Embracing the Struggle

  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...

 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 o...

I get it. We're all struggling. All sick of hearing about COVID-19 and how it's changed everything. We've all looked at the same memes about being stuck inside, all shared in the collective outrage at people who refuse to take this pandemic seriously and shared in the collective support of our health care workers, grocery store workers, and others who are the front lines of this. Those of us who are teachers are scrambling to figure out online learning and posting about how much we miss our students. We're all (or at least I am), completely and utterly terrified when we read articles about the current death toll and about how much this pandemic might spread, how long this all might last. So I'm not really expecting anyone to read this (which is how I usually approach this blog), because the last thing anyone really needs  is another online take about COVID-19 and how we're coping with it. But it has quite literally taken over the world, and all of our lives an...

Part 10: Choir Kids Are Made, Not Born, and Middle School is When We Make Them Consider the choir kid. I don't mean simply "a kid who is in choir," but rather the choir kid.  You know the one I'm talking about, the one that eats, sleeps and breathes choir. Who is obsessed with music and singing and seeks out as much choir in their lives as they possibly can. They probably end up a student leader and/or volunteering a great deal of their time to the choir program in high school, and they might even major in music in college. They will, at the very least, end up lifelong lovers of (and hopefully singers or supporters of) choral music, and will look back fondly on their choral experiences. They are that kid, who truly loves being in choir and giving their all to the choir, even if they never end up studying music past high school. Those kids aren't born, they are made. Kids who love to sing and sang from a very young age? Sure. I've encountered kids like t...

Part 9: Middle School Choir Colleagues are Awesome Middle school choir teachers are my tribe. One of the many benefits of my time as a middle school choir teacher was the fact that I met a great number of incredible people over the years. I think it takes a special type of personality to teach middle successfully...you have to be a little crazy, no question. Flexibility, a lot of energy, a good (and somewhat ridiculous) sense of humor are qualities I find most middle school teachers possess. I know a lot of great people who teach other levels, and I am sure I will meet many more, but I will always cherish the friendships I have built with other teachers who have been in the middle school trenches.  When I started teaching middle school, I knew only a few other middle school choir teachers in the whole state. I feel like at the time this was pretty standard for most of us. It seemed like the high school teachers all knew each other and hung out with each other at conferences ...

Part 8: Middle School Kids Can Sing Challenging and Interesting Repertoire My introductory story may come off sounding a little petty (and it is), so you've been  warned: Two years ago I took my auditioned mixed choir, Prairie Voices, to our state festival for adjudication. I had programmed some fairly advanced literature, as I usually did for that group: we sang Ungheresca (the song most people know as Tambur with Italian lyrics), a fast rhythmic a cappella song that I had sung in University Choir back at CU, the Michael Barrett/Raif Schmitt arrangement of Indodana (gorgeous South African piece), and Ain't You Got a Right to the Tree of Life by Caldwell and Ivory. It was a heavy set, but pretty standard for the type of rep that I liked to do with Prairie Voices by that point in time. So we sang our set, and sang it well. It wasn't an incoherent mess, we didn't sound like a choir that was just way out of its depth, not even close. It wasn't perfect either. Beca...

Part 7: Middle School Kids Will Rise or Fall to Your Expectations The thing I most hated hearing during my twelve years of middle school teaching was any variation on the phrase "they sounded so great... for middle schoolers ," or "that was so good... for a middle school performance." I know parents and audience members don't mean it to be, but I found it insulting, and I actively worked to make my groups and my performances so good that people wouldn't even think  about saying it. I would even tell my kids that was our goal.  A lot of people out there just don't expect middle school-aged students to be able to do much of anything, especially where the performing arts are concerned. I wanted to produce quality that would cause my audience members to appreciate our performances on their own merit, that would overcome the inherent biases and low expectations that people far too often possess when it comes to middle school performers. And then there...