Skip to main content

10 Things I Love About Middle School Choir Part 6: Middle School Kids Have an Unrivaled Capacity for Growth

Part 6: Middle School Kids Have an Unrivaled Capacity for Growth


New to the series? Go here to start back at the beginning!

One of my favorite things as a middle school choir teacher is when I am voicing a returning student at the beginning of the year and they completely blow me away. Sometimes it has been close to a year since I heard that student sing individually, and the progress they've made in class (and sometimes just the crazy changes that can happen over a summer) is an absolute joy.

The primary feature of adolescence is the incredible growth (in all senses of the word) that takes place during these years as children go through the developmental transition to become young adults. It is astonishing to see how much young people can change during these years, both musically and as humans.  The growth that a middle level student can make from the beginning of a school year to the end of the year can be impressive, but what I love about my job is that many of my students take my class for all three years of middle school. This means that every year I get to see the tremendous growth that happens from sixth grade to eighth grade.

Sixth graders are very much still in an elementary school mindset when they start off the year, and they can be quite needy and clingy and need to be taught EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING. Rationally you know that they have already had six years of education before they come to you, but in reality they are babies. They're also babies that are starting to hit adolescence and are now in a building surrounded by seventh and eighth graders and so some of them try to act way older, tougher, and more worldly than they actually are. Most of them though are sweet. They draw you pictures and ask you about your weekend and are desperately looking for anyone to provide them a sense of safety and security in the intimidating and chaotic environment that is middle school. I truly did enjoy being that for them, and while I found myself getting impatient with my sixth graders near the end of my time as a middle school teacher, for most of my career I found them endearing and fun to teach.

I also find that sixth grade is the easiest (but not the only) entry point for a middle school student to start being excited by choir. You get them inspired and excited about singing for you (See Part 5),  and introduce them to what choir is and the way you do things. I always take new students in seventh and eighth grade, but my program was able to be so successful because I always had this core group of students who had been with me since sixth grade. They knew our choir culture, they knew how to sing the way I wanted them to, and it just made everything so much easier. The school at which I taught before I came to Prairie only had seventh and eighth grade, and building my program was so much more difficult because I didn't have that training year.


The characteristic I love most about seventh graders is that seventh grade is the year the most astonishing amount of growth happens. There is a chasm between a sixth grader and eighth grader, both musically and in maturity/personality, and seventh grade is where the bridging of that gap occurs. I have found that the most rapid and drastic amount of growth and change happens during the seventh grade year. Often (though not always), the most drastic parts of the voice change happen in seventh grade, especially for tenors and basses. My seventh grade TB choirs would usually start the year as a collection of new baritones with a five note range and unchanged boy altos who couldn't really sing all the notes in a standard tenor part. By the end of seventh/beginning of eighth grade, I would have real basses and baritones, some lower tenors holding down a T2 part, and still some of the unchanged boys holding down first tenor (who could by then usually sing the lower G that you'll see in a lot of tenor parts). But that growth! By the end of the year many of them were through the worst of the voice change. Likewise my sopranos and altos in my seventh grade treble (formerly women's) group would start the year struggling to hear and hold harmonies, and their collective sound would often be breathy and young. I told them every year that it was so exciting how much they were going to grow, because by May they would sound like a different choir. [Yes, this the hope for any choir, certainly any school-based choir, but I'm telling you there is something about middle school, and something about seventh grade in particularly, that is just an whole other level of dynamic growth] And every May, they did sound like a different choir, their voices and their confidence just blossoming after a year of hard work and developmental change.

In seventh grade you start to see the personalities emerge. They start to find their bearings and even though they are still very much exploring their identities, you start to see flashes of the person they are going to be, and it's really cool. The shift from concrete to abstract thinking means you can start to banter with them more, and at least some of them start to feel more comfortable being their weird, ridiculous selves around you, which is so entertaining. If sixth grade is where I start to get my students hooked on and excited about choir, seventh grade is the year where I turn them into hard core choir kids (more on that coming in Part 10). My seventh graders usually started the year with only one semester of choir under their belts, and every year they left seventh grade ready to be my new group of leaders, leading musically and by example as the standard-bearers for our choir culture.

