Thanks for following this link. If you are a high school music teacher this is for you. We are asked to do so much and all the while keep to our most important job of helping students to learn music. I can't remember the last time I saw a history class or a forth grade class march through town with people shouting questions at them. That way they could publicly judge them the way they do us. Or how about his one, Sally's not crazy about eight grade so she's signing out.
We need to somehow balance strong educational values with fun and joy that keeps our students coming back.
With that in mind I know my follow HS Band Directors are a special lot of highly motivated, talented, and overworked professionals. I used to think I could do everything myself with no help. I was wrong. What if I gave you this curriculum and you just added to it instead of starting from scratch. We all have specialties. If you're a percussionist why not use my curriculum and write another one just for percussion. You see where this is going. I'm not saying that this work is the best but it's a start. With some cleaning by a few and some additions we could create a real working curriculum that's more than just file cabinet filler.We could create an instrument specific curriculum that feeds into a guide such as this.
I look to you because you're not the pencil pushing bureaucrats that create things which have no relevance to the real world of music performance. Most of you are professional musicians that know exactly what gets you a called back. I'm not saying that we need to create a curriculum that makes every student a professional musician, but I heard a statistic that 80% of high school musicians never play again after graduation. I think that's due to people teaching to the concert or to regional auditions. I'm looking for people interested in teaching students to read music not just teaching the pieces they need for a concert or certain scales for an audition. If you would like to contribute feel free to contact me. I offer no credit hours, no money, no college credits. In the end we will all put our names on an evolving document that works for kids that only professionals like us know how to do. Hey if weren't any good at this we would have become administrators by now.
best wishes,