Last week, we were lucky enough to have bassist Ranaan Meyer come and work with all of my orchestras combined. He wrote a piece for my orchestra and he came and worked on it with my classes. It is a challenging piece - especially for my beginners. It has a lot of tricky rhythms, ties, and it has 3 flats....so it was a lot of work to get my students ready for his visit. As I was trying to figure out how to teach the piece to my classes, I wished I had a few clones of myself because every section needed attention and I could only help one section at a time. Students were getting lost and frustrated and I couldn't rehearse that piece in a traditional way. That gave me the idea to record myself using my iPad doing sectionals for each group. I did 2 sectional videos for each section of the orchestra in each class and uploaded the videos to YouTube. Then, in class, we broke into groups using a few different rooms and students watched and played along with ME. I really did clone myself! It worked really well and we were able to learn that really challenging piece.
Here's an article that was just in the newpaper about the event with Ranaan Meyer:
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