Band

 Today was an interesting day. I subbed in the high school music room, the same place I subbed on Monday. This music director is brand new to the school, he just started but still needs to teach at his old school through the end of this week, hence all the subs for this week. His wife has been subbing for him but she couldn't do it today which is why I was there. 

They have their day set up in block periods, class periods are 1.5h. Classes are an hour and a half long which is a super long time for a music lesson, which feel even longer when you run out of things to do. That happened quite a bit because this new director is still trying to figure out where the students' skill levels are.

I only had three students to teach for the whole day. The first was a percussion lesson, however she was late to class because she had an appointment. I didn't find this out until halfway through her lesson because she didn't let anybody know she would be gone. One of the other teachers poked his head in to let me know that that is probably what happened to her. Eventually she showed up and we muddled through the percussion lesson. It went fine. She practiced putting her foot hand and other hand together while playing different rhythms. This is a very challenging task and it seemed like she made progress through the lesson. 

After that I taught a piano lesson which went better than the piano lesson from Monday. This student had more music background so she was able to pick up on the skills quicker. The teacher had left more for her to work on, which helped, but the lesson still felt very long for both of us. 

After that was chapel followed by lunch time and then my last lesson of the day. This was a guitar lesson, another class I've never had to teach before, but again we muddled through and it seemed like he made progress. He said this was only his second guitar lesson and the first lesson he had been by himself with a non music teacher supervising, so he didn't know how lessons were supposed to go normally. I told him his third lesson would be the best yet since it would be with his actual director! This student too was more skilled in music than the director had anticipated, so we finished everything he was supposed to do in about 15 minutes. 

Yikes. Time to improvise. Pretty tricky to do when you don't have any guitar experience. The teacher had left a bunch of guitar music books so we flipped through them and let him sight read and practice picking the notes. The last few minutes of class, the student and I chatted about music and discovered that both of us play the tuba. 

Overall an interesting experience I'm glad I had, but not one I would like to do every day. I'm looking forward to being back in 5th grade tomorrow!