Embracing the Struggle

New teachers, student teachers, pre-service teachers, this one's for you: If you are pursuing a career in teaching your particular field of study, then you probably love your content. In fact, you probably love it a lot, and that passionate interest is probably a big reason why you're a teacher at all. You probably spent four(?) years of undergraduate education studying your content in great depth, becoming more and more passionate about it as time passed. I know in music, this is especially true.  (If you're not a music teacher, feel free to insert whatever content you  are  passionate about and view the rest of the post through that lens).  Even as music education  majors, we tend to spend a large percentage of our undergraduate education studying music theory and history, practicing our primary instrument, and climbing the rungs of the performance ensembles. Training in this conservatory model tends to distort our perception a bit: we often think of ourse...

Resilience is something I've been thinking about a great deal this week. Between my struggles to bounce back from the turmoil in my school and talking with a colleague about a very different, but no less traumatic, event that hit her school this week, the topic has never been far from my mind. What makes a person, or a staff, or a community resilient? Are certain people just more resilient than others? Or do some of us just have resilience thrust upon us? I  truly do not know if I or my staff are inherently resilient, or if we are resilient because we have been given no other choice. Maybe we are all just really caring and awesome and skilled individuals (I'm not going to completely discount that possibility). But maybe we are just the product of circumstance. We continue to encounter new and varied sh*tstorms as the year progresses, and since you can't just cancel the remainder of a school year, we keep showing up as we would if everything was fine. Whatever the reason...

What do you do when this blow feels like the blow you can't come back from? When you've been knocked down over and over and over again, and you keep pulling yourself back up, does there come a point when you just stay down? Hanging by a thread. Dealing with every challenge, every struggle. We took every hit and carried on. But this? I don't know how to survive this. There's a quotation that says something to the effect of "if you're going through hell, keep going." Apparently Winston Churchill said it. I remember it from some disposable country song they used to play on the radio. Do we keep going through hell because we know we can make it out through the other side? Or because we literally have no other option? You bury yourself in the work. The work is still there. Of course it is. Omnipresent. Never-ceasing. There will always be kids that need you. So you walk back in and you do your job. Possibly because you just don't know what else...

Educators, especially fellow music educators: Thank you for showing up to work every day. Even when you don't feel great or just don't want to. Thank you for being there for your kids. Thank you for doing the best you can for the students in your care. Even when it doesn't feel like enough (spoiler alert, it will never feel like it's enough), you are making a positive difference in the lives of young people. Don't forget that. Thank you for being a light in the darkness, especially in these times in which the darkness seems to be growing more oppressive than ever. Even though you have your own feelings of discouragement, pain, and trauma, you serve as a beacon of hope for your students and you encourage them to do so for others, without even realizing it. Thank you for dedicating your lives to service. You encourage young people to make music, to make art, to work together to create something bigger than themselves, something beautiful. The opposite of destr...

I tend to move at a breakneck pace with my auditioned choir and push them as hard as I can. For several years now I have wanted to push the limits of what middle school singers can accomplish, and as a result I feel constant pressure, most of it coming from myself, to keep my Prairie Voices working every minute of every rehearsal. We only get 45 minutes a day, and it's gotten worse this year because we have lost 20% of our rehearsal time this year due to this homeroom/character education class that meets every Monday. This school year I have felt like I am constantly under the gun, and that I cannot waste a single second of rehearsal. Yesterday though, I made a conscious effort to slow down. I didn't start warming them up immediately at the bell (though most of them were standing in their spots on the risers at the last bell... finally ...after weeks of me trying to train them to do that), but instead I moved at a more leisurely pace. I talked to a some individual students, t...

That quotation, "no plan survives contact with the enemy" is a paraphrased version of this quote by Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, a Prussian general who was the architect of the German Wars of Unification in the 19th Century: "The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: 'I have never had a plan of operations.' Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force." Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke never had to teach middle school children or work in a public school in the early 21st Century, but if he had I am sure the experience would only reinforce his belief that you can have all the plans you want, but once you encounter your first ho...

I started officially back at school today. Meetings and prep all this week, first day with kids next Monday. So as I transition fully into teacher mode, I think this is as good a time as any to reflect on what my goals are for this coming school year. At first glance I don’t have any huge mountains to climb this year: I finished my thesis, my Master’s degree is complete, I don’t have any big conference performances I’m preparing a group for this year, etc. But I want (and need) to have a direction, things to work on to help me be a better teacher and make this year better than the previous year. I want to be able to tweak my instruction and my approach to how I do things so that I can avoid stagnating as a teacher. “Just make sure everything is as good as last year” is not much of a hill to climb, after all.   As the summer progressed and I read, reflected, listened to podcasts, and wrote, I identified three overarching goals that I would like to focus on this year. I wanted the...