Thomas J. West Music

I was a middle school and/or high school band director in public schools in central and southeast Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey for the first nine years of my teaching career. I still teach middle school and high school instrumental music, but I no longer am directly involved on a daily basis with a marching band and concert band program.

Separation from that lifestyle has br...

In America and other cultures, Christmas is one of the most anticipated and revered holidays om the calendar. The festival of light five days after the winter solstice has been a celebration of the days becoming longer since ancient druids in years B.C. There are at least a dozen different celebrations that occur during this season in all manner of religions and cult...

As November ends and rolls into December, my father, James T. West, will be leaving his full-time work for official retirement.

We all have heard the stories of "the American dream" and the self-made man. My dad is a self-made man in every sense of the word. He began his first job at the age of fourteen and has worked consistently for nearly sixty years. He ...

Yesterday, I published an editorial about my perspective on the child abuse scandal in the Penn State Football program. I received many positive comments...

I was an undergraduate at The Pennsylvania State University from 1991 to 1998 (yes, that's seven years - I switched majors). I was a member of the Penn State Marching Blue Band from 1991 to 1995 and was along for the thrilling ride of the 1994 Rose Bowl season with the likes of Kerry Collins, KiJana ...

I ride a commuter bus to work each day. This morning, the bus was standing-room-only - so much so that I couldn't even get past the driver's cabin to cling to the rails in an illusion of safety. In one of those strange phenomenons of human social behavior, people forced to stand only traverse to the m...

As I go along in this human experience, I grow continually convinced that our attitudes have a direct effect on what we end up experiencing.

There are many and varied definitions of the word "attitude" in its various contexts. My current working definition of "attitude...

Many times as teachers (and as parents) we feel we are communicating our expectations to young people clearly. Many times we are, but it simply hasn't been said enough times.

Or maybe, we need to make sure that our intended audience is paying attention.

Many times as teachers (and as parents) we feel we are givi...

I have been an opponent of the No Child Left Behind Act  since its inception in 2001. While it brought needed accountability to our public education system, its methods and financial penalties have, in my thirteen years of experience as a public educator, been ...

There are a lot of very clever pieces of humor circulating social media right now about the Occupy Wall Street protests.  The image on this blog post was one I collected from Facebook this morning. It lampoons the #OWS slogan by stating a similarity in clas...