Picking up speed

Well, the President's holidays gave me a few days to work on my stuff. It's still a little slow going - having a toddler at home can impede things, somewhat. Yesterday, I was supposed to devote the entire day to school stuff. I basically woke up late, made breakfast, went back to sleep... and by the time I crawled out of bed again it was almost time to pick the little one up from daycare. And once he's home... well... you can forget about doing anything else.

Today was a little different. I made an appointment to meet with my string coach - so at least I got out of the house. We met at the school and started hashing through my skill-level structure. It was actually pretty productive, but more because of her than me. Not that I was being particularly sluggish - but we were going over the orchestra coach, and she's the resident string guru. I was trying to keep all of our ideas all nice an tidy on the computer, meanwhile she was scribbling things down at a fever pace. After only an hour and a half, she had to leave to go teach a lesson, and I was left with pages of handwritten notes.

Awesome.

We basically laid out levels 0-2, how to address posture and instrument position, how and when to introduce shifting, How to divide up the rhythmic concepts by levels (which was really my forte, I had already been doing the same thing for the band classes, and the concepts are pretty much the same.) It's weird, because I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel a little bit. It occurred to me while we were talking that these were the same issues that must have come up with people who were putting together beginning methods books. Still, the method books are meant for homogeneous classes, and we are specifically developing a process for mufti-level classes.

Throughout all of it, I had to keep reminding myself: keep it simple, keep it do-able.

My next goal will be to invent a student progress sheet. I'll do that tomorrow, if I don't end up repainting the front porch, that is.