TTU is offering a summer master's degree program in music education. Students will be able to complete all of their coursework by attending class only in the summer. In order to accommodate this, we've broken up the first summer session (which is roughly four weeks long) into two mini-mesters of two weeks each. Classes meet every day for four hours. And yours truly is teaching the graduate harmony review class for students who have been away from theory for a while and did not pass our placement test.
So this week's project is figuring out how to compress what amounts to the entire undergraduate theory curriculum (admittedly in review form) into a two-week class. To keep things interesting for the students (and for me!), I've asked them to buy the Dover collection of Schubert song cycles: that book will serve as our anthology. Other materials will be drawn from the vast collection of textbooks that occupy my office.
I think the two biggest problems are content--what's important and what can I leave out and how much time should I spend on each topic--and how to keep everyone (including myself) interested for four straight hours. Homework is another issue: how much can I reasonably expect them to get done overnight, and how quickly can I grade the work and turn it around (I would basically need to turn it around immediately).
I'll keep you posted as the course unfolds.
So this week's project is figuring out how to compress what amounts to the entire undergraduate theory curriculum (admittedly in review form) into a two-week class. To keep things interesting for the students (and for me!), I've asked them to buy the Dover collection of Schubert song cycles: that book will serve as our anthology. Other materials will be drawn from the vast collection of textbooks that occupy my office.
I think the two biggest problems are content--what's important and what can I leave out and how much time should I spend on each topic--and how to keep everyone (including myself) interested for four straight hours. Homework is another issue: how much can I reasonably expect them to get done overnight, and how quickly can I grade the work and turn it around (I would basically need to turn it around immediately).
I'll keep you posted as the course unfolds.