Last week I finally watched Whiplash; as a student of jazz I was kind of nervous to see it at all, especially given the general reaction in the jazz education community.
It's been an interesting year. I realize New Year's has already come and gone, but I thought it'd be worth writing some last 2009ish thoughts anyway, just for posterity. Here are some of the things I remember most.
This afternoon Jamie and I co-directed another session of the Denton Bible kindergarten choir. We took the kids "Christmas caroling" around various empty classrooms as a way of teaching them some new Christmas songs without losing track of their attention spans…turned out to be a great way to keep them on task. We've also been teaching them about various kinds of musical opposites: fast/slow, loud/soft, notes/rests, and so forth. I don't really remember what kinds of concepts I was learning at that age, but they seem to be getting it pretty well.
My substitute teaching work has been pretty lucky so far; the majority of it has been music-related, which means at the very least that I know the subject (if not the kids). On Friday I was teaching trombone sectionals for sixth graders...they had literally been playing for eight months, if that. When one of them asked how long I had been playing, we discovered together that my trombone experience extended his entire life.