One of the great things about being a writer for Teaching Music is that I get a chance to talk to some great teachers that normally I would never meet or probably even hear of.  This month in preparation for a piece coming out in the April issue I got to meet Steve Park, an Adjunct Horn Professor at Utah State University.  The topic was on trumpet stuff (you'll just have to read the piece in the magazine if you are curious) but along the way he gave me some great tips for helping a few of my floundering trumpet and horn students.  Sometimes it just takes a different point of view to help you see a new way to teach something and teaching it in that new way can make all the difference.  

Tales From The Podium

It’s been well over a year since I last did a real round up of the current crop of digital audio recorders and there have been a lot of changes. One of the recorders that many of my collegues swore by (The M-Audio MicroTrak 2) got discontinued, and the company got out of the portable digital audio recording business completely. At the same time Olympus, a long time maker of digital voice recorders has come out with a model that (at least in my tests) seemed to do very well as a music/field recording device. The old list was kind of long and complicated so this year I am scaling back to focus on the best of the best in the world of portable digital audio recorders.  Read on to find out who made the cut.

Tales From The Podium

I asked a few music teaching friends to write down what the biggest challenges to their music teaching are.

Here is a smattering of the results.

Andrea Wilborn

Administrators who want a good and strong music education department, but have no clue how to achieve it.
Grade level teachers who want their class to perform something special for a program, but expect the music teacher to do all the work. (when you only see that class once a week for 45 minutes)
Parents who bring their child to school for an after school program, then leaves.
Parents who pick up their children late all the time. (30 minutes to 1 hour)
Hearing a child say, they can't practice at home because someone is looking at TV and they don't want to hear that noise.
Students who think that choir consist of singing nothing but songs they hear on the radio or their CD's.

Music Teachers 911

I would like to invite all music teachers to explore the fantastic opportunities through a great organization called the Music Teachers National Association Foundation Fund. The MTNA FOUNDATION FUND is a support program that enables music teachers to pursue continuing education opportunities, provides awards for student competitions and assists organizations in funding educational and community outreach programs. for more information, here is their contact information. 441 Vine St., Ste. 3100, Cincinnati, OH 45202 Phone (888) 512-5278 Website http://www.mtnafoundation.org You can also become a facebook fan at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Music-Teachers-National-Association-Foundation-Fund/83300906832 good gigging! Larry Marra musicteachers911.com

Music Teachers 911