This week, I went to San Antonio for the Texas Bandmasters Association convention. I attended some really good sessions and took a few notes on my iPhone. Without spending a lot of time to expand on these notes right now, I thought I would post them so maybe someone else can benefit from them. After the convention, I’ll sit down later and flesh them out a bit more. Here are the notes from Days 2 and 3.

• Meet with parents prior to testing 5th graders
• Parent orientation at beginning of year 4-6 weeks into school year
• Take a class period to discuss procedures
• Teach basic reading skills and introduce counting system early (8th notes asap)
• Open cases on the floor – Respect the instrument
• Take up headjoints and mouthpieces early. Ziplock bag with name, give it back after a couple of weeks when they know hand position
• Thumb touches the flute at 3-4 o’clock between fingers 4&5
• Thumb is perpendicular to flute
• Flute thumbnail is toward the ceiling
• Clarinet thumbnail pointing toward chin
• First finger (LH) is the key to playing the clarinet
• Clarinet LH thumb at 45 degree angle. Teach three positions.
  1. Hole only
  2. Hole and register key
  3. Register key only
• If they can’t talk with their embouchure, there’s too much bottom lip in their mouth
• Take in as much mouthpiece as you can without spreading the sound
• Flute gymnastics
• Suspend the flute, don’t hold it
• Flute vibrato // steady air, faster than steady air
• Saxophone vibrato with jaw // steady air, slower than steady
• Brass teach hand position second
• Don’t squeeze brass embouchure. If they get air only on mouthpiece, it’s okay. The key is that lips touch teeth
• “do not let the bottom lip get wet from the top lip”
• “make sure the bottom lip is standing tall”
• Wait on articulation until they can all produce characteristic sounds. Start with saying it. Then say it into mouthpiece. Then blow air without mouthpiece. Then blow air with mouthpiece. Finally add horns
• Have them tap shoulder instead of clapping. They feel it more, less coordination issues, can hear counting better
• Count in your head while you play
• Fingers in the air – show your brain
• Basic priorities for beginning band
  1. Characteristic tone
  2. Proper hand position
  3. Music reading skills
  4. Good work habits
  5. Good concentration skills
• If wrong notes/rhythms/articulations are enough reason to stop a band, so are tone quality problems
• Breathing: “HOW” (in) “TO” (out)
• Listen to individuals more. Even for short passages.
• That’s a good concert F, but I want a high definition version. Try again…

This week, I am in San Antonio for the Texas Bandmasters Association convention. I attended some really good sessions and took a few notes on my iPhone. Without spending a lot of time to expand on these notes right now, I thought I would post them so maybe someone else can benefit from them. After the convention, I’ll sit down later and flesh them out a bit more. Here’s Day 1.

• Raise your level of absurdity. If something doesn’t sound stupid, you won’t address it.
• Come up with a warmup rotation. Same concepts per day of week. Lip flexibility, scales, tone production, articulations, intervals/listening
• Same with journals. Music appreciation, rhythmic dictation, music/rhythm copying, free writing, theory exercises
• All bad behavior is fear-based. Fear creates bad behavior. Cultivate self-respect
• Make binder organization part of the lesson. Manage whatever is turned in or expected. Teach the value of why we expect these things.
• Shut up and teach. Don’t turn a 2-minute bullet point into a 20 minute lecture
• Public speaking from time to time. Introduce yourself in front of the class the first week of school. And provide the opportunity throughout the year.
• Practicing – 1. Students must learn to use the information they have. 2. Teach the value associated with practicing. 3. Play songs/pieces/etudes.
• Posture is the gateway to the breath and uninstructed air.
• Teach posture standing up. “Swan neck” vs. “Turkey neck”
• Every day is posture day!!!
• Your hands should look beautiful // remember band is a fine art
• The air falls out of the body the same way water flows over Niagara Falls
• “Let more air out of the body” not “blow more/faster air”
• Most articulation problems are corner placement problems
• “The process is developmental and must be monitored arduously”

New Teacher Survival Kit

If you’ve read much on my blog, you know that I do not have the traditional mindset of most educators. I have no problem with kids dropping out of school as long as they are doing so as a means of furthering their education. I don’t think that a college education is essential for success in the world. In fact, I know that it’s not.

I recently was watching to a TED Talk by Cameron Herold (@CameronHerold on Twitter) that challenged me and also reinforced some of my previously-held views and articulated them in a way that shed new light on them. The talk was entitled Let’s raise kids to be entrepreneurs. You should watch it. If nothing else, you will pick up a few amazing parenting ideas from it.

