Part 1: Middle School Kids Won't Sing for an Asshole (Alternate Title: Middle School Students Need to Feel Loved and Safe Above All Else)
But Phil, don't ALL students need to feel loved and safe? Why yes, reader who already understands the most important part of teaching, all students DO need to feel loved and safe, especially if you are going to ask them to be vulnerable and make music with their voices. But with middle schoolers, just go on and crank those needs up to 11. These kiddos are just little raw exposed nerves walking around all day, every day, dealing with constant changes to A.) their bodies, B.) their emotional state, and C.) the tectonic shifts from elementary school in both their social interactions and academic pressure that starts to take place in the middle years. Yes, high school students can be dramatic too. Elementary school students can have meltdowns too. But the middle years/early adolescence are this perfect storm of awkwardness, mood swings, discomfort in their own skin, and an inability to anticipate the consequences of their own decisions. Even getting themselves to school in the morning often takes a Herculean effort.
And then they show up in our classrooms and we expect them to sing. Not only sing, but sing in a way that a lot of them have never sung before (for the ones that even have sung before), with repertoire that they are probably not familiar with, in notation they may not know how to read, often in languages they don't know. And then when it all goes pear-shaped, we start panicking. Trust me, I've been there. I think these situations happen largely because we try to dive right into the music side of things without making sure we're meeting the students' needs first. Set the lofty musical goals aside, for now anyway. They will come. I have a whole part of this series planned around the amazing things middle school kids can do. Right now, though, we're going back to basics.
Vocal/choral music is fundamentally different from instrumental music in one key way: your voice is biologically a part of you, which means every time you make music with it, you are putting a piece of yourself out into the world, offering it up for potential judgement. The vulnerability that takes, just to sing in front of or around other people, is tremendous. If something goes wrong with your voice, that means something went wrong with you. If someone criticizes your singing, they are criticizing you. You can't change your strings, or blame your reed, or buy a new, higher quality instrument some day. What you've got is what you've got. You can train it and develop it but at the end of the day it's the only one you have and it is part of you. This presents a psychological and emotional minefield (where all my vocal majors whose heads got totally screwed up in music school at?) that is difficult for a young adolescent, who is already insecure about literally everything else about themselves, to navigate. [Sidebar: instrumentalists, I believe this is a big part of why vocalists are so much more touchy feely than you are, on average. We have to be because of the amount of vulnerability it requires to put your voice out into the world.]
So if you want middle school students to be in a head space where they will take the risk of singing, then they need to feel safe. Your choir room must become a home, a space where students can feel physically and emotionally secure, where they know that they will be supported and not judged when they take risks. Some ways in which I have done that over the years:
1.) I tell my beginners (sixth grade for me) that the whole point of the class they are in is to try. Yes, they are going to sing. But it is always going to be in a group and I will never make a student sing by themselves in front of other people who doesn't want to (you would be amazed at how many kids walk into choir thinking they are going to be made to sing solos all the time). The class is all about trying, singing in a big group (so strength in numbers), and I don't grade them on what their voice sounds like: I grade them on whether they try, on whether they do the things I ask them to do.
2.) I tell them I don't believe in bad singers (which is true, I don't). There are singers who have had more training or experience and singers who have had less, but there is no such thing as a bad singer. I tell them I will never judge your voice or tell you that you are a bad singer. And if you tell me you can't sing? Of course you can, you just don't know how...and lucky for you, I am going to teach you how.
3.) In my older groups, I continue to reinforce the importance of choir being a safe place. It should be the sanctuary in the rest of their day, and if anyone doesn't want to come to choir because of the way another student is treating them, or the way I'm treating them, then we have a serious problem that needs to be addressed right away. I can't just say it once on syllabus day and then never address it again. I have to constantly reinforce, remind, and then correct when situations arise where someone is feeling unsafe.
And finally, and most importantly, I try not to be an asshole to them. Finally we're bringing it back to the provocative, clickbait title!
