Skip to main content

Introduction and Goals

Hello and welcome! My name is Kelly Walker and I teach high school band and choir in California's Bay Area. Currently, that includes Wind Ensemble, Jazz Band, Mixed Choir, Chamber Singers, and AP Music Theory during the school day. I also vocal direct 1-2 musicals per year at my school, and in the fall of 2017 we launched our new marching band program, which had been two years in the making.

Conducting my Wind Ensemble at a concert.
Running marching band rehearsal in September 2017 at 8 months pregnant. The show must go on!
I became a teacher because I believe it's my calling. For many years in college and just afterwards, I tried to avoid it by focusing on vocal performance and pursuing a career in classical singing. Eventually I decided that that lifestyle wasn't for me, but it took another year or so before I really felt called into teaching. Now that I'm here, I can't imagine doing anything else.

I believe in the importance of music in everyone's life, whether it be as a serious music scholar or as a passive appreciator. Music holds a certain power over us that no other form of expression can quite match, and one of my favorite things about teaching is seeing how music takes hold of students. This often happens in ways they don't expect, and I think it's in those moments that they grow as humans.

 My goals for this blog are:
  1. To share what's going on in my own program and to reflect on how I might improve my own teaching.
  2. To offer suggestions from my experience and expertise that might be helpful to other teachers in similar positions.
If you're a fellow teacher, I hope you find this to be a place of solidarity and help. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy getting some insight into the workings of a high school music program and find yourself inspired to make the world a little more beautiful in whatever way you can.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Instructional Resources for Marching Band

In the teaching world, it's universally accepted that teachers steal ideas and resources from each other. I've found that when you're the sole person responsible for an entire high school music program, this becomes even more crucial to survival. For every concept or skill you teach, there is guaranteed to be someone else out there who has taught it already, and maybe even someone who has created a resource for other teachers to use. With marching band in particular, the easiest way to teach certain techniques is to model or show the correct way to perform them. Below is a list of several helpful videos for different marching band-related skills. I've also included some useful articles and presentation resources by other band directors. Videos: A good beginner's tutorial on basic upper and lower body positions A stretching routine for the beginning of rehearsal Five of the most common flag tosses  for color guard Rifle toss fundamentals Marching ba...
Post a Comment
Read more

How My Personality Affects My Teaching

Have you ever taken the Myers-Briggs personality test? After taking a few different iterations of it, I've learned that my personality type is ESFJ/P, which essentially means that I: am extroverted tend to make decisions based on facts and logic rather than my intuition or theoretical information see situations through the lens of my personal experience and beliefs prefer organization, structure, and being able to see the big picture upfront You can see from the chart that I’m more or less in the middle 50% of the spectrum in all categories, and I actually fall dead center on the Judgment/Perception spectrum. According to the Myers-Briggs descriptors, this means I try to foster community amongst groups of people and help individuals find their value within that community. It also means that I am good at taking specific action in order to benefit other people. Reading over these descriptions after taking the test, I can definitely see these attributes in myself, m...
Post a Comment
Read more