tears

A Holiday Tear-Jerker Story

From my boss, Fred, whose name has been changed to protect him from the jealousy of other superintendants who haven't done as good a job at creating a fantastic work environment:

"Hello Everybody,

I just wanted to take a moment to write to you to wish you all a restful winter break. This past semester has been the busiest of my career in education. In this time of year where we reflect on what we can be grateful for, I want you to know I am grateful for each of you.

Thus, I have attached a photo story I made to honor of you. Please take the time to watch it when you get the chance. We in the world of education don’t get holiday bonuses as many folks in the business world do. As superintendent of schools and as your principal I want you to know that if I could…we would.

The photo story I have attached follows the theme of a song by Tish Hinojosa…”Everything You Wish”.

My wish for you this holiday season IS that everything you wish comes true. If your wish is for better health….I wish that for you. If your wish is for quiet time with your family….I wish that for you. I wish for all your dreams could come true.

On that same topic…one of my dreams HAS come true. To work in a school where all staff members are focused on the needs of kids. Where every staff member is doing the best work they have ever done…and where every staff member is willing to whatever it takes to become better at what they do.

An educational leader can be given no greater gift.

I did my best to do an accounting of the folks in this building who really make a difference. I am old and forgetful…so if there is someone I somehow missed…please forgive me. I hope you have a happy and restful winter break. I look forward to seeing you all again in January.

With the deepest respect and appreciation,

Fred."

Fred wrote compliments to each one of us. I could tell from what he wrote, and what I know about each teacher I work with, that Fred is able to see right straight to the core of who we each are.

Holy cow.

My response. This stuff has been on my chest for a while and needed to get it out. I hope he, nor anyone else cuz I sent it to the whole bunch, minds that it's a bit wordy. I tend to get wordy when I get choked up.


"Dear Fred,
My first job out of graduate school I worked for a guy who wore hand-tailored suits and Italian leather shoes. Those of us taking care of "his" art collection didn't make enough to rise above the poverty line in our area, even though we brought master's degrees and professional experience to the job. We were never mentioned at the fancy opening-night galas and we had to beg and plead for the training we knew would help us do our jobs better.

My second job I worked for a woman who made me read her mind. She gave me a task and then berated me for not doing it how she wanted. She expected me to stay busy but never gave me enough meaningful work to do. Then the CEO made me his personal secretary (without asking me), yelled at me in front of the other staff, and expected me to jump the moment he snapped his fingers. I felt like there was no use for my brain any more.

My third (full-time) job, well, I'm pretty sure your shoes aren't Italian. There's a pay scale so I never have to guess at what my salary is going to be nor worry that I can't afford to have an acceptable standard of living with which to grow my family and my future. Your communications are effective so I never have to guess how to do my job. Instead of being told, "I could have 200 people lined up for your job tomorrow," (which was technically true) I hear, "it's just a suggestion, you know music," which makes me feel as though my experience and my knowledge are worth something, and makes me want to try harder. I never lack for stimulating professional development and I'd rather sit down at a staff potluck than anonymously attend a hundred galas. Even better, there are kids around!-- kids who constantly reach into parts of our hearts and minds that we have a tendency to keep a little shuttered. Best of all, you exude real warmth and respect toward your staff and promote the same among us all.

Your gift to me, and I hope the rest of us, is the value you genuinely place on each one of us, not to mention a pretty wonderful environment in which to spend 9-10 hours of our day and provide for our families.

Thank you."

Fred made me cry. He made four other teachers cry, I think. Maybe more. 'Scuse me while I reach for the kleenex.

The power in the point

I'm having the kids (6th, 7th-9th) do Power Points about band this week. This insanely smart lesson plan that I came up with in the shower last week and refined while I was talking to my knitter friend yesterday accomplishes a variety of things:

1) They get to use their laptops.

