On my way to work today I ran into the baseball coach at my school. His son plays trombone in the bands where I teach, and he was in attendance at the spring concert last night. “How come you never have a losing season?” he asked with a smile.
What does it mean to say a school is making “adequate yearly progress”? What is the value of a standardized test that produces an aggregate score for a group of students in one school and has it compared in the local newspaper against scores from another? How does student performance on a standardized exam relate to future vocational aspirations? […]
I am not one to make a new year’s resolution – the idea of self-regulation only once every 365 days is somewhat unsettling. If you think that needs to happen only once every 8,760 hours, you might have some personal issues that no amount of blogging can ever fix – sorry to drop the hammer, just a personal view. That […]
Four very short weeks ago, the band program at Mercer took a big leap as we started our year with a unit on chamber music that culminated in our Fall Chamber Recital. Over twenty different selections were presented in the recital ranging from Handel, Haydn, and Mozart to Sousa, and John Williams. You can read a full copy of the […]
This week I began researching interpretation and feeling as part of my work at Kent State. At first glance, they seemed unrelated. However, the more I began reading perspectives of different composers and conductors, my conclusion is that great interpretation does not just recreate the composer’s intent but rather conveys feelings that the composer intended. The sources abounded including Mark […]
