End.

Hello from the same place where I was when I started this blog - the lovely world of unemployment. Well, that was a moderately pessimistic way to start this post. Anyway here's the scoop. 

Monday was the last day with the kids.  I went to school for just a few hours on Tuesday to sign out and then I went back to my old home school (from when I was doing the part-time gig) to return a book and say hi to my old friends. After student teaching was over, I was really emotional - maybe because it was the end of my first time really teaching in a school and maybe because I had just conducted my first concert which made me realize that teaching was what I was meant to do and I was good at it... Regardless, I knew that there was a chance I'd be emotional on Monday saying bye to the kids but I really wasn't; I was more sad about leaving the colleagues I had grown so close to and about the fact that I don't know where I'm teaching next year. 

I have a few leads about what jobs will be open in the future but only have 1 active application out at the moment. I've had 3 interviews so far and from what I've heard, most districts won't start interviewing again until the middle/end of July. Guess what else is happening in the middle/end of July? My wedding and honeymoon! Sigh/yay. I've had to put in the final paragraph of my cover letter that I'm unavailable for contact between July 20 and 29th and I really hope that it doesn't deter employers from calling me. If not, maybe I can sue for discrimination? I'll work on it. 

I guess I should have some kind of summary of how I felt this year of teaching and what I've learned. Well I already did that kind of thing for my general music gig and I feel like I've already been keeping up with what I've learned in the band gig, but here goes. Alls I really knows is I'm a good teacher and I want nothing else in the world than to teach. I also stand by the fact that if you have good rapport with the kids and stay true to your personality at any age level they will work with you.  Being real with kids helps them achieve more so why not be yourself? Yeah I guess those are my nuggets of wisdom from junior high band. 

Here's hoping I'll report back soon with a job.

Blah

Two posts in one week? Crazy, I know. SPOILERS: If you want to know the theme of this blog, just take a sec and look at the tags at the bottom. 

Yeah.

I've been thinking a lot about what the future holds and why it's so upsetting to me that I might not have a job next year.  I ended my last post with this semi-optimistic statement - "But at least my fiance has a job and at least I can leave this position knowing that I did a good job in the time I was there."  Well I think that the problem with that statement is that I can't just leave my current position with the confidence and knowledge that comes with being told my multiple people that you do a good job. (That last sentence sounded cocky. Whatever.) I think it's in the human condition to want to be better and to improve as much as possible. If I was not "in to" teaching, hated it, or was doing a bad job then maybe I wouldn't get sick at the thought of not teaching. However I know I'm pretty good at teaching and this year has shown me that I was meant to teach.  The money stuff will sort itself out because based on the budget my fiance and I did, we can survive on his salary alone.  That's great for the future if I want to stay home with kids (way down the road) or in case something happens and I can't work, but right now I actually want to work.  It's really hard to stay positive and keep my situation in perspective with the "everything happens for a reason attitude" that I usually have but I have to stay focused on the day-to-day things I can control such as finishing writing my class final and learning to use a Scantron machine (which I'm actually really excited about). Still...about once a day I get a terrible sinking feeling that I'll be unemployed which doesn't help mitigate the stresses of moving and getting married. This is going to sound either nerdy or lame or whatever, but all I've ever wanted to do - minus when I was a in elementary school and wanted to be a comedian - is teach music.  Teaching music is my dream job.  Even on the worst days when the kids are being difficult, I still end that class knowing that this is what I want to do.  I think the other thing that is frustrating is that many job interviews might not happen until July (please...not during my honeymoon pleeeeeease) so there's no telling when this poopy feeling will end.  

So that's where I'm at - just trying to stay above the blah feeling.  

An update

Well, May came and went and I didn't blog. I think about blogging...then I don't because nothing interesting is going on. I guess now that it's June and my year is drawing to a close, I may as well sum up what's been going on. We just had a pops concert that was organized mostly by the orchestra teacher which included the 2 jazz bands and some members of the chorus.  It was a great concert and lots of fun - I got to play snare drum and hi-hat for a couple of the orchestra pieces! I also co-arranged the grand finale (Gangnam Style) with the orchestra teacher which featured the jazz bands, orchestra, a Korean student doing the rap, and dancers! 

After the concert back in April, I began a strange new journey into figuring out what the heck to teach the kids for the rest of the year. Being that this is the first year the 8th and 9th grade band kids are separated and being taught by 2 people, I got to figure out how much of the composition project that the other teacher traditionally does I would use and how much I would come up with on my own. I spent about 2 weeks doing sight reading and teaching the kids about phrase structure, doing improvisation exercises, working on ear training (more on that in a later post), one listening assignment, and a little theory as we went for the kids to understand the details of what I was teaching a little better.  After that I decided I wanted to teach them about compositional techniques such as theme and variation and assigned a theme and variation assignment - to write 2 variations on Hot Cross Buns.  I had a lot of fun writing the rubric for the composition assignment because that really forced me to realize my end goals for the students. Probably in real life, you're supposed to come up with firm objectives and then do the rubric, but it was sort of a hand-in-hand thing. I mean, I knew that the kids needed to have an understanding of how to write a manuscript so I borrowed (and was sure to credit) the 9th grade band director's rubric about correct number of beats per measure, if the key, clef, and time signature were in the correct order and were there, musical terms were spelled correctly, etc. I used that for 50/100 points then wrote the next 50 points of rubric.  It was hard for me to quantify "musical creativity" which was a main part of what I hoped the students would get out of the project so I came up with categories such as using more than 2 elements of variation for full points (changing rhythm, adding pitches, changing the time signature, altering the octave of the theme, adding in new sounds like clapping or trills) and making sure there was variation between variations.  So far as I'm grading the variations, all the kids have been getting good scores and some of them wrote great stuff! 

Besides the compositions, the students had etude testing (which is happening now) and also had a chamber group project.  That chamber project had another cool rubric that emphasized that a chamber group of any size needs to have communication, have well-thought out positioning, leaders, agree on style, basically all the stuff that college musicians still work on in chamber music. I hadn't conducted a full-group-reading-a-piece-type rehearsal in a long time until we were working on 3/8 and 6/8 this past week. Now I have to finish compiling the info for the written final and the review sheets and grade all the playing tests. Woooo! Busy busy push till the end of the year. 

It's bittersweet for sure that the end of the year is coming because I don't know if I'll have a job next year and real life approaches with rent, Internet, phone, TV, life insurance, health insurance, car payments, food, furniture, and all the other stuff that comes with moving out and on my own. And oh right, I'm getting married next month. But at least my fiance has a job and at least I can leave this position knowing that I did a good job in the time I was there.