Week 8 — Drill Plan · Foundations, Consolidated in Minor

Course: MUS 155 Aural Skills I · Kenosis College
Instructor: Professor Hemsworth
Unit: Learning Unit 8 of 15 (Week 8) · two sessions per week
Objectives: SLO 1 · SLO 2 · SLO 3 · SLO 5
Session: one meeting this week — the paired theory course's exam week; this course's only one-session week. Skills Check 8 runs in this session, after the drills.

Instructor-facing. Excluded from the student cartridge. Every stimulus named below is notated, with its performance script, in _keys/KEY-stimulus-sheet-week-08.md — nothing musical is spelled out here.

Named in Music Theory I: the midterm — the literacy gate over every name of the first seven weeks: staff and letters, rhythm simple and compound, major, minor three ways, the intervals narrow and wide. An hour later the same seven units arrive as sound: sung, echoed, and taken in dictation.

First time teaching this

The point of the LU: this is a one-session week, and the whole plan fits one 75-minute block. Students walk in straight from the theory midterm. The session is deliberately a release — high-energy, cumulative, singing-heavy, and it introduces nothing new by name. Everything played today has been drilled before; today it all sounds in one room, back to back, with the minor mode carrying the most weight.

The one thing that must land: the first 4-bar melodic dictation, in both modes. The message to say out loud before the first hearing: the protocol beats memory span. Nobody holds four bars in raw memory; the ritual — hear the whole, tap the pulse, land the cadence, fill the middle across four hearings — is what writes the melody down. A student who trusts the protocol today owns every dictation for the rest of the term.

The most common way it goes wrong: treating consolidation as a breather and letting the energy sag, or stopping to re-teach. The room is tired from the exam; the cure is pace, not explanation. If a rung of the medley wobbles, play it again once and move — the escalation path below says when to drop back and when to bank.

The do ritual

As always, every key change starts with the ritual: play I–IV–V–I, sing do, the class sings do–mi–sol–mi–do back (in minor: do–me–sol–me–do — the flip is itself today's first drill). Defined in full in Unit 1's plan; today it runs twice at the top, major then parallel minor on the same do.

Drill sequence

One session — the only one this week. Minute markers, stimuli by keys-sheet name, tempi, repetitions, words to say.

When they miss it

Escalation path

Drop one rung, never one week: the medley falls back to its single-unit rung (M4 alone before the M4→M5 flip; M1 before M2), the loops fall back to L1 only, and the dictation falls back to bars 1–2 of D1 (a 2-bar dictation is last week's floor — use it, then extend). Re-establish tonic the same way every time: stop, run the do ritual in the working key, resume. Abandon criterion: a segment still failing after two escalated attempts gets banked — say "the seed is planted; your recordings this week water it" — and log it. The named pick-up hook: every banked Unit 8 element re-enters Unit 9 at floor difficulty — the both-modes loops become the major/minor arpeggio echoes (do–mi–sol finally gets its name next week), and the 4-bar protocol runs again inside Unit 9's dictation with triadic skips. Nothing is lost; next week is built to catch it.

Tempo table

Rotation note: the solo-hearing ledger keeps running inside the loops segment — 6–8 quick individual turns as usual (a one-loop solo, ~20 seconds each). With the check taking the session's last quarter hour, cap solos at six today; the rotation catches up in Unit 9.