This text includes provocative essays written by scholars to refresh both teacher and student, successful and understandable techniques for teaching through performance, and teaching methods that engage students at all levels.

    Jager-Hyman also offers a startlingly frank appraisal of the college admission process and the important roles race and class continue to play in a student's efforts to attend the best school possible.

    Signposted for coverage of FENTO standards, with full coverage of the C&G 7407, 7302, and Cert Ed courses. Retaining the unique style of the previous editions, this is an essential text for students and qualified teachers.

    a world where salvation and ambition and teenage angst collide in strange ways no outsider could ever understand, unless you read American Band." --Michael Bamberger, author of Wonderland: A Year in the Life of an American High School Every fall, marching bands take to the field in a uniquely American ritual. From the stands, it looks easy. You don’t see them sweat. For millions of kids, band is more than a show. It’s a rite of passage—a first foray into leadership and adult responsibility, and a chance to learn what it means to be part of a community. Nowhere is band more serious than at Concord High School in Elkhart, Indiana, where the entire town is involved with the success of its defending state champion band, the Marching Minutemen. In the place where this tradition may have originated, in the city that became the band instrument capital of the world, band is a religion. But it’s not the only religion, as director Max Jones discovers. After four decades, Jones’s single-minded devotion to musical excellence has fallen out of step with a younger generation increasingly focused on personal salvation. In what his students do not know is his final season of directing, he has assembled his most ambitious show ever, for the strongest senior class he has ever directed. Amid conflicting notions of greatness, the band marches through a season that starts in hope and promise, progresses through uncertainty and disappointment, and ends, ultimately, in redemption. AMERICAN BAND is an unusually intimate chronicle of life, in all its triumph, disappointment, and drama, in the kind of community in which most of America lives. It is an especially timely portrait, capturing as it does the spirit of the heartland at a time of profound change. If you have ever been—or yearned to be—part of something bigger than yourself, you will be rooting for the kids whose voices fill this book.