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 of Teaching During the COVID Era™. I was flexible during the long summer of constantly changing plans, and appropriately grateful/cautiously optimistic when it appeared we would be starting hybrid and I would get to see my kids in person and actually sing with them. Like I said, I thought I did a great job of letting go: I went into the year not expecting to be able to do any performances (certainly not choir concerts like the way we did them before the shut down). No field trips, no festivals, all of the grand plans I had to build the culture in my choir program would have to put on hold or significantly altered. The music was going to need to be easier. Lofty pursuits of artistic excellence would have to wait. I knew we were on borrowed time anyway...at some point conditions will force us to go remote again so I wanted to front load the in person learning as much as I could. The important thing was the we give our students their art back and build as much community as we can. I really thought that I had a great plan for letting go, that I was being realistic about my situation. 

And then we actually started, and I was still struggling, and it was apparent that letting go is easier said than done. 

To summarize really quick if you don't know my situation, this is how I'm teaching currently on our hybrid schedule:

Monday: Remote learning for all students. Mostly a plan day for teachers while students work asynchronously, but I do meet synchronously over video chat for "office hours" with each class for 20 minutes at a scheduled time. 

Tuesday-Wednesday: I see the A-K (last name) Cohort in person. We follow our normal block schedule (Periods 1A, 2A, 3A, 4A on Tuesday, Periods 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B on Wednesday) during those two days. The L-Z Cohort is at home working on asynchronous remote work assigned by their teachers. I assign one remote assignment per week for each class. 

Thursday-Friday: L-Z Cohort attends in person and does the same schedule that I just taught with A-K the previous two days. A-K Cohort is now at home working on their asynchronous remote work for the week. 

So considering we're on a block schedule, I see every student exactly once a week in person. In addition, I only ever see half of my choirs at one time, so the entire choir currently never rehearses together. In addition, since cohorts are split by last name, they aren't always even and sometimes result in some really unbalanced splits in my ensembles between each cohort. 

The in-person part of this hybrid schedule I love. Even though we're singing in masks, and either rehearsing outside for my larger groups or inside and leaving the choir room every 30 minutes to let the room's air clear out with my smaller groups, we are making music together again and I am grateful. My heart goes out to my colleagues who are teaching fully remote right now: even though some of you are crushing remote learning, I have no doubt that you miss seeing your kids and miss hearing them sing. 

I thought I was doing a good job of managing my expectations, but I was still feeling frustrated. The remote learning piece is really tough. I worked really hard to only assign my choir kids meaningful remote assignments, and to make the assignments manageable and not overwhelming from week to week. Despite this, I have so many students not doing their remote work. In my auditioned groups, I usually only have 50% of the group turning assignments in (though that number slowly ticks upward once I put in missing assignments as zeros to motivate kids), and in my beginning groups it's even worse. In my beginning tenor-bass choir, I have multiple students who have yet to turn in ANYTHING remotely. 

So I started to get frustrated, for so many different reasons! I'm frustrated that I even have to do this at all. I am not the type of teacher who assigns homework and projects, I never have been. Come to class, participate in the learning that we're doing as an ensemble, and then come to the concert and you're going to do fine in my class (yep, that's been my assessment policy, fight me. I know it would be a huge disappointment to Dr. Austin but it's the way I do things). Of course I can't do that this year. Class is once a week, and we don't have concerts right now. I have to assign work to supplement what we do in class and to justify that these students actually are truly earning high school credit. I don't like it but I don't have a choice!

I also get frustrated at some of the other teachers in my building who are just assigning WAY too much work because they apparently don't understand that just because kids are home for three days doesn't mean they can magically complete an insane amount of homework. So kids get overloaded and then what is the first thing they stop doing? Choir. Four, five, six remote assignments per week? Are you kidding? 

Finally, I'm frustrated about how to hold kids accountable. Kids fail choir sometimes: it's rare but it happens. This year though? I have more kids failing than I ever have before, and these students are kids who in a "normal" year would be doing fine in my class! They come to class! They sing! They do the thing!!! Furthermore I want them to come back. COVID and the subsequent transfers to the online high school have already majorly reduced my numbers, and I can't afford to have a bunch of otherwise good choir students quit because I failed them. So I am continually struggling with THAT dilemma. 

Now add to all of that remote learning frustration the fact that I am still also getting upset about choir director things! In a pandemic!!! I know, I'm hopeless. "I wish they were singing louder." "The tenors and basses aren't holding their parts when I'm not singing with them." 'I'm having to re-teach this part every week because they aren't practicing on their own." Which like, the response to all of these choir director concerns needs to be a big fat WHO CARES because really. The world is on fire and we're in a pandemic and a lot of my colleagues can't sing at all and there is never such a thing as a choral emergency. What the hell is wrong with me? 

I continued to struggle with all of these different frustrations in a school year which, by at least some metrics, barely counts at all. And I thought I was being all Zen and had let go of all these different things and wasn't going into the year being an insane choir director...so what happened to me? Well I didn't let go as of as much as I thought I did, and most importantly I didn't let go of "should." I was carrying around all of these notions of what my choirs should be doing, where they should be by the end of a quarter or semester or a year, what they should be able to do in terms of musical skill or musical difficulty, what personal accountability and work ethic in an auditioned group should look like. Even though I knew intellectually that a lot of my kids are seriously struggling with remote learning, staying motivated when they are at home, not to mention all of the struggles their families may be facing because of the aforementioned global pandemic, I still felt on some level that they all should be doing their remote work. I was taking it personally that I had worked so hard and so painstakingly to make the work meaningful and accessible and not too overwhelming, and they still weren't doing it. 

So I had to do a lot of reflecting because that's what I always do in my job when things aren't going well. I obsess a lot, continually reflect, and eventually figure out how am I going to adapt so that things go better and I am hopefully less frustrated. I also talked to my partner a lot to process through all of this (I know it's not for everybody, but I really love dating a fellow choir teacher and having someone in the same profession to bounce ideas off of and talk shop with). I discovered that behind all of my frustration and feelings of inadequacy was that word, in all of its subtle, insidious power. I am currently in the process of letting go of "should." Again. For what certainly will not be the last time. Even when we think we are being reasonable, and not asking too much of each other or of ourselves, sometimes we still lose perspective. It happens.

I'm not beating myself up over this (too much...I had a couple of bad days), I am just committing to making a change. Even though I think my kids should be able to handle the work I'm giving them, I'm going to ease up on the remote workload even more, especially with my beginning classes. In addition, I am readjusting my musical/personal work ethic expectations because this year is so different and the words "auditioned" or "advanced" group don't really matter as much as they normally would. Ultimately I want my kids to get something out of being in choir: beauty, community, emotional support, creative expression. I want choir to have a positive impact on their incredibly disrupted lives, and yes...selfishly I would like them to enjoy what we're doing enough that they sign up again next year. 

I know myself well enough to know that something else will happen that will send me spiraling again. Maybe it will be when I finally get used to hybrid and then the inevitable shutdown comes and a bunch of my students just ghost me when we're fully remote. Maybe my grand plan to use Soundtrap to make recordings that I can edit into virtual choir recordings to share in lieu of concerts will blow up in my face (a definite possibility at this point). Maybe despite all of my efforts to meet my kids where they are at and give them a good experience, a bunch of them still quit/not return next year, and my rebuilding job will become even more daunting. Through it all, however, I will continue to look for the word "should" in my job and in my life, and I will continually work to take away its power.