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 […]
Walter Bitner
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 […]