Tag: education

SubscribeStar Saturday: Celebration of Life for Bob Gunn – Remarks

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Earlier this year one of my dear colleagues, Bob Gunn, passed away after suffering from a stroke.  He had worked at my school since its founding in the mid-1990s, and was an integral part to its operation, its culture, and its legacy.

Tonight (Saturday, 22 June 2024), my school is hosting a celebration of life service in honor of Bob, his legacy, and his memory.  I’ve been asked to say a few words, which I have included in this post.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Spring Jam 2024 Postmortem

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On Friday, 24 May 2024 I hosted the fourth annual Spring Jam Recital on my front porch.  It is one of two front porch recitals I host each year, the other being the Spooktacular in October.

This year’s Spring Jam was the smallest one yet.  I always host the event the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend, primarily because it is the night before graduation for my school’s seniors, so many families are still in town.  However, the combination of graduation season (which means graduation parties) and the holiday weekend mean it is a potentially dicey weekend in terms of schedules.

So far, I have been fortunate to have a large number of students who attend and play, but this year, Fate cut differently and we had a much smaller crowd than usual.  Even so, we had a blast.

Gear Loaded Up!
Drum Kit
Wider Shot of Kit
Added a Small Cymbal
Rotel Dip!
The Stage is Set!

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Gig Day IX: TJC Spring Jam IV

The Portly Politico6 Comments

It’s time for another front porch concert!  This event—the TJC Spring Jam and Recital—will be the eighth Front Porch concert I’ve hosted (I think), and I’ve learned quite a bit from the others, including the last Spooktacular.

This year marks the fourth Spring Jam, which has become a popular event with my private music students.  These front porch concerts started out as a way for my buddy John and me to play gigs during The Age of The Virus, when nobody was open for live music.  I realized that if I wanted to play in front of a live audience, I’d have to circumvent the hysteria and become the venue and talent.

Gradually, the concept morphed from a self-indulgent concert into a recital for my private music students.  The Lord Has Blessed me—far beyond what I deserve—with a large clientele of private music students (I’m a bit murky on the number at the moment, as I have several seniors graduating tomorrow, but it’s around fifteen lessons a week), so it made sense to offer a couple of recital opportunities a  year for them.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Graduation Season 2024

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Graduation season has matriculated for yours portly.  Indeed, college graduations have already been rolling on for a few weeks now, with a flurry of graduation photos and heartfelt Facebook posts accompanying the accomplishments of young people across the land.  My school observed a graduation ceremony for our eighth graders last night, continuing the long-standing tradition of watering down “graduation” to apply to any milestone.  Never mind kindergarten graduation ceremonies; pretty soon we’ll be having graduation ceremonies for when youngsters leave the house to head to school for the first time.

Regardless, it is a season of joy and celebration, and there is something to be said for all of that pomp and circumstance (and the constant playing of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance No. 1,” which is echoing across the land even as I write, I’d wager).  Nowadays graduations are largely an opportunity for mothers to take thousands of pictures of their children (which likely explains the explosion of “graduations” referenced earlier), but they still hold certain symbolic and cultural importance.

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TBT^4: SimEarth

The Portly Politico27 Comments

May.  It’s the superfluous final month of school.  There’s not enough time to cover any new content, but too much time to launch right into exam review.  The result:  an odd limbo in which neither students or teachers wish to dwell.  It’s the time of year when everyone is in on the game of modern education—we’d all be better off doing and being somewhere else, but we’re still going through the rituals of an industrial-era factory.

Naturally, with summer looming, I’m getting the itch to do some gaming again.  Since finishing Disco Elysium a few weeks ago, I have not played any game deeply.  I did purchase Planescape: Torment, the spiritual ancestor of DE, but only managed to get in about an hour of playtime.  One of my students asked me earlier this week about Stardew Valley, which I played religiously for about two weeks in probably 2013.  That’s a modern classic I want to dust off soon.

As for the ostensible subject of this post, my forays into SimEarth have been nonexistent since those halcyon days of May 2020, when America’s love affair with The Virus was in full swing.  Being cooped up in the house got me nostalgic for the classics, but I need to revisit the planet simulator soon.

Big plans for the summer.  If I play all these games as planned, my eyeballs might fall out.

With that, here is 11 May 2023’s “TBT^2: SimEarth“:

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Quick Post-Concert Update

The Portly Politico2 Comments

The concert was a big success.  It was also loooooong—about two hours.  Of course, with performances from dance classes, the choir, various soloists, and my Middle and High School Ensembles, it was bound to be lengthy.  As I pointed out to some folks afterwards, it’s no different than kids who play a baseball game (but, let’s be honest, way more fun that baseball).

I’ll have a full postmortem this weekend, but now, I am heading to bed (at the time of writing, it’s about 10:15 PM the Tuesday evening after the concert).

Back to real posts soon.  Yours portly is just having to do these quick ones to get by for the time being.

Rock on,

TPP

Concert is Tonight!

The Portly Politico2 Comments

The big Spring Concert is tonight!  Yours portly busted his butt yesterday in his planning periods and after school to get everything looking good.

