Tonight’s the night! The big Spring Concert is finally here!
Tag: learning
Monday Morning Musical Theatre Review: Disney’s Descendants
My school is giving its annual Spring Musical tonight. They’re doing a stage musical adaptation of Disney’s Descendants, which follows the lives of the children of the various Disney villains and heroes. It’s a cute little musical and it’s always cool seeing what our Drama teacher manages to put together.
The plot of the play itself, however, is classic modern Disney propaganda. It essentially presents a naïve view that evil is not a real threat; instead, it just needs to be neutralized with tolerance and a proper environment.
Lazy Sunday CCCLXXXV: Production Week
This past week was slammed with preparation for the Spring Fine Arts Festival, which commences tomorrow and culminates in my students’ Spring Concert on Tuesday. As such, I thought I’d look back at this past week:
- “Be Back Tomorrow” – A placeholder post to appease the WordPress daily post counter.
- “Production Week” – A recap of prepping for the school musical.
- “SubscribeStar Saturday: Spring Concert 2026 Preview” (SubscribeStar) – A look ahead to my students’ Spring Concert!
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
SubscribeStar Saturday: Spring Concert 2026 Preview
Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.
The last Spring Concert of yours portly career (at least in its current iteration) is coming up this Tuesday, 28 April 2026. It’s my swan song as the music teacher at my little school, so I’m going out big.
This concert will be the biggest, most stacked concert I’ve ever programmed. It will feature a total of twenty-six (26) pieces (appropriate, since it’s 2026, but I did not plan it that way; I just realized the connection while typing this post)—ten selections from the Middle School Music Ensemble; three solo pieces; one small group performance; and twelve tunes from the High School Music Ensemble.
The Middle School Music Ensemble’s set takes about forty minutes from top to bottom, and they’ve played it all the way through every day this past week. The High School Set is a bit longer, and we have not been able to play the entire program in a single class period. A class period at my school is about fifty-six minutes; by the time we get through attendance and tuning, we have maybe fifty minutes remaining. Our best run yet was getting through ten of the twelve pieces.
As such, I’m estimating that the total performance time of the concert will be about two hours—100 minutes between the two Ensembles, and about twenty minutes for the solo and small group pieces. That’s about the upper limit of where I (and, I imagine, my administration) would like to go. Factor in some shuffling between pieces and what not, as well as transitioning students on and off the stage, and we’re probably looking at around two hours and fifteen minutes.
There’s always this weird pressure to rush on through these concerts. My point (and the one I’ll make to my admin if they object to the length) is that we routinely have sporting events that last three or more hours. Baseball frequently has double-headers on school nights, which can easily run until 9 or even 10 PM. Us wrapping up around 8:15 or 8:30 PM is not going to ruin anyone’s ability to come to school the next day. Frankly, if the admin doesn’t want to stick around (understandable—they have to make an appearance at a lot of events), I don’t mind. I can lock up the building myself (as I have done many times before)!
Ahem—but I digress. No need to get defensive on the front end. That said, it’s going to be a pretty awesome concert. It’s not just two hours of lame filler. We’re going to rock—and pop, and soft rock, and so on—and it’s going to be a fitting display of my students’ talents.
To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.
Production Week
This week the Drama kids have been rehearsing for the school play, which is this coming Monday (my students have their big Spring Concert this coming Tuesday, 28 April 2026). That means yours portly has been rehearsing with the kids this week.
I run the sound and lighting for these plays. It’s not too difficult, but it’s quite an undertaking nonetheless. I essentially do what would typically be done by three or four people, in that I mix the sound; play the sound cues; run the lights; and troubleshoot any sound and/or equipment issues that arise during the play.
Issues always seem to arise.
Lazy Sunday CCCLXXXIV: Education Posts
The school year is in its last legs, and soon yours portly will be transitioning to his new life of once-a-week chaplaincy and quasi-full-time writing. After my reaccreditation team visit (see below), I’ve been reflecting more and more about education; it seemed like a good time to look back at some posts on the topic:
- “SubscribeStar Saturday: Educational Tyranny” (SubscribeStar) – a piece about the systemic cowardice of administrators.
