing the series I announced before. I've got outlines just waiting to be filled out.

-Greg

Summer and the Start of a Series

Greeting to all, and a belated happy start to the school year!

The past several months found me with another year teaching beginning summer band, which was by far my summer's highlight. I had the rowdiest group of trombones I've ever had, but they did great and learned a lot. I'll tell more tales as time wears on.

For the time being, I want to announce a series of posts for people either looking at becoming music education majors or early on in their undergrad. Topics include:

• Why the piano is important
• What to expect (and not to expect) in your first couple years
• How to stuff 30 hours into a 24-hour day (kind of)
• Why instrumentalists should learn how to sing and vocalists should learn how to play
• How to pass Music Theory I and why that's the hardest class you might take

'Til then,
-Greg

Off the Cliff

I've said before that coming into a vacation can be like those moments in IMAX movies where they have a helicopter going over a cliff - at first, there's ground rushing underneath you, but then when it goes over the edge, "FOOSH!" You're flying, the panorama stretches out before you, and there's hundreds of feet of nothing below you.

Finals finished several weeks ago, and I'm finally getting over the feeling of having nothing beneath my feet. Thankfully, I've survived this one pretty well; there have been times in the past where, in going over the cliff, I tripped and faceplanted in the scenery below, so to speak, but I've had to hit the ground running this time for a number of reasons.

First, housing has been keeping me on my toes; due to circumstances out of my control, I found myself in the situation of having five days to find a place to live for the next 12+ months (this was during finals week, by the way), but because I put out so many feelers, I've become somewhat of a real estate agent for other people in my situation. Since everyone I'm working with is a friend, or at least a good acquantence, it's rewarding to know that good people are getting good prices for good housing and good roommates.

Second, reentry into real life has been mitigated by the fact that I'm working three jobs this summer. More on this in another post.

Finally, I'm living on my own now! I've got a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood, and even having to cook for one's self keeps a person connected to reality and unable to just slip into a post-finals catharsis.

So, I'm back in the game, and I've already got a bunch of posts that I'm excited to post and share with the community. Major congradulations to this year's graduates, sure to do great things in their futures; I'm honored to know you all.

'Til next time,
-Greg

I know college kids need energy...

I just finished a recording session, number 5 out of 6 for the band this year, and as I was walking back to my dorm, I happened to see something through someone's window. The scene was this: two guys, sitting at their respective desks, looking like they were in for a long night of paper-writing or study. One guy is on his computer, and the other is (and I am not making this up) drinking honey out of the bottle.

Well, that's one way to pull an all-nighter without caffeine.

Second-Graders, Teachers, and Rock Bands

I picked this up on the ASCD SmartBrief today - an article on second-grade classrooms using Twitter. Two thoughts jumped into my head right away: first, my teachers always encouraged us to "write long." I know that I may tend to do this too much in my blog posts, but have you ever tried limiting an idea or two to 140 characters? It's tough! Second, I'll bet you dinner that if those kids thought Twitter was "cool" or "hip" to begin with, they sure don't now. Imagine this scenario:

Guy: I've been working out...
Girl: Ooh!
Guy: ... for gym class.
Girl: Oh...

Magically, the mention of class, a teacher, or an adult makes the once-cool action remarkably less so, and I wonder if rock band classes have the same effect. I know that this isn't always the case - in high school, we loved when our director would jam with us after school - but showing kids that adults are okay with the internet almost seems like the best way to turn kids off from the idea.

Happy weekend,
-Greg

Reflection in Music Engineering

I have about a month left to finish my work on Concordia's Beat, which, now that everyone's been recorded, involves the mixing and mastering all 14 groups. I've already made seven pretty good rough mixes, and hopefully, the patch bay I installed this weekend will help with the other half.

As part of this, I went and revisited some old mixes I had made as I was first recording these tracks and was surprised at how much I had learned in just these last couple months. I was using compressors and limiters in very strange ways, I wasn't using the better of the plugins we have, I was cranking the gain in odd places, and overall, I was complicating the overall work flow. Not surprisingly, simplifying that made for an overall better sound - punchier and more natural.

I've also been happily using an old Aphex Aural Exciter that the project supervisor found at a local music store for cheap. The difference in my mixes when I use it right is like listening to a group live or with my coat over my head. I'll have to post some before-and-after demos some time.

'Til then,
-Greg

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