Which brings me to eighth grade. Not going to lie, my eighth graders have been my favorite group to teach for most of my career. The exceptions are basically any time I had a first year anywhere (my eighth graders the semester I spent at Northglenn, my eighth graders my first year at Mesa -though their were some awesome individual kids in that class, and my eighth graders the first two years I was at Prairie -again, talking about a collective group here not individuals) because eighth graders, when they aren't loyal to you, are the worst. If you're lucky they will just be indifferent to what you want to do with them, but often you don't get that lucky. Eighth graders who aren't yours can be absolutely savage -they will talk back, actively disrupt what you're trying to do, and/or be really cruel to you and one another. Sixth and seventh graders can be jerks too, no question, but I swear to God it feels like eighth graders make it personal. But I'm not going to dwell on those eighth graders anymore. If you find yourself with a class like that, you grit your teeth and get through it until you can send them on to high school and you wait patiently for the day when the sixth graders who started with you become your eighth graders.

Because that is awesome. Eighth graders who are loyal to you, who believe in your program and whom you have a relationship with, are the absolute best. They know you,  they know your expectations, and they are bought in. As such, they will be your strongest allies in maintaining your choir culture. You have a shared history and a rapport that allows you to joke with them a ton and their personalities have developed to the point that you can have real conversations with them. Some of my biggest laughs and best memories of teaching have come from just sitting around shooting the shit with my eighth graders. They will come to you for support because of that trust you've built over the years, and likewise you can rely on them when you need them too. I survived my hardest year at Prairie (not counting Year 1) a couple of years ago thanks mostly to the fact that I was able to lean on my eighth graders so heavily. We all carried each other to the finish line. They come back from that summer after seventh grade with bigger voices and their skills allow you to do some pretty challenging rep. By the end of eighth grade they will have grown even more, and they sound damn good and they are ready to take on just about anything you throw at them.

And then, after you spend three years training them and breaking them in, they leave you and some high school teacher gets to reap all the musical benefits of your hard work.

That last statement is mostly a joke, though it's an honest representation of how I felt. I worked with some great high school teachers while I was at Prairie, and I was proud of my kids for continuing to sing and take the next step in their musical development with a new teacher. But I can't lie and say I didn't feel jealous at times or a little like "This is unfair. I did the hard part, and now you get to do the fun part." That statement is of course inaccurate. Training high school singers is hard too (but middle school is harder, fight me), and teaching middle school is, of course, also the fun part. Which one is more fun? I'll let you know in 12-ish years.


If you are or are about to be a middle school music teacher, I encourage you to start getting excited about the incredible capacity for growth that this age group possesses. We as music teachers are fortunate that in most of our programs, we get to see many or most of our students for multiple years (and if you're program is not like that, you have some conversations to have with your admin), and one of the coolest parts about that is that we get to see their progress over more than one year. In middle school, you get to see them change rapidly and exponentially. You get a front row seat to the emerging singer and the emerging person, and then you get to reflect back to when they were a shy little sixth grader, uncomfortable in their own skin, sitting in your choir class on the first day of school, with no idea what was going to happen in the next three years of their life.

At the beginning of every semester with my sixth grade choirs I would always tell them: "This is such a cool day for me, meeting you all. Because so many of you in this room are going to end up loving this. You are going to end up loving choir, and staying with me for all three years, and making so many memories, and at the end of your eighth grade year you are going to be devastated to leave this room that you're sitting in for the first time today. Because it will have become your home. And the coolest part about all of that is that you don't even know it yet. You think I'm crazy but I know it will happen for some of you, because I see it happen every single year."

Each individual sixth grader who enters your room, every new student, represents massive, untapped potential, to say nothing of an entire class full of them. How beautiful.


Coming next: Part 7: Middle School Students Will Rise or Fall to Your Expectations





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

388 Days

Three hundred and eighty-eight days. That is how long I went without hearing my choirs sing fully together. There was the shutdown, where we weren't together at all, and a period of remote choir that lasted a couple of months this winter, but most of the year we've been hybrid, with only parts of the choir singing together at once. There were no rhyme or reason to these cohorts...here's a cohort of only 6 kids, here's a cohort of only 3. The tenors? We'll split them randomly, right down the middle so these boys won't know what it's like to sing with their whole section. We've managed, we've worked hard to just tread water and not lose any more ground than we have to (how about that for a mixed metaphor), but it hasn't been easy and hasn't always felt a lot like choir.  Until today. On Day 389,  all of our students were back in the building at once, 5 days a week. No more hybrid. No more cohorts. There's a lot of strong feelings about whet...
Post a Comment
Read more