The kids LOVE. their laptops. You know the movie Annie Hall? Where Woody Allen (I'm not that old, I've seen the movie once, and I was depressed afterward, but it was really funny) tries to tell Annie how much he loves her and he just keeps saying "loooeerrrve" trying to convey the intensity of his feeling, as in, "I love you, I looovve you, I mean, I loooeeeerrrrve you!" The kids loooeeerrrve their laptops. They get to use 'em in my class all week. (My other favorite line from that movie is when Annie is parking the car and it's kind of far away from the sidewalk and Woody Allen gets out and exclaims, "Hey, we can walk to the curb from here!")

2) They are not passively watching a movie.

Most of the really awesome movies about music are about people who have some involvement with illegal substances (Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, to name two recent examples of biopics depicting the musicians' drug use) so those are out. The ones appropriate for middle school-aged students are a little bit cliche-ed, such as Mr. Holland's Opus. That leaves non-music related movies, which you can still make a case for because we can still "listen to, analyze, evaluate and describe music" a la Standard 5, but it gets complicated and I just get tired of watching them watch movies, you know? They're not creating anything.

3) They are still forced to think about band on a minimal level.

This is, after all, band class. There's really no point in having them rehearse when I know perfectly well they are not going to play anyway for the two weeks of Winter Break (otherwise known as Christmas vaCATION!!!!). We (meaning I) had enough stress last week getting ready for the performance, so it's better to have them work on something else in a summative kind of way. They have to cover the topic, "if an important person visited our school to find out about what we do, what would you put into a slide show about our band for them to watch?" They're all a little nervous now about just who that important person might be.

4) Speaking of being creative, they get to put their own personality into what they are doing.

After weeks and weeks of really traditional rehearsals where they are started and stopped and told how to sit and stand and hold their every last digit, and what to play when and how and told to check their posture every second and hold their dang trumpets up (except that I don't say dang in class), they get to lounge on the walls by the heaters, plug their earphones in, and relax. A lot of the students are using images that mean something to them (e.g. cars), colors that they like (e.g. pink sparklies), and are saying whatever they feel is important to them (e.g. "I like to eat cookies and I LIKE GIRLS").

5) I can chill.

I'm just sitting up on top of my tall chair watching the middle school kids bounce around the room saving their power points, and for the last forty-five minutes I've been posting grades and blogging. I don't have to stand in front of them and make them look at me for the whole class, I don't have to yell or talk or correct or encourage or cajole or brainwash or tease or get mad or pretend to get mad or disgusted or explain, or any of the other thousand and five things I have to do to get them to show some effort and play the music correctly. I can just keep my eye on them to make sure nobody gets a black eye or starts to bleed, and catch up on a few things, like, um, making a lesson plan for this lesson.

Oh the concert!!

Last night was the concert and I was still on a post-concert high 24 hours later...'til about an hour ago when I crashed...but that's not part of our story today!

The concert was so good, at least, so I heard. It's hard to have the perspective of how good it is when you're right in the middle of it, running it. You just kind of go from one thing to the next, gesture and shepherd students onto and off the stage, deal with last minute problems (I think I still have two spare clarinet reeds in the pocket of my green velvet jacket) and try not to let the stage lights blind you or say anything dumb into the microphone.

The order of the program was: 5th grade, Jennifer*, Sasha, 6th grade, Kylie, Sarah, Jessica & me, a coterie of teachers, and then the middle-high band. (*Names have been changed so as to protect the innocent, and for fun.)

The program had a lot of variety, as someone pointed out, and I will definitely agree with that. There were also an awful lot of students performing. It was so fun to see the shiny curls, the special braids, the stockings, the collared shirts and ties, even a suit or two. I usually see my kids in jeans and t-shirts and hoodies and occasionally in sports attire so it's a downright treat to see them dressed up.

I had drilled the 5th grade so hard on behavior and when they entered the auditorium with their instruments they were containing themselves, but barely. They were so excited to go onstage. I had made a big deal of how this was their First Band Concert. These kids don't have much but the fact that they played in a band concert you can never take away from them.

Even when I told them at the last minute they had to turn around and exit the stage in the opposite direction didn't faze them. Cool kids, a few exceptions to that, there always are; but for the most part what a nice bunch. More on them later.