The last two things on the video are a list of things he says we should be teaching kids and a video. The list is pretty interesting to me, because a lot of the things I do in band are bordering on reinforcing these skills, but if I just pushed a little more, I could really go into them much deeper. How many of these skills are you teaching? I’ve included a couple suggestions of possible ways that I might encourage each of the skills this year.

1. Problem solving
   “Why did you play the wrong note there?”
   Do some teacher-guided brainstorming of different ways to play higher/louder/better notes
2. To lead others
   Provide opportunities for all students to lead the group
   Do occasional small group work and give all students leadership responsibilities
3. To want to make money
   Use monetary rewards for fundraising top seller incentives (possibly?)
   Discuss the importance of earning potential
4. Public speaking
   Allow students to speak at concert performaces
   Provide opportunities for all students to occasionally tell stories/jokes 
   Reward students for volunteering
5. To ask questions
   Encourage every question, no matter how silly or redundant it may seem
   Thank students for asking questions
6. To learn from mistakes
   Use mistakes as a springboard for growth
   “We all mess up, but we need to grow from that experience so we don’t make the same mistake twice”
7. How to sell
   Encourage occasional negotiations about minor grading/rule changes
   Encourage students to do the selling (and discourage parent intervention) in the fall fundraiser
8. To never give up
   Make difficult assignments and don’t back down
   Reward extraordinary effort
9. To be creative
   Students create concert programs, including coming up with program notes
   Let students make posters to decorate the classroom
   Allow students to update the bulletin board and any other displays
10. How to save money
    Discuss the importance of saving money for purchases rather than spending it immediately
    Charge $0.25 for each replacement copy of a paper the students need; use the money later to pay for class rewards
11. To ask for help
    Encourage every question, no matter how silly or redundant it may seem
    Thank students for asking questions
12. To see solutions
    Present real-world problems to the students and allow them to brainstorm ways to solve them
    Come up with the most efficient way to store all of the supplies in the classroom

See, I think we usually focus on the same three or four of these skills all the time. I know some of what I’ve done in the past has actually been counterproductive to some of these, so the challenge for me is to be more encouraging of the curiosity of my students and let them actually be kids.

This video that ended the talk is the essence of where we ought to be directing our students.

So what are you going to do this year to foster the entrepreneurial spirit of your students?

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5 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers

Don’t quit teaching. It could be that every single struggle you’ve ever faced as a teacher has been leading you to an amazing breakthrough that will happen this year. Make it happen!

Fear
I’m not a fan of listening to the fear-mongers on TV telling us that the sky is falling. It’s been falling since the 1980s when I first saw news. I bet it was falling before that. That doesn’t help anything. I found that when I intentionally stopped paying attention to news a few years ago, the quality of my life actually got a little bit better. But fear isn’t the reason to stick with teaching. In fact, it’s absolutely not the reason.

Honestly, I don’t have a real good reason for you, but I know it’s the right thing to do. I deplore the idea of giving up on a dream just because external circumstances make things difficult. To me, that is actually all the more reason to push through.

I think I can, I think I can…
If there’s one thing that my (incredibly slow) running exploits this year has taught me, it’s that giving up is always easier, but never better. Sometimes you need to stop or take a break so that you can regroup and live to fight another day, but you always need to stay in the battle.

A couple of weeks ago, the following comment was posted by “Joel Is An Idiot”

Joel, it sounds to me like you have no idea how difficult teaching truly is. Do you have an out of classroom position? Are you an administrator? I refuse to believe that you are a teacher in the classroom. If you are, then you must be one of those people that has their heads so far up their principals a$ that they cannot see the truth. You are truly pathetic!!!

Either this dude has a highly unfortunate name, terribly cruel parents, or is trying to attack me personally. Either way, I think it’s important to address the comment. The comment was posted in response to my article Invalid Reasons Teachers Quit. A basic summary of the article is that there are good reasons to quit and bad reasons. The “invalid” reasons for quitting are (1) Bad students/administrators/curriculum/demographics, (2) Too much paperwork/responsibility, (3) Too much negativity, (4) Not enough time, and (5) Not enough respect/not enough pay. Essentially my argument is that these factors are things that might be solved by transferring to a different school or district, or that these are problems common to many workplaces, or that these excuses are symptoms of much deeper-seated problems that should be addressed directly.

So the complaint was that I side too much with administrators and I think that is a fair complaint when the stuff written on my blog is taken at face-value for the most part. Maybe it’s because I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Habit 5 is Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood), but I try to put myself in the place of administrators and see if it’s really a legitimate complaint against them. Plus, I always hate the idea of complaining about something and acting like a victim when I actually have the means to activate change in the situation.

Victim mindset/Loser language
One thing I can’t stand is the “I can’t” type of thinking. I won’t allow my students to tell me they can’t do something that I know they are capable of doing, and it’s even worse when I hear adults complain about that.

