Substitute File #3

Just call me the musical math teacher...

A few weeks ago, I was a choir teacher for the morning. I enjoyed watching a musical with the first period, had a prep the 2nd period and then still had 3rd period and part of 4th before I could go home.

3rd period was a group of girls, many of whom I have had before for math classes. They were to break up into altos/sopranos1/sopranos2 and sing along with a CD that their teacher put together of the teacher playing their part on the piano for three or four songs. The sopranos went to some practice rooms, and the altos stayed in the main choir room. I followed along a bit with the music as I sat in the back of the room. They were struggling with following one of the songs - it had a lot of repeats, a Coda, and a DS sign thing. I tried to help them (it was quiet simple really, since the music would say go to measure such and such whenever it jumped around). However, they didn't really feel like accepting my help... sometimes there are problems when they know you're a math teacher (umm... as if math people can't sing or play instruments)

4th period was fine, since I only had to be there for half an hour before the regular teacher came back... pretty much just crowd control!

Anyways, this morning, I accepted the position of a middle school music teacher. Let me tell you, I was quite surprised this morning when I realized that the usual teacher expected me to conduct... and it wasn't choir and it wasn't band... it was ORCHESTRA! Um, I didn't grow up with an orchestra in my school (my graduating class had 42... kind of a small school).

Thankfully, it was small strings group - I had 18, 23 and 24 students in the three classes I had to conduct. Also thankfully, it was all the same music; thus, I was pretty familiar with the music come the third class. In the sub notes, it also said I could choose students to come up and lead the group - SCORE!

I hid my insecurity with conducting a group of musicions by helping the conducting student follow the score and keep beat. I was pretty proud of myself for remember the hand motions for 2-4 and 4-4 time :)

Math is still my love, but hey, math people know music too!