Competencies

Competencies in Resume

During this fall, I have been student teaching underneath the supervision of Mr. Jonathan Ross at Bardonia Elementary and Mrs. Lauren Palazolo at Felix Festa Middle School. As someone that grew up in the Nanuet School District for my entire K-12 school career, it was important to me to student teach in a district that was larger and in a music program that is set up differently than the one I grew up in. During my eight week working at Bardonia Elementary with Mr. Ross, I was blown away by the creativity and school spirit that he brings to his general music classes.

Although I am fresh out of my undergraduate music education program, I have extensive experiences working with children across my time in college and during high school. Two of my work study programs involved working with students and tutoring them in literary and writing skills. These programs opened my eyes to the cross curricular possibilities of incorporating ELA, math, science, social studies, art, etc. concepts into the general music space.

In the summer of 2019, I was a group leader at Ramaquois Day Camp, where I had previously been a counselor for two summers and attended as a camper for eight summers. During my experience in the summer of 2019, I worked with a group of eighteen fourth graders and learned the importance of being a friendly, responsible, reliable adult among a group of impressionable young girls.

Competencies through Expansive Music Teaching Capabilities

In this video, I am pre-recording an asynchronous fifth grade trombone lesson for my students at Bardonia Elementary. In order to work on their playing skills independently, I used the program Screencastify to provide the students both a video of myself playing the trombone and the music for them all to follow along with. Although I studied voice in my undergraduate program, I played trombone all throughout middle and high school and feel very comfortable and confident teaching it to beginner students. In this lesson, the students are continuing to learn the melody of the pop piece "Fight Song" by Rachel Platten. This song is culturally responsive because it is a song that many of our students know and listen to during their free time by a female artist that is currently in the music industry.

Competencies in Preparing and Performing Vocal Repertoire

This is a video of my Junior Recital, which I performed on November 10, 2019. My studio teacher, Professor Donald George, allowed me to pick all of the music for my recital. It was important to me to include a female composer in my recital, so I included three lesser-known pieces by the incredible romantic composer Amy Beach. My second section of music is all Yiddish music with lyrics by a distant relative of mine from the early 20th century. My third section of music represents my love of Broadway with a selection of pieces from the musical "Ragtime" which takes place in early 20th century America. Including music that so closely relates to my cultural identity made me feel emotionally invested in each and every piece I performed. As a music teacher, I plan to incorporate my students' cultural identities in the music we listen to, study, create, and perform.