Here was the stage in our gym at around 7:15 AM yesterday (leave a comment if you notice the unusual detail in this picture):

Spring Concert 2024 Setup Before

And here it is around 5:30 PM, shortly before I left work:

Spring Concert 2024 Setup After

Granted, I didn’t work on it continuously during that time, as I had classes, but in total, it was probably four hours of setup.  I had help from some colleagues moving the big stuff and the drums, and some Middle School students setup the lighting (not pictured, but you can see the light controller on the bottom right in front of the stage).  Overall, the setup yesterday—including leaving copies of students’ music on their music stands and pianos—should make today a bit less stressful.

Rock on!

—TPP

Concert Week!

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Yours portly is nearly through the gauntlet.  Tomorrow night my students have their annual Spring Concert.

It’s shaping up to be a good one.  We’re working in a lot of classics, as well as some newer tunes.  I’m particularly excited about the closing number for the concert.

Yours portly will be spending the bulk of today and tomorrow setting up sound equipment and instruments (when I’m not teaching classes).  I’ve gotten a lot better at doing this setup over the years, but it’s still quite time-consuming, and I require a good deal of focus to get it done.  That’s sometimes hard to achieve in a school full of students!

So I’m hoping to be getting in early the next couple of days to make sure everything is good to go!

Rock on,

TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Music Festival 2024

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This past Thursday was the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, a major event for my music students each year.  The Music Festival is an opportunity for students to perform solo and ensemble pieces for judges.  The judges are typically doctoral students at the University of South Carolina School of Music, and they often give excellent, detailed feedback to students.

Students can earn one of three scores:  a Gold/Superior/I; a Silver/Excellent/II; or a Bronze/Good/III.  Even students who earn a Gold/Superior often get invaluable comments (in other words, not just things like, “That was amazing!” without further elaboration, although that does happen occasionally).  While I stress to my students that our aim is to get a Gold on our performances, the real value lies in 1.) challenging ourselves as musicians in the first place and 2.) taking constructive feedback to heart so that we can improve as musicians.

I also make sure they know that simply playing at the Festival is a testament to their courage as performers, as it is very difficult to expose one’s self to criticism, even when that criticism is designed to help us improve.  For me, signing up and working hard to prepare a solo is the most important victory; everything else is icing on the cake.

That said, I am very pleased to announce that both my Middle School and High School Instrumental Ensembles earned Golds for their performances.  The Middle School Music Ensemble performed an instrumental arrangement of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La donna è mobile” from his opera Rigoletto (you can purchase sheet music of my now-award-winning arrangement here, here, and here).  The High School Music Ensemble played the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves.”

Our Choir Director had a great day, too:  her choir earned a Gold, and each of her vocal soloists earned Gold as well.

Here is the (rather dry) update I sent to my administration after school, which I am sure they have blasted out onto social media by this point:

On Thursday, 7 March 2024, forty-two (42) student-musicians travelled to the SCISA Music Festival at the USC School of Music in Columbia, South Carolina to perform adjudicated solo and ensemble pieces. Students competed in the categories of Small Vocal Ensemble, Small Instrumental Ensemble, Large Instrumental Ensemble, Vocal Solo, Drum Solo, Piano Solo, Guitar Solo, and Violin Solo.

The Small Vocal Ensemble, the Small Middle School Instrumental Ensemble, and the Large High School Instrumental Ensemble all earned Gold (Superior) ratings.

Vocal soloists earned five (5) Gold ratings, two (2) Silver ratings, and one (1) Bronze rating.

Instrumental soloists earned eight (8) Gold ratings, three (3) Silver ratings, and one (1) Bronze rating.

In total, students gave twenty-three (23) musical performances, earning sixteen (16) Gold/Superior ratings, five (5) Silver/Excellent ratings, and two (2) Bronze/Good ratings.

The results demonstrate the musical talents of the [school’s] student body, and speak to the cultivation of those talents in the Music program.

So, what does it take to get such results?  Let’s dive in.

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Memorable Monday III: Monday Steakhouse Blues

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Well, it seems that my resolve yesterday to get back to our regular schedule waivered, before breaking down completely.  Yours portly has been exceptionally busy lately—March and April are always difficult, but this February was also quite brutal—and what little creative energy I have has been laser-focused on composing.

I also haven’t really watched any flicks worth reviewing.  To be clear, I have reviewed plenty of bad movies.  Lately, though, nothing has leapt out at me as worth hammering out 600-1000 words.  Maybe Ponty will finally write that rebuttal to my award-winning, trenchant, insightful, powerful, persuasive review of Donnie Darko (1999).

So I thought I’d cast back to an old post about eating a steak alone on a Monday night while using my cellphone to write a blog post.  I wrote the post on the eve of the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, which is one of the marquee events of our music program.  It’s a huge and chaotic undertaking, but super fun, and I love seeing my students get ready to perform.

I’m pretty on-the-ball this year, but that on-the-ballitude accounts, in part, for my poor posting—I’ve been working ahead on school and Music Festival stuff.

There probably won’t be any steak tonight, but there might be Thursday after I get back from the Festival.

Regardless, here’s 9 March 2020’s “Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues“:

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