No complaining
It has been a crazy month, which explains why I haven’t taken care of much of the email I’ve received, put up guest posts I received back in June, or done much else on the blog (besides some cosmetic changes). I will write about this stuff more over the upcoming weeks and months. There have been some staff changes in the band program here and so things are going to be interesting here pretty soon. But before any of this happened, I determined that my one rule for this year was going to be: No complaining. Pointing out problems and suggesting solutions is contributing. Pointing out problems without suggesting solutions is complaining.

Upcoming guest articles
Some guest blogs are already coming in. I am trying to organize a handful of articles about making this school year be the best school year ever. Maybe you had a great year last year and want to continue it. Maybe you had a terrible year last year and have some specific changes you’re setting out to implement. Whatever the case, your personal experience will be beneficial to others! If you’d like to share it with the readers of So You Want To Teach? then go to the Guest Posting Page for more details.

No Rights Reserved

50 Reasons To Love Your Job As A Teacher

Habit 2: Classroom Habits

10 Things I Wish I Knew As A First Year Teacher

The Best of SYWTT 2009

Top 5 (Plus 14) Character Traits Of Superior Teachers

I used to hate running. But I tried it this year and have become convinced that running is the gateway drug of the fitness world. You can walk forever without feeling the need to do anything more. I find it exceptionally difficult to make a concentrated effort of running and not have visions of marathons, triathlons, or being in South Africa playing for a World Cup team.

Back in January, I came up with this crazy idea to set out to run a 5K. I say it’s a crazy idea simply because I was somewhere around 100 pounds overweight. Simply the thought of running anywhere was absolutely unreal. But I have a handful of friends who run marathons and I figure if they can run 26.2 miles, I must be able to run 3.1 nonstop.

So I started.

I decided to use the Couch To 5K Running Plan instead of going out there and winging it. I figured being on a plan is the best way to start anything. So out I went. The first day told me to walk 5 minutes, then run 1 minute, then walk 1 1/2, then repeat…for a total of 9 1-minute running intervals.

I knew that was too much for me. So I found a slightly longer plan that started easier. I decided to use that for a few weeks to try to get me ready for C25K Day 1! The first day I walked 15 minutes. Simple. Then on Day 2, I walked a few minutes, ran 1, and walked a few minutes more. That minute of running about near killed me. Then I looked at the plan again and realized I was actually supposed to repeat the 1 minute run. So I went out and did it again the next day. The next day of walking was a welcome change of pace.

“Do you really want to die?”
I decided that the running was going to be the death of me at that point, so I changed my plan of attack. Throughout the months of January and February, every time the plan told me to run, I would actually walk at a slightly “peppier” pace than I had been walking. Even so, I continued fighting through leg cramps, lower back pain, upper back pain, chest pain (nowhere near as fun as it sounds…), breathing troubles, lung pain, knee pain, ankle pain, foot pain, a pesky heel spur, arm pain (I still can’t figure that one out, but it happened more than once). I also “ran” in wind gusting over 40mph, freezing winds, rain, and freezing rain.

Lose the battle, win the war
There were plenty of times that I wanted to quit. There were days when I’d set out to run and get there and start, and the pain would just get the better of me. During these times, I would tell myself that it’s better to lose the battle to win the war. I stopped, felt like a failure, and decided I would just live to fight another day. And fight I did.

Running for real
Beginning in March, I decided to start the C25K plan over again, but this time actually jogging the intervals. I don’t know how fast I went, but I do know when I started, I was actually “running” slower than my walking pace. Seriously. I could walk 1/4 mile in 5 minutes and run the same distance in 5:15. But I never let that dissuade me. Like Forrest Gump, I just ran. March was a great month as I saw a whole lot of progress. I ran nearly every day. On days I didn’t run, I’d just go out and walk.

I finally fell in love with running in March.

I finally came to grips with the fact that, though I don’t look like it, I am a runner. My mom bought me sweet running shoes over Spring Break. I also downloaded the RunKeeper Pro App for my iPhone. That is without question my favorite iPhone app. The web interface is amazing. It appeals to the math nerd side of me. Big time. It maps my route, it graphs my progress, it determines my speed, it posts to Facebook and Twitter. It even allows me to distinguish what I’m doing each day. If I’m running I choose that, I can also tell it that I’m Cycling, Mountain Biking, Walking, Hiking, Downhill Skiing, Cross-Country Skiing, Snowboarding, Skating, Wheelchairing, Rowing, working out with an Elliptical, or even Swimming (really?). It would let me use a treadmill and input my info as well.