- “SubscribeStar Saturday: The State of Education Update II” (SubscribeStar) – some reflections on education a few years ago.
- “SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Reaccreditation Visit” (SubscribeStar) – reflections on the reaccreditation process as the observer, rather than the observed.
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Reaccreditation Team Visit
Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.
Reaccreditation is the process that private schools go through periodically to assure they’re meeting minimum education standards. As I explain it to my students, having accreditation gives their diploma value in the eyes of colleges, universities, and employers. The reaccreditation team makes sure that the school is still meeting and/or exceeding those standards, so that the diploma from those institutions will still mean something.
There are different accrediting cycles. My school (accredited through the Southern Association of Independent Schools [SAIS], which shares accrediting standards with the National Association of Independent Schools [NAIS]; we’re part of SCISA for academic, athletic, and fine arts events) goes through reaccreditation every five years. SCISA offers three-year and five-year options, with slightly different standards for the longer term. SCISA also has separate reaccrediting standards for different types of schools; for example, Montessori schools have their own set of standards, because the Montessori approach is quite different from typical educational approaches. In the world of independent schools, there is, not surprisingly, a great deal of independence.
That’s something worth bearing in mind, too: reaccreditation does not mean standardization. Yes, there is a certain baseline, such as schools needing to maintain adequate safety protocols, or keeping immunization records on file, but the how of teaching and curriculum is left up to the schools. The reaccrediting team offers recommendations for a school, but the main point is accountability—are the schools delivering what they promise their stakeholders, or making steps to do so?
I am usually not one for bureaucratic paper-shuffling, but apparently I’m good at it, as I take lots of notes and can figure out how to optimize a system fairly quickly. I possess, too, the capacity for consuming large amounts of information quickly, which includes scanning files for necessary documents and information. I also love education (even though I have my issues with it), so it was really cool being part of this visiting team. I’ve heard some horror stories about schools that lacked even basic documentation and that have actively avoided reaccreditation (which is, ultimately, self-defeating, because it likely means you aren’t delivering on your promises to parents and students).
To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.
SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Music Festival 2026
Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.
Another SCISA Music Festival is in the books, and it’s a bittersweet occasion for yours portly, as it’s the last one as a music teacher at my current school. I’ve been taking kids to Columbia, South Carolina for the SCISA Music Festival every year since 2012 (except for one year when I had to stay on campus for our reaccreditation visit, and during the COVID year, when we hired a judge to adjudicate our pianists on campus). My Instrumental Ensembles, whether in the “Small” or “Large” categories, and either High School or Middle School, have earned Gold medals every year since 2013 (the High School Small Instrumental Ensemble in 2012 earned a Silver for an instrumental rendition of “The Circle of Life”).
Because we are not a traditional concert band, there’s a good bit of “tech” that goes with the group. Essentially, my Music Ensembles are large rock bands, often with multiple guitars, basses, pianos/keys, and whatever other instruments happen to be enrolled in the class. One year, I took an ensemble that consisted of the following mélange of instrumentation: piano, electric piano, viola, alto sax, euphonium, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, electric bass guitar, and ukulele. It was one of the oddest mixtures, but it worked.
This year, my High School Ensemble featured the typical guitar (all electric), keys, basses (three of them!), and drums, but also alto sax, violin, clarinet, and guzheng. The last of those is a traditional Chinese stringed instrument. We incorporated all of that into a cool arrangement of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic “My Favorite Things.”
That selection itself came about as a result of organic creativity. I was stumped as to what piece to pick for the High School this year, until one of the students came for an after-school lesson and asked to sightread some jazz piano pieces. We found a Jamie Aebersold book with a number of pieces, including “My Favorite Things.” He had immense fun playing it.
Just a day before, my older brother had texted me a lengthy live recording of John Coltrane playing the piece. It seemed serendipitous that my student was also drawn to the piece, so I decided we’d try it as a group.