As much as I want to, I can't take credit for this wonderful pearl of wisdom. Many years ago, when I was still in undergrad, I received an important piece of advice from one of my mentors that I have never forgotten: "Middle school kids won't sing for an asshole. High school kids will, if the choir is good enough; not that they should, but there will be a small number of high school kids who will put up with a jerk director if the music is good. But middle schoolers won't do it." And I am here to tell you, she was absolutely right. Oh and then we have the college kids, specifically music majors, who far too often will sing for directors who are snide, tyrannical, and verbally abusive. Even in this more enlightened age, our profession still has assholes. Many of them are assholes because the people who trained them were assholes, and some of those assholes are really famous and well-regarded in the choral field. So then we got stuck in this cycle where we sometimes equated choral greatness with treating people poorly. It a problem in our profession (though hopefully not as much as it used to be) and there is a lot that could be said on the topic. We're talking about middle school in this series, though, so I will just say that that garbage will not fly with middle school kids. Someone who treats their middle school kids poorly will make them feel unsafe, which means they won't have many kids in their program at all before too long, and the ones they do have will make that director's life quite difficult.
DISCLAIMER: If you are struggling with your middle school choir, I am not calling you a nasty name or suggesting that's why you are struggling. We all struggle, for a variety of reasons, and the struggle is not something to beat yourself up about it is something to motivate you to get better. So no, if your middle schoolers aren't singing for you it doesn't automatically mean you're an asshole. What I do think is that all of us can benefit from self-awareness of when we might be veering into asshole territory. I am human. I have had my asshole moments that I have subsequently regretted. I will always be an intense choral director, at least in certain situations, and in my twenties I was really hotheaded. I still lose my temper at my choir students occasionally and it is something I am going to have to work on my entire life to improve. Thankfully for me and for my program, those moments are sporadic, and they occur in an environment of mutual accountability and trust that allow me to do the repair that I need to do after I lose it. I am constantly trying to show them my humanity, and that includes the ugly parts sometimes. I own it, we acknowledge it, I work to repair the relationship. And I believe that my middle school students appreciate that I am a real person with them, because God Bless them they will detect and reject an inauthentic teacher almost immediately.
So now let's take this one step further. Once you've established an environment where your middle school students feel safe enough to try doing the thing, if you want them to feel motivated to work hard, respect you, and not talk through every single rehearsal, then they need to feel loved.
I love this quality in middle school kids: the fact that they will not care about what you know or what you have to say if they don't feel like you care about them. I wrote a whole post about it last year, and I suggest you check it out because it sums up my experiences with that concept. The short version is, if you don't love kids, if you don't love your kids that you have in that room, then they will be able to tell. If that's the case, you will have a much more difficult time getting your students to do all of that important choir stuff like not talking in rehearsal, showing up to concerts, performing well in those concerts, learning all those cool music things you're trying to teach them. Because I'm sorry, but they don't find it cool. They don't love choral music like you do, and they probably aren't even interested in it. They also are not interested in all of your incredible accomplishments from music school. Making them care about choir is your job. If you want to walk into a room where every kid already knows how to behave in rehearsal and is crazy about choir, you should not be teaching middle school (hot take: or teaching choir at all?). But inspiring them to love it is what makes the job is so freaking fun! (There's an upcoming post on that too)
The kids in this age group are primarily motivated extrinsically, and our job is to slowly develop that intrinsic motivation within them, where they love choir for it's own sake, for the benefits they feel while being a part of it. And our greatest extrinsic motivator is us. When you have taken that time to build that relationship, the kids see you as fun, inspiring, and most importantly, a trusted adult who cares about them. Then they will care about you right back, and motivation is born. Building and then maintaining that relationship is the key to lighting that fire of motivation underneath them.
To sum up: to get middle level students to care about choir, they have to care about you. To get them to care about you, they have to know that you care about them.
This is such a gift! How bland our job would be without that love! Middle school kids will make you work for it. They will challenge you and push you and frustrate you in incredibly unique and creative ways. Middle school students who have been through trauma or are otherwise high needs will especially not make building that love an easy thing. They will be slow to trust, or they will betray your trust after you have invested so much in them. But the rewards are incredible once you have built those relationships. This is the best way to get them to do the musical things you want them to accomplish, but more importantly this love and trust can change their lives, and it will most certainly change yours. What I love about middle school kids is that they compel you to do this. There is no other option: if you are an asshole they won't sing for you. If you don't love them, they will sense it and they won't work very hard for you. They have this absolutely brutal honesty that forces you to become a better teacher. I know that my middle school students forced me to become a better teacher, and I could not be more grateful.
Coming next time, Part 2: Middle School Kids Are Hilarious.
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