Student Teaching Day 3

My Day
Today was the first day that the students were at school.  I went to a drug free assembly with them, and then observed all of the music classes for the day which included: Advanced Jazz Band, Beginning Jazz Band, Wind Ensemble, Symphonic Band and Percussion Ensemble.  In between classes and after school I looked through scores so that I could get some ideas of pieces I would like to conduct with the bands. 

Instrument techniques
-Brass players should be careful not to close or clench their teeth because it really hurts the tone they produce. 

General Instruction
-During jazz band the director was teaching staccato articulation and the way he described this was to "dit" the note.  He had the students say it and play it, and this idea of "dit" seemed to worked better than anything I have seen.
-When teaching improvisation to the jazz band students, the director said he uses the analogy of talking.  Just like a person has many words they can choose from to form a sentence, the jazz players have many sounds/rhythms/motives they can choose from to form their musical sentence. 
-During the band class the students were playing an Italian piece and to communicate and direct the style the teacher cheesed it up with Italianish analogies; the kids ate it up and it worked!

Quotes and Other Random Happenings
-I really like that in the music library the concert band pieces are organized by names of scores and the scores only.  This saves a lot of room and makes it easy to flip through all the literature.