It began to morph from there. Our alto saxophonist is phenomenal, and I worked out an odd little “Middle Eastern” scale for him. Essentially, it’s an E Phrygian scale, but instead of a G natural as the third interval, it’s a G#; to wit: E F G# A B C D E. That raised third creates a really interesting interval.
My guzheng player and I also collaborated. He is a delightful international student from China, and he will often practice during my afternoon planning. The guzheng typically uses a kind of “open” pentatonic tuning, so he contrived a unique blended tuning in order to get the pitches he needed to play the melody. I told him that I wanted the piece to sound like “East meets West.”
It all fell into place from there. One thing I will miss about teaching music in a group is that very process of collaborative creation. The molding of our arrangement felt like a musical conversation that unfolded gradually, each element falling into place at its appointed time. The process was truly magical.
To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.
TBT: Midweek Mongol Madness
It’s my second consecutive year teaching World History (I taught it last school year for the first time since the 2011-2012 school year—whoa!), and I’m pleased to see that I’m two weeks ahead of schedule compared to where I was last year. That’s likely due to having a bunch of my lessons done this year, so I’m not trying to pad out lectures with a bunch of riffing.
So it is that, as of the time of writing, I’ve just covered the Mongols in detail (minus a couple of slides before we talk about medieval Japan).
The Mongols are wildly fascinating, in part because they were wild—nomadic horsemen who would drink the blood of their horses when they were low on supplies; wore silk underwear that served as protection against arrows; and would switch horses mid-ride, spending as much as ten days in their saddles. Under Genghis Khan, they spilled an immense amount of blood, slaughtering an estimated 40,000,000 (that’s forty million) people, equivalent to low-end estimates of those who perished in the Second World War. Again, these are estimates—numbers from the thirteenth century aren’t necessarily reliable—but that comes to roughly 13% of the global population at the time. Indeed, while writing these numbers, they seemed fantastically large; I had to go back and consult my World History textbook (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you).
Genghis Khan’s conquests, as well as those of his successors, brought an odd peace, the Pax Mongolica (also an Amazon Affiliate link), to Eurasia for about 100 years. It was the peace of the graveyard, as so many people were killed in the course of these invasions, there was no one troublesome enough left to cause a ruckus. It also marked one of the few times in human history that a single political unit (sort of) controlled the great Eurasian steppes, allowing for the (alleged) journeys of Marco Polo and doubtlessly thousands of other unsung but intrepid merchants, missionaries, and explorers.
Naturally, the largest land-based empire ever to exist in the world could not long survive. The Mongol Empire was probably never anything as such—a single, unified political unit—but more of an amalgamation of tribes, peoples, and regions swearing allegiance to the Great Khan. After Genghis Khan’s death, the empire was divided into four khanates, with an ostensible Great Kahn ruling over the four, but with the regions going their own ways in practice.
Nevertheless, there is something captivating about the sheer scale of these conquests, and the way a nation of clannish, nomadic horsemen swept across the world, spreading their terrible fury and bloodlust as they went (and, it seems likely, the Black Death that would depopulate 25% of Europe).
Will another horde arise from the Eurasian steppes? If so, let’s pray they fall far short of ambitious conquests of the Mongols.
With that, here is 5 March 2025’s “Midweek Mongol Madness“:
TBT: The Portly Politico Presidents’ Day Extravaganza
The United States observed Presidents’ Day earlier this week, and yours portly is enjoying a decadent Winter Break for the next couple of days. Of course, the decadence will end abruptly on Saturday when Dr. Wife and I load up yet another U-Haul with the last remaining stuff from her house.
For today, though, I’m enjoying a little bit of time with the dogs while Dr. Wife slaves away at the hospital. She’s a good woman.
It seems that February is always a bit of a low-point for the blog in terms of my own preparedness and output. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps the initial rush of the New Year has passed, with Reality settling in heavily. It certainly seems like everything has been busier lately.
Regardless, here’s to a few days off—probably the last for a good while!
With that, here is 17 February 2025’s “The Portly Politico Presidents’ Day Extravaganza“: