VCE

My birthday is over for another year. I got some fantastic presents and a very enjoyable dinner out with family and friends. I had a lot of fun with friends and a now empty bottle of Vodka later in the night too...

I've been working so hard lately, I've been coming home exhausted at the end of the week. There is so much to be done in a day that I seem to be one of the last cars in the carpark every night. The department has a big hole in it at the moment, which is a lot of the problem, the other classroom teacher has left to pursue another job at a different school and we were unable to fill the position with a music teacher before the school year started and thus have a non music teacher infront of the year 7 classes.

We're getting geared up for going on tour at the moment, to China this year. We are having two new instrumental teachers starting, and moving the instrumental lessons to a different area in the school. I've been writing lesson plans for my own classes, and the other teacher. I've had an enormous increase in the number of year 9 students in OzRock and teaching students to play drums, piano, guitar, bass and vocals at the same time in the one room is hard work. I'm also recently the VCE teacher, which means getting my head around the curriculum while teaching it in order to prepare these students for the big exams at the end of the year.

I travelled to Melbourne this weekend to go to the VCE music teachers conference to learn more about the VCE course. I've come away from it feeling a lot more confident about what I'm supposed to cover this year. It's a lot about sifting through all the theory stuff in order to teach the right thing, rather than just teaching everything. At this stage I'm feeling really good about it all. See how things go when we all get closer to the exams...