I'll blog about Jennifer and Sasha and the individual ones separately; for now, suffice it to say that each of their performances was pleasing and good in its own way. Except for Kylie, she didn't show up and explained to me this morning that her boss made her go do her shift or she would lose her job. Tough to be in that position. Wish she had called me.

Anyway, we gracefully swayed from one thing to the next and by the time it was over, well, I knew I had done a good job. Several of my colleagues were there and said so, so that's how I kind of knew, plus it's a feeling in my gut. There's no hard and fast evidence. Of course, if someone screws up blatantly or a soloist doesn't show or I couldn't get the audience to quiet down--or, heaven forbid, I were to make a horrible mistake-- then I would have experienced some frustration, some regret. But I knew in my gut it was solid.

Here's what I did to make it so: 1) Drill the kids endlessly on behavior. It doesn't matter how well they play, if they're not sitting up straight and taking care of the instruments on stage, people will not think of them as good musicians. 2) Insist, every day, on the fundamentals: proper posture, proper technique, and learning the right notes and the right way to finger them. 3) Do goofy things like breathing exercises and consistent, but infinitely boring, long-tone warm-ups so that kids develop good tone and listening skills. 4) Insist on a high level of ettiquette in the classroom: no talking bad about one another, or oneself, understanding that one's part helps or hurts the group depending on how it's done, self-discipline and self-control so that the time is productive, as opposed to spent on classroom management.

It's just what I learned in my musical experiences. Nothing fancy. No big vocabulary needed.

Yeah, some of the kids think I'm a hard-ass, but that's ok. I've noticed that if I'm a hard-ass in class, but go to their games and deal with them fairly and show respect for them in the way I talk to them, then we have a good relationship, and the kids start to understand that what they're part of is really great.

Like last night. Great concert, great feeling in my gut, lots of nice compliments. I found I really could not stop smiling the whole time. On the way home I thought about whether it was more fun to play oboe in a band with a really good conductor, a la grown-up band, or be the one running the show holding the baton.

I hate to dis many happy years of playing oboe in a band, but holding the baton edges it out by a slim margin....

Days and weeks before

The days and weeks leading up to a concert are always a little bit stressful. You plan the repertoire well in advance and then try to balance it out between the kids' preparation and the time remaining.

In all the large classes, I have to figure that at some point the repertoire will be learned, and they'll be ready for a performance. That day comes sooner or later, depending on the group and the music I've picked and how well they've learned it, and most importantly, if they like it or not.

If the students don't have enough time to get prepared, then they won't do well at the concert and their little self-esteems will suffer. Especially the 6th graders, who are sensitive to everything, will be on cloud nine or a pit of despair based on every little thing that happens.

If the students have too much time to learn the music, at some point, a week or two away from the concert, you find yourself nit-picking and going over things again just to fill the time. This spells disaster. If it's anything the kids hate, it's beating a dead horse. They get sick of the music and then nothing you do will induce them to play it correctly, with the appropriate style and spirit.

Nothing.

The 6th grade came closest to hitting that perfect point of being ready right when the time came for the concert. I could feel it happening as we prepared. Repetition of their first song, a little American folk song from their method book, Sawmill Creek, proved to be the key to confidence. Students had time to learn the notes in the safety of the big group, and the percussion players (and I use that term loosely) needed more time to really get what they were doing.

On their other song, the Six Episodes, I felt that coming together right when it needed to. The last two days of rehearsal, on the stage, were for fine-tuning in that environment, as opposed to the band room, which is carpeted and sound-tiled. And for this group, a reminder of how to behave on stage.

The fifth grade was a little less stroctured, the students progressed at such different rates! And as a group, they are learning all kinds of skills all at the same time and having to synthesize them into a one-time-shot performance. So I picked the music I thought they could do well. No sense picking hard songs they won't be confident on.

