Practice Records: Motivation and Accountability, or a Waste of Paper?

The district I teach in requires all elementary students to turn in a monthly practice record. It’s a simplified version of a weekly practice record and progress report we used to use several years ago. I’ve had extremely mixed results and reactions from my students, and I’m guessing you may have experience the same thing.

Some students use the practice records exactly as they’re intended: Students keep truthful records of the number of minutes they’ve practiced, and the visualization of these numbers often motivates them to practice more. Many students totally blow off these practice records and have never turned one in. Other students are somewhere in the middle. I always get a kick out of seeing the practice records with outrageously high numbers turned in by students who can’t play their way out of a paper bag.

So what do we do about this? Do we let students get away with being dishonest (or maybe delusional!) about their report? Do we let students get away with not turning the sheets in every month?

By the way, I really like Ken’s concept of outcome based practice rather than time based. I plan to revise the practice record format and add a few questions at the bottom of the sheet, like “What did you accomplish this month?” and “What are your musical goals for next month?”

Copyright and Fair Use: My Two Cents

Music teachers have always debated about copyright and fair use issues. The blogosphere and recent podcasts have created new forums for this debate. Technology has certainly changed the framework of many copyright issues, but at its core, the debate continues.

My take on the whole thing involves a little of the golden rule, recognition of the law, a little hypocracy, and hopefully a lot of common sense.

It seems to me that there are a few principles which play into this issue.

Principle #1: Writers and publishers should profit from their work. I have no doubt we all understand that already.

Principle #2: Students will lose and destroy sheet music. I’ll never forget when one of my students brought me his music folder which his dog had peed all over. I very willingly replaced the whole thing, including the method book he had bought.

Principle #3: Teachers are caught in the middle. Our budgets sometimes don’t allow for frequent purchases of sheet music, yet we want to provide the best possible musical experience for our students. I also believe many of us sincerely want to support the writers and publishers whose music we enjoy.

With these principles in mind, here are a few of my own opinions about particular dilemmas.

Opinion #1: Sheet music purchases deserve a bigger percentage of our budget than we often allow. We are willing to spend $2,000 on a new instrument, but are we willing to spend $50 to buy a legal edition of a publication? We spend thousands more on band uniforms and dry cleaning, busses and hotels, instrument maintenance, but are we willing to spend money on our music? We wouldn’t shoplift reeds, valve oil, strings, or instruments from a music store, so why should we do effectively the same to publishers and writers?

Opinion #2: I recently heard a discussion about prodiving original scores to adjudicators at music festivals. One teacher felt it was unfair to expect teachers to pay the publisher again for copies of scores they had already purchased simply to provide originals to adjudicators. My feeling is that if the teacher has a high enough opinion of the work to use it as a festival selection or even a concert selection, the few extra dollars for legal scores are worth the price.

Opinion #3: Publishers need to come up with some sort of provision for teachers to distribute sheet music. This is where things get tricky, of course. Consider the format of various classroom publications: You’ve probably heard of “blackline masters” and “reproducibles.” Publishers of curriculum recognize that classroom teachers will need to photocopy the material, and it’s not cost effective to sell sets of 30-40 sheets of each page for students’ use. What about some sort of equivalent for sheet music?

What do you think? Does anyone here have experience with getting permission to make photocopies? Do you buy the required extra scores and parts when necessary? I don’t expect anyone here to confess to copying huge volumes of music, but what are your thoughts and practices?

Curriculum for Jazz Saxophone

After a number of years of experimentation and revision, this is the sequence of books and materials I use with my jazz saxophone students.

Essential Elements for Jazz by Mike Steinel*. This book provides an excellent transition from traditional music into jazz. It’s presented in typical method book format, with lots of short exercises and clear definitions of new concepts. Emphasis is on jazz articulation and swing style. It has some brief improvisation excercises, but not so much as to intimidate young players. There are brief biographies of important jazz players like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker, and some discussion of different forms of jazz (swing, bebop, fusion, etc.).

Jazz Conception for Saxophone by Lennie Niehaus. This series of books is a great next step. The first section of each book is made up one-page exercises which help the student master jazz articulation, rhythm and phrasing. The second section of each book has 10 etudes which resemble bebop solo transcriptions. There is no explanatory material other than a brief preface, so a student would need a good jazz playing teacher to model the style.

How to Play Jazz and Improvise: Vol. 1 in Jamey Aebersold’s Play Along series. This is great entry level material with simple chord progressions and moderate tempos. Some improvisation teachers feel this material caters only to left brain thinkers and is overly academic in its approach. However, I’ve felt that a good teacher can balance that by keeping the lessons fun, with plenty of positive reinforcement.

Maiden Voyage: Vol. 54 in Jamey Aebersold’s Play Along series. A good next step for young improvisation students. I like that it uses real tunes, not artificial exercises. I’ve been playing the original recordings for my students to introduce them to the important jazz artists.

Charlie Parker Omnibook. Call me crazy, but it’s taken me a while to accept the fact that it’s pretty futile to attempt these solo transcriptions until until a sax student has had plenty of experience with easier material like the Niehaus books. Just be sure to buy only the Eb edition. The Bb edition might be okay for trumpet players, but it would be totally unrealistic to have a saxophonist play from the Bb edition.

*Mike Steinel was one of my professors at the University of North Texas, where he continues to teach. He has also written Building a Jazz Vocabulary which I would definitely recommend for experienced improvisation students who are capable of dealing with more advanced music theory concepts.