Embracing the Struggle

 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...

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...

  A truly remarkable woman left this earth two days ago, unexpectedly and far too soon. She was my incredible principal, a pillar of our Overland-Prairie community, a mother of three children, a wife, a fierce advocate of education, a singer, and a Servant of God. I have been struggling with the shock and the pain since I heard the news, grasping and failing to make sense of this. This year has already been hard enough, our community has already absorbed too much heartbreak, without losing Aleshia. Our Leader and our Light is just gone, with no warning. Just here one day and the next day...not. This wasn't supposed to happen.  I think it's human nature to view losing someone through the lens of how it affects you personally. It's not a particularly noble thing to admit, but we can't help it. As I write about her, my mind keeps coming back  to Aleshia Armour the principal. As many people far more qualified than I could speak to, she was also so much more than that, but s...