Even so, the most important thing for the 5th grade was behavior. Drilling them on expectations. It's not enough to just tell them how to act on stage and expect them to do it, you have to actually practice with them so they start to get used to it. So we took a lot of class time, a chunk every day for the last couple of weeks, to practice the concert behavior.

Sigh. My middle-high group crossed the line into beating a dead horse. I felt so bad for them. The were so depressed one day when they left class, because they just hated Festal March (Handel's Festal March from his operetta Rinaldo) with all their beings. Hated. It.

So I let them work on a packet for three days, an assessment of their knowledge of musical concepts, skills, and vocabulary. They were happy to go back to playing after that.

The day before the concert is usually the hardest. It's getting the kids used to being in the concert space, in this case, our wonderful little (as of now, horribly echo-y) auditorium, and they kind of go into chaos mode and it's even harder, because of the chaos and the echo, to get them to calm down.

I learned that if I get them to go on stage right away, I can control them better because they're sitting in a confined space. It just takes longer.

Plus, my mindset is all a-twitter, the day before the concert. I'm excited and nervous at the same time. I wonder how the kids are going to do. This time around, my 6th grade bass drum player threw up in class, on stage. I had not prepared a backup in case he was really sick and didn't come.

The day of the concert, I held classes again in the auditorium. The nervous feeling was starting to go away, to be replaced by a recurring thought: "it will be what it will be." Very existential of me, who is not usually existential, at all.

Read on for how the thing actually went.

Frosting the cupcake

It's that time of the semester when we are getting ready for our Winter Concert. Well, we've been getting ready for it since before Fall Break, but now we're really getting ready for it, know what I mean?

It's not the time for fooling around any more, and way past the time for assigning percussion parts or even doing sectionals so kids can learn their parts.

The time now is for frosting the cupcake. Isn't that such a delicious little metaphor? I thought it up all by myself. I thought it up while thinking about the glorious little pumpkin cinnamon cupcakes I made for my niece's birthday.

The whole meaning is that making the cupcakes--learning notes, rhythms, and getting down how the songs go--is one thing, but putting the finishing touches on the whole endeavor is quite another.

For that you have to have a different approach. Frosting the cupcake requires patiently mixing the frosting to the correct consistency, and applying the embellishment with the appropriate level of deftness and subtlety.

With regard to teaching junior high band, the deft embellishment goes something like this:

"Low brass. On the ends of phrases, I need more of your dotted half notes to bring out the balance and resolution."

"First trumpets...on your high D, I love they way you're really making effort to reach that note, but try to change your embouchure without restricting your air flow."

"Bass drum...sigh...that first note at the beginning of William Tell could be a little softer. We're not running from cannon..."

It's making sure we are prepared to go from a cushiony--in terms of sound--and absorbent room, to an auditorium where the sound bounces around like a three-year-old in a toy store. Short notes need to be really short, so that the whole thing doesn't sound like mud when we get in there. Balance needs to be adjusted ahead of time, it's awfully hard to tell drum players to play softer if they haven't been asked to do it that way all semester except for football games.

It's the time of year that is the most exciting, and the most frustrating. Exciting because the countdown is here, the end is in sight, the event for which nearly every class day has been preparation for. Frustrating, because it's a tightrope act to know when you've crossed over the line to beating a dead horse.

If it's one thing junior high kids can't stand, it's beating a dead horse.

I try to avoid it at all costs, because once you've gone down that road, it's over. Goodness knows how I feel having to play the same dang song one too many times, and it's magnified times ten for these kiddoes. You just lose all desire to do it right, and then the whole thing goes out the window.

The first Winter Concert for the 5th graders is just about them being able to play Hot Cross Buns on something other than a $5 recorder, and for their parents to take pictures while they hold up their trombones or French horns or whatever. It's more for show than anything, and for that reason, I do the most work with the 5th grade on sitting, standing, instruments up and down, and things like that. They love it.

So that's frosting the cupcake. Why not a whole cake?

Because, dear readers, 5th, 6th, and junior high band is best listened to in cupcake-sized doses.

T minus eight days and counting.