A Bloggable Moment: Biggest Compliment EVER!!!!

I just finished teaching my Music Theory 1/Ap Music Theory class (that’s right I have both levels in the same class- talk about differentiating instruction!) there are 30 students, and since I had to “convince” my school to offer the class (they won’t open a section with less than 25 students) I had to “take all comers” meaning that there were about 10 students interested in AP, but that is not enough to make a class…

Anyway, on to the compliment…

As you can imagine, I have a WIDE variety of students in this class, but I am basically teaching EVERYONE AP (not “dumbing it down”) there are some VERY CHALLENGING STUDENTS in the class- ones that really couldn’t care less about the finer points of theory…

After class today- one of these “challenging” students came up to me and said:  ”You know, you are like that teacher in the movie Dangerous Minds- you are not happy until everyone learns even us dumb kids” I looked him straight in the eye (tearing up a bit) and thanked him.  I told him that that is one of the biggest compliments I could EVER get as a teacher.  He just looked at me like I had two heads.

What a great day!!!!!!!!!

Jemsite: It’s NOT only Rock n’ Roll (and I like it!)

Recently I was contacted by the good people over at Jemsite to do an electronic interview.  After checking out their site, I was really impressed!  If you haven’t seen the site yet, you should check it out- they are branching out into music education and (correctly, in my opinion) realizing that music education is changing and growing, crossing boundaries and blurring the lines with popular music.

It is exactly this type of partnership and teamwork that we need as we transform our classrooms to reflect the needed changes for the 21st Century. Students today are interested in more than just the traditional music education delivery model, and as I have said in my posts many times before, we MUST reach the approximately 80% of students walking around our school hallways who are NOT in our music classroom!

What an opportunity to connect and share resources- A HUGE name in guitars like Ibanez certainly commands attention from today’s non-traditional music student seeking to make choices about how to express themselves musically.  How COOL is it that they recognize the importance of what we educators do on a daily basis and want to support our efforts?  This type of partnership is CRITICAL in the coming years as we change the way we view music education!