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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: pupils, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. Pauline Hall recalls her early years and how her teaching career began

By Pauline Hall


I spent my first seven years living in Amen Court in the City of London, 100 metres from the northwest corner of St Paul’s Cathedral. I still have vivid memories of this time including recollections of lavish children’s parties given by Dean Inge (the so-called Gloomy Dean) for the cathedral choristers, hearing the call of the cats’ meat man who fed the rat-catching office cats, and the daily round of the lamplighter who tolerated the ‘help’ of a seven year-old assistant.

Then my family moved to Yorkshire where I had my first piano lessons. My teacher was Isobel Purdon who I now realize was a first-rate (if eccentric) musician. She knitted throughout lessons but still managed to hear all my mistakes, and I remember seeing her on her way to the Stranraer ferry (probably 200 miles away) with the neck of her double bass sticking out of the roof of her Austin 7. At music festivals she would conduct the school orchestra with a knitting needle; very embarrassing for the young orchestra members but it didn’t stop us winning more often than not.

On leaving school I studied piano and violin at The Royal Academy of Music. It was war time and buzz bombs were falling regularly over central London. We often had to dive under tables as the air raid warnings sounded–one notable occasion was right in the middle of my first violin exam.

After graduating, I embarked on my teaching career. After a year teaching very young children I felt the lack of inspirational music for this age group and so began to write a piano method which was logical, well-paced, and at the same time attractive and enjoyable. Producing a simple tutor for young children that addresses all these needs is a challenge, but as I was already a teacher I had the opportunity to learn on the job, so to speak, and all the pieces were tried and tested. As a piano teacher, a mother of three, and the wife of a busy doctor, time was scarce and my first drafts were written sitting at the ironing-board. Those initial sketches grew into the Piano Time series, a method used by many thousands of teachers and pupils across the globe today.

Tarantella

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Dinosaurs’ Bedtime March

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On Parade

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Playful Plesiosaurs

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At this point I would like to mention that however dedicated the piano teacher is, and however rewarding their teaching career, there will be times when it can seem like drudgery. The late Philip Cranmer, who had a long and distinguished career as a teacher, once put an interesting proposition. Are you a piano teacher and have you ever taught Für Elise? Here is Philip Cranmer’s proposition:

“Let there be a teacher who has taught the piano for 40 years on an average for 44 weeks in each year. And at any time during that period let there be one of that teacher’s pupils learning Für Elise, playing it through twice at each lesson. Then the teacher will have heard the E/Sharp seesaw 180,000 times. The actual figure arrived at by multiplying out is 179,520, but the extra 480 takes account of all the times the pupil has played one too many because he has miscounted the beat.”

Although there are moments of drudgery, the rewards of introducing young pupils to the infinite joy of music making must make this one of the most satisfying and fulfilling of all careers.

Pauline Hall is the author of Piano Time, Oxford University Press’s award-winning series for young pianists. Oxford Sheet Music is distributed in the United States by Peters Edition.

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The post Pauline Hall recalls her early years and how her teaching career began appeared first on OUPblog.

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2. TEACHERS ACCOMPANY STUDENTS HOME ON BUS FOR SAFETY

NOTE TO SELF: SOME TEACHERS GO ON AND ABOVE THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM

It wasn't that long ago that students who walked to and from school playfully jostled each other, while still others took public transportation.

Passing courses aren't the only things students attending schools in London, England, have to worry about these days. Seems that stabbings are becoming more and more frequent and it's not part of their teaching manual or job description, but some teachers are worried enough to personally intervene.

In the wake of concern about the level of knife crime among young people, one London teacher tells of the extraordinary lengths he and his staff go to, to keep their pupils safe.

Headteacher Tom Mannion surveyed the street from his seat on a London bus and pointed to where one of his pupils was stabbed last month.

Read the entire story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7448817.stm

Seems like centuries ago now that teachers main concern was ensuring that their pupils learn the 3 R's. Sad and a sign of the times that they have to turn into bodyguards and it's to their credit that some do.

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3. “Subprime” Ready for Prime Time


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The American Dialect Society has announced that the Word of the Year for 2007, as voted by members at its annual meeting, is subprime. It’s a sturdy choice, given how much media attention has circulated this past year about the financial crisis in the housing sector blamed on mortgage loans made to high-risk borrowers with credit ratings that are less than prime. Subprime (sometimes hyphenated as sub-prime) might not be as flashy as some previous selections by the ADS, such as truthiness in 2005 (comedian Stephen Colbert’s term for “truth from the gut” unencumbered by facts) or plutoed in 2006 (’demoted or devalued in the manner of Pluto losing planet status’). Nonetheless, the word has an intriguing history, even for people like me who aren’t terribly fascinated by the lending practices of banks.

(more…)

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