Brad is the Director of Upper School Director of Instrument Ensembles at William Penn Charter School. A true educator at heart, Brad tells us his favorite part of the job is looking at the confident and proud faces of his students after the final note of a performance.
Transcript
>> My name is Brad Ford [assumed spelling], I'm the director of upper school bands at William Penn Charter School. My days at school are usually kind of composed of lessons, instrumental lessons. I teach sixth through 12th grade. Sixth grade I teach beginners. Everyone at our school takes instrumental lessons on band instruments, woodwinds or brass or percussion. I'm also the assistant director of the seven eight band and then I direct the upper school, which is basically like a high school, which is called upper school bands at Penn Charter, which is composed of ninth through 12th, woodwind, brass, percussion. And it's about 65, 70 kids, which is one of the larger activities. Also director of jazz bands, director of the pit orchestra for the musical, and assistant director for the fall play. Being a music teacher, too, it's a lot of PR, it's a lot of -- we need to make sure that we are working to our clientele. And that's tough. And that takes a lot of finesse from being a music teacher, and it also takes a lot of communication and organization to make sure that you are asked to do more gigs after that one. And we treat them as gigs. We're semi-professional musicians we call ourselves and the kids latch on to that. So students listen to themselves a lot and they evaluate themselves a lot, which I think we don't do enough sometimes. And you need to really learn how to be critical, but to the point to where you're being successful. Because sometimes people are overly critical of themselves and they can't find the ways out. That's my job. My job is to help them find the ways out when there are no answers that they can find.
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