Skip to main content

10 Things I Love About Middle School Choir: An Introduction

10 Things I Love About Middle School Choir:                          An Introduction to the Series

This spring, after twelve years (the sum total of my entire educational career thus far) of teaching middle school choir, I applied for and was offered the position of choral director at the high school I have been feeding at my most recent school. It wasn't an easy decision to leave the program that I have worked so hard to build, to leave my kids (the ones that won't be coming with me right away up to ninth grade, anyway), and to leave my team. In addition, the idea of leaving behind the middle school choir world as a whole made my decision even more difficult.

Teaching middle school choir is all I have ever known professionally, and I have made "middle school choir teacher" an essential part of my identity, of how I view myself, over the past decade plus. I love middle level kids and I love teaching them to sing. I've also become quite good at it, and I wear that as a badge of honor when middle level kids are often perceived as such a challenging age group to teach, especially for choral music. I have had incredibly accomplished choral directors, people who are giants in our state, tell me they tried teaching middle school earlier in their careers and it didn't go well. It's really hard to teach middle school choir, and I feel pride at what I've been able to figure out. In fact, I am legitimately concerned that I will never be as good of a high school director as I was a middle school director, but that's a post for another day.

As I say goodbye to working regularly with middle school singers, I have decided to write this series over the summer, 10 Things I Love About Middle School Choir (it's really more 10 Things I've Learned About Middle School Choir but that isn't as catchy and it obscures my 1990s rom-com reference). This series is my love letter to the unpredictable, hilarious, and beautifully rewarding world that has defined the first act of my educational career. I am writing this 10-part series in the hopes that:

1.) It will help me process all of the thoughts and feelings I am experiencing around this massive change in my professional identity, and

2.) That perhaps writing down my knowledge and experience will help other middle school choir teachers, or other young teachers just starting out in the middle school choir world. I have learned a lot in the past 12 years, and perhaps you the reader can find something helpful in what I've learned, or can share it with a young colleague who could find it to be of help.

I'll be posting the series in installments throughout the summer. If you read, I hope you find it useful or at least entertaining. If you don't read, that's cool, I am going to write it anyway. Here we go!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some of My Favorite Team-Builders

So after my last post about my Mini-Camp, I got some requests for specific descriptions of some of the team-building games I do. I chose four that I think are among the best (and actually lend themselves to written description) and I've written about those below: Hammer in the Circle Name Game: So I do this game with a big inflatable hammer, like this: You don't need the big inflatable hammer for this game, but it helps. I've done it before with a rolled up newspaper (which you have to be really careful because that can potentially hurt more than an inflatable hammer) and just with tagging by hand. Here is how the game works: Students get in a circle and go around quickly with everyone saying their first name. One person is in the middle of the circle with the hammer, and their objective is to get out of the circle. They do this by (GENTLY AND NON-VIOLENTLY, I always tell my kids) bopping someone in the circle. The only way you can be "safe" is to the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Whistling Past the Graveyard, Singing Through the Apocalypse

 Life is weird these days. In my teaching life, we are back to school, five days in person, and singing with essentially no restrictions on what we do in class or our performances (we do have a mask requirement, but aside from that school is pretty much...dare I say... normal ) . I am reconnecting with my students again, making music and doing things more or less the way we used to. In my personal life, my partner and I bought a house together, she started a new job, and our relationship is going strong. I'm vaccinated, most if not all of the people I care about are vaccinated...things there are great.  And yet.  I say life is weird because despite all of that, the world at large has never felt so absolutely out of control. Things "out there" haven't gotten better since the pandemic shut everything down, in fact one could argue things just keep getting worse. As a person with an anxiety disorder who is also a serious  future-oriented thinker, I go into a complete and...
Post a Comment
Read more

Letting Go of "Should"

 A couple of years ago, my therapist told me that the idea of "should" is the enemy of any healthy relationship. So often unhappiness results from a dissonance between our expectations and our reality, and the word "should," when applied to your partner and your partner's actions (my partner should  be doing this certain thing), or when applied to one's image of one's relationship (our relationship should look this certain way), can cause all sorts of unrealistic expectations. My memory of this conversation with my therapist resurfaced this week as I did my weekly mental wrestling match with the realities of hybrid learning. I realized that "should" is a dangerous concept in a lot of different aspects of life, not just one's relationships, and that it had been surreptitiously lurking in my feelings and expectations about this school year and thus making me miserable.  Honestly, I thought I was doing a great job of managing my expectations o...
1 comment
Read more