Teaching

The first week of the semester was a 90% breeze.

I am teaching more of an overload this semester than I usually do, with two lecture classes each Tuesday/Thursday, nine hour-long voice lessons to MT majors and music majors and one non-major (this load is 2/3 of what I am contractually obligated to teach), plus the weekly MDMT performance class and a conducting lesson each week.

But the first week of the semester is a no-lesson week, so I had time last week to prep lectures and PowerPoint presentations, talk with students, attend the department information session for students, lunch on Monday and Wednesday with music colleagues (Monday at Southwest Diner, Wednesday at Sasha’s on Demun), and attend the university’s opening convocation.

One lecture class is new for me, created out of new cloth, as it were. I’m teaching MUSC 1070 Topics in Music, a course in Webster University’s general education program. The topic is Hamilton, Hammerstein, and Hair: how Broadway musical theatre and American pop culture influence each other. The course is writing intensive, so students are writing something almost every one of the 29 class sessions. And they’ll have four primary writing assignments that I’ll read and mark and return and expect rewrites, after which I’ll grade according to the writing rubric used for all gen-ed writing-intensive courses.

The class roster includes students from Nepal and India and Armenia, in addition to the USA. In fact, more than half of the class speaks at home a language other than English. I’m revising each of my class sessions to include more written expression, and more assessment of “is the class getting what I’m teaching?”. (Thus the 10% that wasn’t such a breeze last week.)

MUSC 2910 Applied Musicianship for Musical Theatre has been a staple of my Fall semesters for the better part of a decade. The class, for sophomore MT majors, is now a well-oiled machine with loads of experiential activity and application of concepts. I call it a lecture class, but it’s really more of a concept-to-experience class.

Webster voice lessons started yesterday. I’ve pre-assigned at least three songs to each of the students, so we’ll start with les trois coups, as it were. Two of my voice students are first-years, so they are new to me. I love getting new folks into the studio!

In the midst of this, I rather wisely—thank you very much—decided this year to minimize the private studio work during the first week of school. I taught one-off private voice lessons during the ten days from August 5, then didn’t teach again until last Friday afternoon. This week I’m teaching private students at Webster four of the days in later afternoon. Evenings will be spent with Maisie and dust, listening to BBC Proms concerts on replay. And revising lectures.

The full voice studio schedule begins the day after Labor Day. Most weeks I’m posting 26 hours of voice teaching in the private studio.

This week’s topic in MUSC 1070? Look below . . . .