Part 5: Middle School Kids Have a Unique Loyalty
This post is a direct continuation of Part 4 of the series, so I recommend you jump there and read that first before reading on.
In our attempts to harness Middle Schooler Energy™ and channel it towards something productive, one of our greatest assets is loyalty. Middle school singers can be difficult to win over, but once you do, they are incredibly loyal. You need to be patient, but I can't stress enough how important it is that you win over your middle school singers and earn their trust and loyalty. I tell my students not to talk about other teachers in front of me, but I still hear things. You don't want to be on the receiving end of middle school kids that intensely dislike you...it's awful. You'll need a thick skin in the beginning but so much of your energy should be focused on earning the trust and respect of your students, especially if you are walking into a situation where there has been a lot of trauma and/or inconsistency within the program or the previous directors. Show up for them every day and give them consistency even when they aren't giving you much of that. Banter with them and make your classroom a joyful place. Treat them like human beings. Eventually the trust and respect will come, and then over time that will manifest as a deep loyalty on the part of your singers.
The thing with loyalty is that they are loyal to you. They are not loyal to the program. They are not loyal to the Universal Concept of Choral Music, they are loyal to you, the teacher that made them feel safe and helped them develop of love for singing. The loyalty to the program and to choral singing in general will come later, but middle schoolers are not ones for intrinsic motivation right of the bat, and its our job to develop that intrinsic motivation by starting with some extrinsic motivation. The best extrinsic motivation is you and what you and your personality can do for your kids.
Slight digression: many music educators have said some variation on "well it's never about me, it needs to be all about the kids and I never make anything about me," as if their teaching style must be completely devoid of any ego or else it is detrimental to the students. I respectfully disagree with this perspective. First of all I think when we say this we hold ourselves to an impossible standard of selflessness. We all have ego, every single one of us. To be an artist, which means to be a music educator, is to have both massive ego and crippling self-doubt, and the two are in constant conflict for most if not all of your career. We need both of these things, and so we must strive for balance between them: tilt too far towards ego and we become, well, assholes who make it completely about us and not about our kids at all. But tilt too far towards self-doubt and we lose the confidence to be good and to make our students good. The complete eradication of ego is a wonderful goal for a Buddhist monk, but I am less convinced it is a beneficial (or realistic) action for a choir director. Likewise someone can be humble and still feel like they are good at what they do.
I say this because I believe you are going to have to make your choir program just a little bit about you in order to build something great for kids. (You also have to be getting something back, otherwise you will become a selfless martyr who burns out far too soon). You are selling you to the kids who are just joining choir or haven't bought in yet. You are selling your personality, your classroom demeanor, your humor, your empathy, your kindness, and your skill as a teacher to kids whose instinct may be not to trust you at all. You have no shiny instruments to hook them in with, and things like trips and karaoke day in class are short-lasting and are the kind of extrinsic rewards that are difficult to bridge into intrinsic motivation.
The best weapon in your arsenal for recruiting, retaining, and building loyalty among your students, especially in middle school, is YOU. When they know you care about them, and you start giving them reasons to care about you, to want to come to your class, they will become loyal to you, and subsequently will become loyal to what you are trying to build. However, none of this happens in a vacuum devoid of personality and charisma. Teachers can say they "never make it about them," all they want, but I just don't think this is true of any successful teacher. TL;DR: Step 1, love the kids, Step 2, give them reasons to love you, Step 3, then you can start doing choir.
Walking the line between just enough ego and way too much ego is fraught, so you need to be self-aware. Every one of you reading this has a story of a conductor who went too far, of a program that tipped from "beloved teacher" to "full blown cult of personality," so proceed with caution. You will probably fail at this at some point, and you will realize you are making things too much about you, and you will have to step back and readjust. Lord knows I have had to do this, more than once. Luckily, middle schoolers have a way of keeping you humble, as does the universe.
The hard-won loyalty of middle school students can help you push them to reach their incredible potential, to help them create musical experiences that will bring them joy and healing and memories that will stick with them long after you leave your choirs. For me, the key to this loyalty was some showmanship to reel them in, followed by a lot of love to make sure they stuck around.
Next week we dive into Part 6: Middle School Kids Have an Unrivaled Capacity for Growth.
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