What a week

Well, I'm at the end of week 4. I've been in working on my classroom for two weeks and it looks much better. There is still more to do but I'm taking the afternoon off, I deserve to have a little fun on a Saturday. I have my two storage rooms cleaned and organized. I threw away almost a dumpster full of old, unusable stuff. I still have a few more things to throw out but I'll do that later.
Thursday I went to Ketchikan so that I could talk to the people at the music store. They had been waiting to hear from me. We went through my list of things that I needed and they gave me prices so that I could go back to my superintendent with a purchase order. Needless to say I spent 4 hours there. I needed new drum heads, the current ones have been patched with scotch and masking tape. It's a little scary. I needed a repair kit, a drum key, and a price on digital pianos and new bass drums. The school has two upright pianos and neither one is in even OK shape. The one in my classroom is about 50 cents flat and there is about an octave that is half a step flatter than the rest of the piano and isn't resonating well. The piano over at the high school, which I haven't seen but have been told about, is falling apart, literally. So, being on an island in Alaska, it's hard to get a piano tuner so I pitched the idea of a digital piano. That idea was well received. I ordered one. Next in my instrument mess is two timpani, which both need new heads but will wait till next year, three drum sets but only two snare drums, an assortment of cymbals and toys, a set of vibes, the pipes to I think a marimba but there are no bars so it's getting pitched, and a 36 inch bass drum which also needs new heads. Every drum I have hasn't had new heads put on in quite some time judging by the appearance, and the lack of drum key. Getting large drum heads in Alaska is difficult, the shipping alone is generally more then the heads themselves. This is the case with the timpani and bass drum heads. Getting timpani heads isn't too bad but 36" bass drum heads is a problem. I explained that ordering the two heads that I needed for the bass drum would cost half the price of buying a new, smaller drum with better heads and a new cradle. I got to order the new bass drum. I left the office doing the happy dance. My instrument collection lacks any sort of double reed instruments but in the future I plan on trying to get some. My next problem is that there is a very bad dent on the tuba. Instead of the tubing being round is this section it is almost flat. It's going in for repair to try to make it playable, then maybe next year we'll get a new one. It's really great to have supportive administration. Now if only I could approach the subject of general music curriculum because we don't have a complete set of anything more current than 1978 or possibly 1981. I just have a hard time going in and saying 'hey, I need $6,000 for K-5 curriculum, and add another $1,000 if you want me to add the 6th grade stuff.'
I have no idea what I'm going to teach yet, but I plan on working all next week, when I'm not in inservice, on my first at least month of lesson plans. I have plenty of instruments to do really cool Orff lessons. I have tons for recorders including alto recorders. I think maybe in the future I'd like to order some tenor recorders and maybe some bass recorders and do a recorder choir. I have enough recorders that 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade could do recorders. I have 20 sets of bells, about 25 hand drums, 5 of each type of xylophone that is generally used in Orff arrangements, two or three full sets including chromatics of Boom whackers, amid all the other instruments you would find in a general music classroom. There is a lot of potential here.
While working on my room today, I met the counselor from the middle and high school. He's very nice and we talked for a little while. There are 25 high school students signed up for band, it's the most he's ever seen signed up. I'm excited. We'll see how instrumentation pans out and maybe I can get some people to pick up a second instrument. A lot of people are excited that I'm here and amazed at how organized the music building is so far. Just wait till I'm totally done.
I'm excited about school starting but I don't totally feel ready just because there is still so much more that I need to do.
I did finally get an answer about my certification. I had originally sent in my application for certification at the end of June. It was returned to me in mid July because I had forgotten to put my citizenship on the fingerprint cards. After having mailed that back to them, I found out that I needed to send them my test scores from the Basic Skills test. I called later to check to see if they had gotten everything, they couldn't give me any kind of answer. Great. Finally a few days ago I noticed on my online banking that one of the pending transactions was the fees for certification. I thought this was pretty good but still couldn't find out anything online or from the people there. Finally yesterday, my classroom phone rang and it was the secretary to the superintendent asking about my certification. She had just received a phone call from the head of the department of education stating they had received my test scores but didn't have an application. I explained what I had done and she suggested that I call the department head directly. I called there and explained my situation and told her about the pending transaction and she found where everything had been placed and apologized for the inconvenience and that everything should go through in a couple of days. That was really good news since school starts on the 25th.
It's been a fun roller coaster so far, we'll see how things go.