The Easy Way to Teach Scales

Forget playing the scales, I used
to get this way just teaching them.

It was my first year of teaching. I had a heterogeneous beginning band class, and I was ambitious enough to include horns, giving me four different pitches of instruments to contend with when note naming. I wanted so badly for them to have as many scales as we could get, or at least get them up to the scales they needed for the All-District Band Auditions they would face the next year. So I pushed. But every time we started a new scale, it was a nightmare. Going one group at a time, grinding out the notes, checking the fingers, it took forever. And even with my best efforts, nearly half the group would play wrong notes. I wish I knew now what I knew then. There is a much, much easier way to teach scales to beginners!

A Motivating Pass Off System

On second thought, yes!

In my first year of teaching I rarely used playing tests for beginners. I mostly did it for grades, and sometimes only once per grading cycle. I didn't understand how important it could be for motivation. Instead I wanted to use every moment of class time to learn new lines, and move as quickly through the book as we could, battling classroom management problems along the way. All of the good beginner teachers I know regularly have their students play for a grade. Over the summer I discovered a music pass off system that, it turns out, has worked wonders for student motivation, leading to students being more on task in class and an explosion of practicing outside of class. If you are like I was then, I hope this will encourage you to adopt a regular individual performance grade. If you already do regular playing test grades, then this system might interest you as well!

Teach Beginners to Count Rhythms

It's easy for a young musician to get lost
without some kind of counting system.

By now counting systems have been adopted by almost everyone, but some people still avoid teaching a counting system. My thought is that most people who don't teach a counting system probably are not familiar enough with one, or perhaps they already use one and have thought about switching to another but haven't because they're not used to it. Either way, students need a schema that helps them understand how to break down rhythms, and counting systems become extremely useful the more complicated the rhythms get. Personally, I'm an Eastman Counting System guy. I wanted to provide links to pages explaining the counting systems, but after the first 3 pages of google search I gave up on finding them. So here I'll briefly explain the two most widely used systems for band, traditional and Eastman, and then tell you why I recommend A) Using a counting system and B) Using Eastman.