Moving Forward
As the month continued, I just kept running and running. On the Tuesday of Spring Break (March 16th), I ran in my new running shoes for the first time. I ran 90 seconds, walked 90 seconds, ran 3 minutes, walked 3 minutes, and repeated for a total of 9 minutes of running. I set a goal to run 1 mile before my band went to UIL on March 31st. To get there, I started accelerating the program a bit and pushing myself hard. I also worked my band hard. I remember one day we had a rehearsal until 7. I stayed at school an hour waiting for one kid to get picked up, then I went home. A friend texted me to go run with her, so I changed clothes and went out at 9pm (on a school night, mind you) and ran 3 six-minute intervals. Then I woke up the next morning and ran 10-minutes nonstop at 6am. Two days later, I woke up early Sunday morning and went out and ran a mile before church.

The amazing feeling of accomplishment
After three months of working hard on pushing myself both physically and psychologically, the realization that I could now jog a mile was pretty amazing. I mostly walked in a 5K on May 5th and I was able to complete the C25K plan by running my third 30-minute run on May 20th (a tad longer than the prescribed 9 weeks). Over the next three months, I have continued the running habit and it has simply become second-nature for me. Now I am setting my eyes so much higher…

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No Rights Reserved

This morning I allowed a guest post to go up on this blog that many readers felt was inappropriate for this blog. In it, the author listed three reasons mothers should become teachers:

1. You’re assured of more than two months of vacation every year
2. Your schedule is perfect when it comes to looking after your kids
3. The stress level associated with the job is minimum

Now, anyone who has actually been a teacher (whether a mother or not) knows these reasons are ill-conceived at best, and mostly offensive. I am reminded of two years ago when a troll called J Frap came over and posted a comment wherein he asserted that one reason people should be a teachers is that it is a:

“part time job at full pay wages”. Thats a huge benefit, how about you take one year off from teaching and work in the real world, where you would make less money, only receive one week paid vacation, you wouldn’t be given ‘planning days’ every other week, and you would have to work on most holidays.

Obviously, many readers took offense to this comment, and rightly so. My response was that, while there are some perks, it is definitely not a part-time job in that sense. A month later, I wrote an article delineating why it’s really far from part-time — Teaching: Part Time Job At Full Pay Wages????

This article garnered some comments from the other extreme of the spectrum.

I’m not complaining, but we NEED that time to recover and prepare for the next year. Nobody works harder than teachers do, no matter what they do.

1. My “planning” time is filled with faculty meetings, department meetings, SST meetings, cirriculum meetings, grade level meetings, and any other professional development my administraion deems important. I do all of my planning on my own dime.
2. For the 08-09 school year, I will arrive at school at around 7 AM and leave at about 6:00PM every day. I will have a 25 minute lunch, but I will still be working as I will have lunch duty. When I get home from school (and on weekends) I will have papers to grade and materials to create for an upcoming unit. I don’t get paid overtime for that.
3. I do not recieve pay for my summer “vacation.” I get paid for 190 contractual days, but it is spread out over the 12 months.
4. My “vacation” is chock full of professional development workshops, cirriculum meetings, and planning for the next year (I get a $50 stipend for 2 workshops). The time that I do have to myself over the summer is spent reflecting on my previous preformance and coming up with ways to make the next year run more smoothly (again, I don’t get overtime for this).
5. This year, I will spend roughly $250-$300 out of my own pocket to furnish materials and supplies to my own classroom. I get a tax write-off, but not for the whole thing. I won’t get reimbursed for the money I spend. I don’t get a company car.
6. I will spend each day every day in front of 110 hormonal 12 year olds. I will be a counselor, mediator, entertainer, facilitator, coach, police officer, mother figure, and teacher over the course of every day. I will undoubtedly catch every form of the cold, flu, and stomach virus that floats the the halls of my school. I will break up fights, get yelled at by kids I don’t know, get threatend by parents, and sometimes be underminded by my employer. I won’t get hazard pay.

Some of the other eye-opening comments included:

I have to admit I used to have similar thoughts about teachers being part-time workers. Then I started homeschooling the kids. My hours doing that are much less then a teachers but I stated to see all the things that have to go on behind that bit of sit down time everyone sees. The planning, the research, the organization…Hats off to you!

Mister Teacher, who is the author of Learn Me Good (both the New York Times Bestselling book and the blog) and is also getting married this week, wrote in his article Teaching Mythstakes!:

The person who wrote this on a blog I read seems to think that we work with our children Monday through Thursday, and every Friday we sequester ourselves at a back table at Chili’s and plan out the next week around nachos and margaritas.

The truth is that we have a 45-minute “planning period” every day while our kids are at PE or art or music. Aside from our lunch break, this is the only time that we are not with our students. However, this planning period is not always a true break, as it is frequently used for parent conferences or impromptu meetings with the principal, the test coordinator, or other members of the faculty.

Oh yeah, the book isn’t really a New York Times Bestseller, but it’s good.

Another comment that came in that discussion was this one:

Most outsiders think teachers “have got it made,” because of the schedule they have, but to them I say trade places with a teacher for a day and see how it works out for you. Those people have no idea what it’s like to spend countless hours preparing engaging and intriguing lessons for apathetic kids, some of whose parents send them to school and ‘hope that everything works out for the best,’ expecting teachers to raise the kids or otherwise make corrections and teach lessons that should have come from home. Despite this however, I do love teaching though aware of these glaring realities. I hope you read this article in full and grasped the dualities that were given in the discussion. Naturally, no one should attempt to judge another’s situation if they haven’t been through it, and there are clearly some jobs that I would never want to do–but to anyone who talks about teachers and their complaints, I BEG you to sub a day or two in my classroom.

It’s interesting to me when I consider that most people have absolutely no clue what I do in my job. I know there are many second-career-teachers (my dad is a retired fire marshal who now teaches 6th grade), but most of us who teach have never been out of the school systems. We tend to forget that the average adult graduates from high school or college and goes directly into a world where they work 5-6 days a week every week of the year. No spring break, no summer vacation, no Christmas or Thanksgiving holidays. Bank holidays if they’re lucky.

So the next time someone comes up to you and tells you that they wish they could have a low-stress job where scheduling is as “easy as pie,” try to see things from their perspective before you respond. Odds are, they really aren’t trying to be offensive…

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Habit 2: Classroom Habits

Teaching: Part Time Job At Full Pay Wages????

This guest post is contributed by Anna Miller, who writes on the topic of online degrees . She welcomes your comments at her email id: anna.miller009@gmail.com

It’s a job like no other because it involves both change and routine – you follow a similar routine every day and year after year, but you also see change in the form of different students and a new class every year. It may not be the highest paying job, but teaching at a school is probably one of the best options for most people because it not only allows you to grow as an individual, it also brings you a great deal of satisfaction because you know you’re making a significant difference in the lives of so many youngsters. And if you’re a mom who would like to get back into the job market, becoming a teacher is one of the most perfect positions you could hold, because:

1. You’re assured of more than two months of vacation every year
   When you work at a school, you know you’re assured of a minimum number of vacation days every year because the students you teach are on vacation too. While you may have to go in to school for a few days after it closes and before it reopens, you do get to take at least two months off over the course of a year. Which other job offers you such a long period off work, with pay? Besides this, you get weekends off except under extenuating circumstances; so you’re able to devote time to household chores and bonding with your children and spouse.
2. Your schedule is perfect when it comes to looking after your kids
   Most professionals find it hard to take off for a family vacation because they have to get both parents’ schedules to coincide with the kids’ vacation dates. The sheer logistics of this is enough to put most people off planning holidays. If you’re a teacher, your vacation will definitely coincide with that of your kids’, and if you’re spouse is able to take time off around the same period, it’s easy as pie to plan quality family vacations. Besides this, you’re also home when they are, thus making it possible to help them with homework or just spend the evening with them. Also, if you’re a single mom, it’s easy to be home when your child/children are home from school rather than entrusting them to a sitter and incurring additional expense.
3. The stress level associated with the job is minimum
   While you do have a great deal of responsibility in looking after a class, handling lessons, and coping with difficult and trouble-maker kids, the stress level associated with being a teacher is low when compared to most other jobs. If you have a flair for teaching, if you love children, and if you don’t mind the occasional challenge thrown at you, then teaching is probably the best career for working moms.

Editor’s note: Sadly, this is how many education outsiders view teaching. For the reason, I posted the follow-up Do We Even Know How Most Outsiders View Our Jobs As Teachers

Habit 2: Classroom Habits

Side Jobs For Teachers: Make Them Work For You

10 Things I Wish I Knew As A First Year Teacher

7 Pieces Of Financial Advice For A High School Student (Or Teacher!)

My (Totally Unexpected) Love Affair With Running

7 Ways To Impress Your College Professor

This is a guest post by Thomas Warren, a content writer for GoCollege, one of the oldest and most trusted resources to guide students on how to finance and succeed in college.

We all have knowledge and ideas that we would love to pass on to others. Is there any better legacy to leave than that of learning? And yet, not all of us are cut out to be teachers. Just because you have something to say doesn’t mean 1) people need to learn it, 2) you can relate it effectively, and 3) you actually want to teach. If you’re considering becoming a teacher, you should take a long hard look at yourself; your talents and your motivations. Here are a few things you may want to consider.

1. Do you have good communication skills?
   Whether you have knowledge of a subject or not, you have to be able to relate it to others, so if the thought of public speaking leaves you frozen in your tracks, or you prefer to carry on all of your relationships via email, then perhaps you should consider writing a book (and leave the teaching to someone else).
2. Do you harbor a desire to help others?
   Being a teacher is more than just spouting information. You have to want to help others learn. This is a fundamental concern when becoming a teacher, because it is a profession that requires flexibility, understanding, and patience. Students excel at different speeds and accumulate and retain information in different ways, and you must be prepared to teach everyone the same material, but with a variety of tactics.
3. Do you have the right disposition?
   All good teachers have a few very specific personality traits. You should be calm, for starters, because without fail, you will have to deal with students who are frustrated, angry, lazy, distracted, and even combative. You have to be able to keep a cool head and offer advice and encouragement. You should also have a sense of humor. This is not easily quantifiable, and yet, almost all of us remember that one teacher who made the lessons fun and kept the whole class laughing.
4. Are you passionate about your subject?
   This is really important, especially as students get into middle school and high school (where they are more apt to deal with distractions like hormones and peer pressure). If your subject bores you, it should come as no surprise that it bores kids, as well. In order to keep it entertaining, you need to have a desire to keep learning and translate your level of interest into every lesson.
5. Are you a good listener?
   The best way to improve your performance is by considering feedback. Children tend to be much more receptive to learning if they feel like they can interact with and confide in their teacher on an equal level. And most kids are pretty savvy, so don’t expect to get away with giving them lip service. When they approach you with concerns, you must be able to gain their trust.

There is no magical recipe to make a good teacher. Certainly there are resources available that will impart teaching techniques to improve your classroom performance and allow you to deal with students of varying levels of ability or interest. But mostly, being a good teacher requires a strong desire to help others, an aptitude for delivering information in a manner that is not only succinct, but exciting, and the flexibility to continue learning yourself. This is a career that must be taken seriously. You are, after all, sculpting the minds of future generations.  So if you find you don’t measure up in one or all of these areas, then you may not be cut out for teaching.

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9 Reasons To Quit Teaching (And 10 Reasons To Stick)

Learning New Lessons – Tips for Rookie Teachers

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If you haven’t stopped by the actual website for So You Want To Teach? in a few months, er weeks, er days, er hours, you may not recognize it. I have used my summertime to really put in some solid effort into adjusting the layout of the blog. I haven’t done a full-on redesign since March of 2009. Since that time, I’ve added a few widgets here and something else over there, but never really spent a lot of concentrated time really thinking about the layout of the blog. Until recently.

How it all began
Quite frankly, I got bored of looking at the blog each day. I had some stuff there that just really didn’t make sense. It was more cluttered than I was comfortable. So I started looking at sites I like.

Zen Habits
Number one on the list is always Zen Habits. I am always impressed by how quickly his site loads. Why? Because it’s almost entirely text. I’ve been following this blog since the beginning of January, 2007. So almost from the beginning. Leo featured a sort of interview with me once about my perpetually clean desk, but that article has since been removed. Nevertheless, he did link to me in Ask the readers: Best tips for decluttering? and listed my post first among such sites as FlyLady, CNN, and Lifehacker. So I must give him props there.

Mashable
If you go online at all, you should be familiar with Mashable. If you’re not, you should get familiar with it. Mashable is hard to define, it’s a technology/social media/viral content/Google/YouTube/whatever new trend happens to be going on at the time site. It’s a blog. It’s a perpetual online magazine. It’s an information overload. But amidst the noise, Mashable does a fantastic job of throwing all of the information at you in an organized way.

I really used these two sites more than any others in deciding what I wanted to do. So here’s what I did:

1. Gave search more focus
   I moved the search box from the sidebar to the top of each page. Facebook does it. Mashable does it. Yahoo! does it. Gmail does it. There must be a reason it’s up there. As this blog continues to age, it becomes more and more difficult to find some of the excellent articles buried in the archives. Enter search…
2. Added more excerpts to main page
   I had 5 excerpts per page, which meant there were 100+ pages of archives. Now I’ve made it to where there are 10 per page.
3. Pictures, pictures, pictures
   Whereas the “Popular Posts” widget shows just the titles of the 10 most viewed posts over the last couple of days, I find they often get a little bit stale. I had the “Other Readers Liked” section at the bottom of each article, but decided to move it to the sidebar of every page to add a little bit of color and present some articles repeat visitors may not have seen before. Amazon uses a similar feature. I also expanded the “Related Articles” list at the bottom of each article.
4. More pictures – Avatars
   Since I have quite a few articles written by guest bloggers already on the site, and since more people continue to submit articles, I thought it would be useful to add an author avatar in the header of each article. By the way, if you’ve written something on this site (either an article or a comment), feel free to set up your Gravatar. I also cleaned up the comment section more.
5. Social
   Every article has a Facebook Like button in the header. Additionally, each article has its own Google Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook Share counters. It seems “sharing” and “liking” are two different things on Facebook. I also have found that the Topsy Retweet numbers are more reliable than TweetMeme. Plus the colors fit in a little better with my design, so that’s what I’ve gone with. On top of that, each article has a “Share the Knowledge” section at the bottom, encouraging sharing on Delicious, Diigo, StumbleUpon, Technoratri, Tumblr, and Digg.
6. Follow me
   Along the same lines,  I moved the Social Media icons. You know, the ones that tell you to subscribe or be a fan or follow me or whatever. Well, I took them out of the main sidebar and placed them at the bottom of each article. Conventional wisdom says to place an RSS icon “above the fold” on your blog. I have come to believe that blog readers are pretty smart and if they want to subscribe because of an article they read, they’ll see the big orange icon at the bottom of the article and subscribe if they want to. Speaking of smart readers…
7. Comments
   I have struggled at times with comments simply because moderation was such a chore. I turned them off this spring and had some of the most liberated time I’ve ever had when checking email. But I missed knowing that this blog is helping people. So I begrudgingly turned them back on this summer. Here are some of the things I’ve done to try to fight this:
   1. Removed the section of the comments that allowed a reader to include a URL – Most of my comment spam was coming because people wanted to get a link from this site to theirs.
   2. Removed any links in the displayed comments from previous readers – Before I removed the URL section, hundreds of spam comments made it through the filters. Instead of individually moderating these, I chose rather to simply remove the link back to any site. I hated doing this because so many of you out there do have sites that deserve the link, but my commenting headaches were not worth that. Sorry…
   3. Removed all trackbacks/pingback displays – Again, this was a spam prevention strategy. A bit extreme, but I felt it was necessary if I was going to be serious about turning comments back on.
   4. Reader moderation options – If you happen to be reading through a comment and come across something that doesn’t look right, simply click on the “Flag this comment as inappropriate” link inside the comment box. This “crowdsourcing” concept will help me utilize my reader base to help with the moderating of comments. It is one of the things that convinced me to open them back up, so I’m excited about it!
   5. Conditional comment display in the header – I love the idea of displaying a graphical notification with the comment count on an article, but I always hate seeing the number 0 there. It’s such a lonely number. So I played around with PHP If statements and got it working. If an article has a comment, a little comment count icon appears. If not, it’s not there.
   6. Cleaned up the Gravatar display for comments – I’ve never really been happy with the way that the comment avatars display. Until now. I finally got it to do what I wanted it to do! If you care, the primary thing that allowed me to do this was opening up beyond the sidebar and using the entire width of the blog for the comments.
   7. Integrated Twitter oAuth support – You can now use your Twitter account to login and post a comment, with the option of tweeting out that you posted a comment. I am working on Facebook integration, but it will take a good bit of more work so I can update my database to a more recent version of PHP.
   8. Cleaned up the Comment Submission form – I actually did this last night. Now once you enter an email address, your Gravatar displays in a preview box. If you want to change it, simply click on the link provided and set it up.
8. Digging through the archives
   I have been going through many of the old articles primarily looking to add images to them. I also am eventually going to work my way through and clean up the tags some, but that is a pretty huge undertaking that I just don’t see as a priority. Really, the search box is the best way to find stuff!
9. Tags
   It’s kind of frustrating to me that WordPress didn’t have tags at all back in February of 2007 when I first started my blog. They were a bit late to the game there, and when they implemented them, I basically just used them like categories. So as I said above, my tags are a royal mess on this site. I’ve just never really wanted to bother to go back and really fix them. I like categories and search. But I know a lot of people like them, so I’ve been trying to make them more useful. Toward that end, I put a little box at the end of each article reminding me basically that I have neglected them for too long. It also serves the reader by letting you click through to see other articles that are similarly tagged.
10. Footer: The final frontier
    The footer is the final section that I want to address from a design standpoint. I plan to eventually add some cool graphical navigation stuff but it’s not a hugely pressing issue either.

So there you have it. A quick and simple guide to navigating this site somewhat. Let me know what your thoughts are on the “new design”/modifications. Comments are open for business!

Also, if you have any questions how I did certain things, I would be more than happy to share with you the tricks. At least if you’re using WordPress…

The State of the Blog: 10/13/07

9 Reasons To Quit Teaching (And 10 Reasons To Stick)

20 Classic SYWTT Articles And Series

Habit 2: Classroom Habits

How Do I Keep My Students Quiet?

