Please help me with 6th Grade General Music

Percussion was a pretty solid go-to for me when I had shitty middle school general music classes. Does your high school have any beater/secondhand drumline equipment? They can beat the hell out of those without damaging them, unlike concert percussion.

If you've got access to enough computers, or you're at a 1:1 school, you could consider SoundTrap. It's easy to use loop-building and sequencing software that the kids can create cool beats with. I had a seventh grader subtly record me talking to another student, and she made a hilarious beat out of it. You can work in basic song structure into a project (what's a verse, chorus, bridge, etc.--build different beats for each section and share a common element between them), or just let them run wild with whatever (so long as they're working on their beats). Best of all, you can eat up a whole class working on part of one of these projects. Its fully loaded version is free for 30 days, and even after that expires, you're still left with a good stack of sounds.

As far as the type that yell out their hatred for music with joyous abandon and call you fat and lazy, welcome to the hell that is teaching a "dumper" class. I had one or two every year, and I cleared my conscience by always trying stuff like I and others have mentioned above for a good 5 weeks or so, and if it didn't take, we went straight into paper/pencil, boring-as-hell music theory in a classroom run like a GRE testing room. There was no talking of any sort for any reason other than to ask a purely music- related question. Everything else was written up as a willfull distraction (hey, the math teachers could do it).

I only had one class in my whole time doing middle school that stayed at that level for the whole year. All of the other classes eventually made it out of "the theory dungeon" and back into fun shit. It was remarkable how disciplined they were with the instruments once they knew what misery they'd go back to if they screwed up enough.

/r/MusicEd Thread