Road trip
I was up at the lovely hour of 4 am yesterday in order to go to the NYSSMA (NY State School Music Association) winter convention. Basically, it's a 3 day convention for NY music teachers filled with workshops, vendors, etc .... I've wanted to go forever - my old school district wouldn't spend the $ for me to go, and after getting turned down year after year, I just never bothered asking when I switched to Owego. The elementary band director wanted to go this year, and the original plan was for the other elementary band director to go but he never followed through with the needed paperwork. So I put my paperwork in just to see what happened and I got to go!
Despite the early hour and 3 hour drive in Rochester rush hour traffic, we had a great time. There were 4 workshop session, I attended 3 dealing with teaching multicultural music (which is part of my "professional growth plan", the plan we have for keeping teachers trained in all the latest up to date stuff), and I ditched the fourth MC session to attend a workshop on chorus choreography. The multicultural stuff was really good - it was actually geared more towards middle and high school but I got enough information to be able to adapt lessons and resources for my kiddos. I learned about using multicultural music to teach against prejudice (that was cool), the next session gave sample lessons in aboriginal music/Irish music/african music. The third session dealt exclusively with Native American music - not traditional drum circle stuff but the popular music that is listed to on reservations and combines traditional aspects with more mainstream features (such as rock or hip hop). It was really neat.
The choral choreography workshop was also a lot of fun and I got a lot of good ideas to bring back and use with the kids.
It made for a long day, but definately worth the degree of exhaustion I'd dealing with this morning. Today I have several groups performing at the music booster's Holiday Craft Fair, but should be done by 12:30 and have plans to do some major crashing this afternoon. Tomorrow is the church Christmas pageant. No breaks this weekend. Sigh ... I'll be running full tilt until the kid's Christmas concert on the 17th.