Valid Reasons Teachers Quit

You are currently reading the 501st article on this site
Over the past few years of my time in the blogosphere, I’ve seen some blogs come and go. I’ve seen some great ones start up and hopefully even been able to send out some positive blogging encouragement to some of these folks in the process, either via Twitter or by linking to their blogs. Whatever the case, it’s always encouraging to see new bloggers start into the effort.

With all things, there are numerous people who start out but simply fail to follow through. It’s just the human propensity we have for starting something new and moving on after it loses its newness. I’ve had times in my blogging where the thought crossed my mind and even camped out for a while.

Teachers quit teaching.
Twitter accounts remain untweeted.
Bloggers quit blogging.
MySpace (thankfully) shuts down.

What’s that? MySpace hasn’t shut down yet? Wow…I guess sometimes you just need to keep beating the dead horse even after it’s double-dead, and then some more…

Anyway, back on topic. I want to introduce you to a few EduBlogs that have recently started up in the last year or so that appear to show some promise. Hopefully these bloggers can continue their blogging journey!

Teacher Reboot Camp
Written by  Shelley Terrell, Teacher Reboot Camp’s mission statement is:

To “collaborate on strategies for engaging all our students through effective instructional methods and technology.”

Fantastic stuff. She started her blog in May of 2009, but really has amped it up as we got into 2010. I have enjoyed a lot of the links that she shares on Twitter as well as reading her blog as I get opportunities to do so. The blog lists some of her favorite posts, some of my favorites are:

• Do We See the Beauty in Every Student?
• How Do We Nurture Passion?
• PRESTO: How to Build A PLN Using Twitter

MusicEdMajor.net
MusicEdMajor.net is, as its name implies, a blog geared toward college Music Education majors. It fills an incredible void for many music students where there are plenty of EduBlogs out there, as well as plenty of Music blogs. But many of them relate more toward the administrative side of things. College music students really don’t need to know much about Bad and good ways to defend social foundations and reform teacher education or Additional thoughts on the Wiimote Whiteboard when they are about go to observe a middle school band rehearsal. Both are fantastic in the right time and place, but having a list of 5 Low-Stress Ways to Stay Musically Active Over the Summer may end up more beneficial to the music student. Other favorites from the site include:

• Top Apps for Music Ed Majors
• How to Stay Productive: Part 2-Keep a Calendar
• Practicing 101 for Music Ed Majors

Classroom Book of the Week
While this won’t apply to teachers of many disciplines, Classroom Book of the Week looks like a resource that pretty much any general elementary teacher can find useful at least once in a while. Author Kate Narita describes the site:

I am an author, curriculum guide consultant, and a teacher. Each week this blog features a Multiple Intelligences unit for the primary or intermediate elementary classroom based on a recently published children’s book. Author interviews include information about the writing process and the Six Traits of Writing.

She also includes a shipping address for readers to submit books for review as well as email contact info to encourage follow-up questions and offer her services to help develop curricula.

Look at my happy rainbow!
Matthew Halpern lives the perfect bloggable life ever! Hence, Look at my happy rainbow exists.

I’m a man. I teach kindergarten. Doing the second makes me better at the first. I follow the Responsive Classroom philosophy. I try to find the joy in teaching and something to love about each sprout (not always easy, but that is my job). People say teaching is the hardest job you’ll ever love – it’s true for me. A friend of mine told me there is a special place for kindergarten teachers in heaven… I get to experience a little bit of that everyday I’m in the classroom already so I consider myself doubly lucky.

Though he doesn’t have any “Best of” type lists, I just ran through some of the interesting tags and selected a few posts that just SOUND cool!

• Pirates.
• Forever Young (or how teaching kindergarten is like an 80’s song).
• Sometimes you have to do the Happy Dance.

i want to teach in texas
i want to teach in texas is a brand new blog (started in March) written by April Michelle Floyd, who appears to be a college student. I just found this blog and I think I really like it (not only because she’s in Texas, but that definitely helps her cause)! It’s fun. I love this post entitled 3 Words That Describe Education:

As I look around the blog a little more, I realize that most of what she has posted are just reposts of other site’s stuff. Again, the blog is very young and she has some good ideas. Hopefully with time, April will refine her writing and focus more on quoting small segments of the articles and then adding her own thoughts rather than just cutting and pasting. I’m giving her the befit of the doubt though, since I really do like the direction she’s headed…

So what about you?
What’s your favorite fledgling blog out there? Share in the comments…

How Do I Keep My Students Quiet?

Valid Reasons Teachers Quit

Total Teacher Transformation Begins

50 Reasons To Love Your Job As A Teacher

Flashback Friday

Twitter Guide for Teachers