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Continued from What Your Students Will Remember, Part 1 Creating Lasting Memories One of the great boons (and perhaps, banes) of being a music teacher is that we teach a performing art, and the school year follows a rhythm determined by a schedule of seasonal performances. This was true of my teaching experience no matter […]
Off The Podium
Off The Podium: What Your Students Will Remember, Part 1
At some point early in my teaching career someone told me: They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. …or something like that. I don’t remember who said it or when, honestly. Someone might have quoted it at a faculty meeting, or as part of a motivational […]
Off The Podium: SphinxConnect 2020
This past weekend I attended the annual Sphinx conference in Detroit, Michigan: SphinxConnect 2020. This was my fifth year in a row attending “the epicenter for artists and leaders in diversity” and in the years since I first attended in 2016 I have seen it grow from a single continuous series of presentations for about […]
Off The Podium: How Great is the Pleasure
This lovely eighteenth century canon was a staple of my school choirs’ repertoires throughout my entire teaching career. I came across it in a songbook when I first started teaching at Blue Rock School in the early 1990s, and I believe I taught this to every choir I directed until I left teaching in 2014. […]
Off the Podium: Four Practices
When I read education articles or discussions of education practices on the internet, a theme that I constantly encounter is classroom management and discipline. Current trends in behavior modification theories and practices have promoted a widespread use of reward systems for social (as opposed to anti-social) behavior that is at odds with my own beliefs about education. In […]
Off The Podium: Wholehearted Attention
ChoralNet is delighted to welcome veteran music educator Walter Bitner to our roster of weekly bloggers. His posts will focus on music education, and choral music education in particular. We hope you will enjoy this new series, and invite you to post comments and reflections. Music teachers in school settings often feel a sense of […]