GAMA Teaching Guitar Workshop: Day 5 and Workshop Review

Friday morning we were all getting ready to leave. I know that everyone had at least one extra load to carry with them because of all the stuff that we got. A few people in our group were flying or driving to other destinations and had to have their stuff shipped. But what a great problem! Thanks again GAMA members for the donations.

We had a morning session where we worked the barre-chords some more. "Sittin on the Dock of the Bay" I think and some other things that I don't remember because I didn't have my notebook. it was packed up already.


We went over to Spivey Hall and performed our ensembles with our groups. It was really nice. The Spivey hall folks set up the stage for us between groups and dimmed the lights when a group left the stage. It made you feel like a pro. It was a lot of fun. My group, "Kathy and the Boys" performed "Some Kind of Sunset (Tango)" and "St. Joshua Infirmary" from the H.O.T. and Jerry Snyder ensemble books. Actually, "St. Joshua" was a medley of our own making because we liked "Joshua Fit the Battle" and "St. James Infirmary" so much.

Afterwords we took the workshop photo on the Spivey Hall staircase with our guitars and headed back to our classroom one last time. We packed up our stuff and wrote thank you letters to GAMA and to a manufacturer. I wrote my manufacturer letter to the company that makes Aurora strings. They're multi-colored. Your female students will think they're really pretty and I think that they have a lot of potential as an instructional aid for beginners.

Overall, I thought that the workshop was fantastic. I've played the guitar for 20 years, taught private lessons for 15 and taught classroom guitar for 3 and I still had plenty to learn. Teaching guitar in the classroom setting is just a different beast. It was great to have a week of just seeing what others are doing.

If you teach a guitar class already I think you'd get a lot out of this workshop if only to preview and play through all the guitar books we received. If you don't play guitar yet but would like to teach it in your classroom, then this class is especially geared toward you. A large portion of the workshop is focused on getting inexperienced teachers some guitar skills.

I never found much on the web about the workshops except for their site. So, I tried to be pretty thorough with my review. If you have any questions about the workshop feel free to comment below and I'll try to get back to you.

Suzanne, who is the workshop chair, said they're working on revamping the website. It's linked here. They are also forming groups on facebook and myspace.

In my future posts I'll review some of the books we got at the workshop.