Monday, March 21, 2016

Prepare to fail...

As the saying goes, if you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Time and time again I have experienced this, and hopefully (after 5 years of experience), I am starting to realize the truth in this statement.

Recently, during the 5th and 6th grade choir class, I have had several terrible rehearsals. While I can account these to student behavior, specifically the lack of an attention span, I have also noted a pattern in my own teaching. Usually, I will write down the order of songs to rehearse, but I will not plan exactly what to rehearse in each song. Halfway through a song, I may hear something that needs to be fixed, so we stop to fix the problem and then contine onward. At least, that is theoretically what should happen. However, with these students (and possibly older students - I don't want to experiment), their attention span goes out the window when I use what I call this "reactionary" technique. In other words, I am reacting to what is happening during the rehearsal, rather than planning for what should happen before the rehearsal even starts. Of course, this goes against all notions of good teaching, so I can't figure out why I keep falling into this pattern. Hopefully writing about it will reinforce the idea...

Rehearsals should not be "reactionary." They should be planned out ahead of time, knowing which issues need to be addressed and how to address them. "Winging it" is not a viable rehearsal option for any successful music teacher.

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