The MENC Guitar Education Team has created a “Hot List” for MENC members interested in attending the Teaching Guitar Workshops, which are available exclusively for MENC members during the summer of 2009.
In addition to instruction, workshop participants receive a free guitar, guitar publications and accessories, and three graduate college credits from Duquesne University. The entire package is worth about $1,800, and participants pay only travel and housing expenses and a $150 application fee.
Locations for the 2009 summer workshops include Atlanta, Georgia; Gahanna, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Bose, Idaho; Reston, Virginia; San Diego, California; St. Louis, Missouri; and Colorado Springs, Colorado.
The MENC Guitar Education Team receives generous fur ding from the Guitar & Accessories Marketing Association (GAMA) and the International Music Products Association (NAMM). The Mary Pappert School of Music at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offers three graduate credits at no additional cost.
Since the inception of the Teaching Guitar Workshops program, more than 1,500 teachers have provided guitar classes for more than 700,000 students.
Suzanne Shull, Chair of the MENC Guitar Education Team and Teaching Guitar Workshops, said, “The guitar is the most popular and versatile of all instruments. It has become an integral part of music programs around the nation, increasing the number of students who are actively involved in music making. From upper elementary grades through high school, the guitar is a proven vehicle for navigating the richness of a music education propelled by the National Standards for Music Education.”
Visit www.guitaredunet.org for workshop dates and applications. For more information, contact Mark Koch at 412-396-4939 or koch duq.edu.
Send an e-mail to Hotlist@guitaredunet.org to get on the priority registration list for 2009. This gets your name in the system to receive the application.
The $150 application fee is refundable if the applicant is not accepted or cannot attend.
When Connie Christy started teaching music at Aynor Elementary six years ago, she found children struggling to clap a beat. Even a simple rhythmic African stone-passing game left the youngest kids in tears.
Within four years, Aynor was one of 10 national winners of the Grammy Gold Signature Award for excellence in elementary music education. Its steel and African/world drum bands are in demand, performing at festivals and events across the state. Christy’s music classes play not just rhythm sticks and recorders, but glockenspiels, drums and guitars.
Besides teaching music, reinforcing academic goals and exposing students in this two-stoplight farming community to world culture, Christy uses music to teach larger life lessons. “What I’d like for them to take from this is that when they cooperated, they were able to make wonderful things happen,” she says.
Christy, 43, who plays six instruments, including the saxophone professionally, has a gentle manner that masks a competitive spirit. Her program is carefully structured to motivate students to work hard and work together.
“I’ve got something they want,” she says. Blessed with a supportive administration, a spacious classroom and ample storage space, Christy tantalizes her young charges with a complete African drumming ensemble, a regular drumming set, electronic keyboards, a piano, glockenspiels and 24 guitars. Each 50-minute class includes five to eight different musical activities.
Christy brought the drumming curriculum to Aynor her first year there. The steel and world drums demand cooperation and make success accessible relatively quickly, she says. She first teaches simple drum beats, moving the most beat-competent students to more sophisticated arrangements. Students quickly learn that everyone has to work together to make music. “All of a sudden, everybody plays, and everybody feels successful,” she says.
Starting in third grade, Christy’s music classes serve as a year-long audition for the school’s marquee drum bands. Christy keeps tabs on how well students pick up concepts and take direction. The top 30 students earn spots on the Steel Pan Jam steel drum band; the next 25 take places in the world drum band. A 78-member chorus rounds out the performing groups.
The transformation from rural kids bused to Aynor from all over the county to the dynamic musicians who have played at Broadway on the Beach at nearby Myrtle Beach starts in Christy’s youngest classes. She begins with simple beats, rhythmic clapping, singing and moving, breaking music down into a long string of small successes.
When first-graders play glockenspiels, she removes the flat notes, so even a mis-strike doesn’t sound bad. With the guitars, Christy puts smiley-face stickers on the frets to mark the fingering for simple chords, allowing third-graders to strum a basic song.
But for all her own musical training and teaching skill, Christy believes having a son with Down syndrome had the most profound effect on her as a teacher. Her son, now 20, taught her to think of every single child as special, she says.
“It really made me a much more compassionate teacher with every child.”
