St. Cecilia II Part 3 -- Coordinated Tracks
One thing we tried this year was coordinating some of the tracks of classes ahead of time. One of my pet peeves with SCA classes is that there usually isn’t any cohesion between classes. Even if there are themed tracks, one class usually doesn’t lead into the next. For Renaissance Dance classes this is alright since our goal is to memorize new dances, but I like the idea of later material building off earlier material.
So we experimented for this year. It was recommended that I put in a beginner track, and with some reluctance I did. :P I say reluctance because I’ve had the experience of offering beginner classes and having no one show up. But hey, if no one came I could use it as evidence for not putting it in next year. I also wanted to have something for intermediate players to improve their playing skills. Originally I thought of maybe arranging private lesson time during the day for people who wanted it, but was eventually convinced to have a track of fundamentals classes. These two tracks were coordinated beforehand.
For the beginner track my original thought was to have people attend that track all day. If you were in the track you had to stay because one class built on the next. I’d treat this track like a beginning Lindy Hop progressive. One doesn’t pick and choose what classes to take when one is in a Lindy Hop progressive. One stays and learns because otherwise one will get lost. I was convinced otherwise for the beginning musician bootcamp. Instead we made it so that if you did stay all day you would definitely learn things and one class would build off the other. But, everyone has different backgrounds. Lots of people took piano lessons as a kid and can read pitch and rhythm, but don’t know how to say, play recorder. Lots of people fumble on recorder but know how to muddle along with the local recorder group. I think this progressive but not system worked well.
For the Fundamentals track the classes were related but not progressive. Each class was more or less independent from the others. This was fine.
I picked the pool of teachers I wanted for these tracks and coordinated a couple google-hangout meetings a few months ago. We figured out what the curriculum should be and divided up the classes.
There were things I liked about having done this, and things I didn’t like. I’ll start with the things I liked. I liked being able to brainstorm with the other teachers. I liked how the tracks shaped up. The beginner track I thought was particularly well organized (having not gone to any of the classes in it, though.) For fundamentals I liked the classes we came up with. There were all good, solid classes. I think we could do different ones next year.
Things I didn’t like were that I heard some of the classes steered way off topic. Or some teachers didn’t know what they were getting into. I’m particularly confused about that, since said teacher was in the meeting! But whatever. It is what it is. I wish more people attended the articulation class, and there were some people I really wanted in my intonation class that didn’t come/stay. I liked having people I knew I could talk to about the content of my class. I didn’t like trying to coordinate a meeting with 10 people. -_- I didn’t like having two meetings with different sets of people. And in general this is more work than just being like “Bring me classes!” I need to be careful about giving myself more work.
For next year I feel confident that I have a grasp of what the beginner track should look like. I think it will be a recurring part of St. Cecilia in spite of my initial reservations. I’m OK with this. We’re going to write up a curriculum for the track. In particular the rhythm and pitch classes could use some good handouts. I also might put Aaron’s simplifying music class before easy ensemble playing. But at the same time, if easy ensemble playing was what I thought it was going to be that should not have been necessary. :P Also if St. Cecilia gets extended this track may get more awesome, I mean longer. Or if not longer in classes, I might put in more breathing room.
On a side-note, we ended up putting the beginner track in the Church’s nursery. Luckily the attendees took it in good fun. It doesn’t help when talking about the track far before I figured out what room it would be in, we’d dubbed it the Baby Beginner track. XD We are terrible people.
Now that I know what the beginner track should more or less look like, I might have meetings for each track instead of both tracks together. That will limit the number of people I have to coordinate for each meeting.
Also maybe I’ll try to organize a post-meeting with the track teachers?? Would that be too much??
I also want to put together a track for improvisation next year. That’s something that’s sorely lacking in SCA music, and I think people could use some hand-holding to get started. It’s something that would be nice to coordinate.
Gah, that means at least three meetings next year! Meaning More Work. But I can get started on it earlier because now I know what these meeting look like.
I think these tracks really raised the bar for the quality of classes this year.