first full day

It always suprises me when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window, or the glass of the stereo cabinet as I'm passionately explaining the concept of Home Tone or running to grab xylophone mallets, hot it the center of an emerging orff arrangement of such classics as, "Senor Don Gato was a Cat," or showing Tariq the underhand turn in a Circassian Circle mixer. It's all I can do to not stop dead in my tracks.

Of all things, how on earth did I become an elementary school music teacher?

I feel like I muse endlessly about teaching and the effect it's had on my life. How I've learned so many things about myself, how the kids are like a mirror - their innocent faces relecting back my deepest insecurities, blahblahblah. Over the summer, or at meetings I always seem to have such great perspective on how to relate to/ understand kids in order to love them. To love them by teaching them the right stuff. And, somehow, as I'm talking/writing about this I am creating for myself the subconscious assurance that when I go back there, I'll get them, and they'll love me, and they'll be interested in what's going on, and I'll pay close attention to what their actions are saying and
we will make beautiful music together.

And then I see them. After all the smiles and hugs I realize that they have not a clue what it does to me when I've been offering a brilliant first-class-of-the-year treatise at the second grade level about empathy and respect and being peaceful and I ask who's got a question or a suggestion about how we can make this happen in our room and thirteen hands shoot up and I call on them each by the names I've worked so hard to remember only to realize that all they've been thinking about the entire time was who's going to be first to try out the bathroom.

I see each child (there are almost 800 of them) for 45 minues a week(including set-up and clean-up and tuning etc..), 42 weeks a year That is, if they're not on a field trip or at an assembly (gag) or off on vacation, or absent, or I'm not at a meeting talking about reaching them - you get the idea. In this time am supposed to instill in EVERY CHILD not only the ability to play on the beat and sing in tune, and read notation, and listen critically, and respond creatively, experience the music of other cultures and their own, and integrate the arts into their other academic subjects, and improvise and compose and hear functional tertian harmony; but ALSO to love music.

I can't. No one could. The only kids who really get the music part, are kids who have it outside of class. But- and here's the real issue - everyone who is in my classroom (including myself) gets the experience. This is why I think I've had it backward. I can't love them by teaching them the right stuff if teaching them the right stuff means turning them all into skilled and creative musicians. I just can't do that. But if I just love them. Right away. Not via a plan or curricular delivery, but in the flawed yet powerful way that I love my family, or music itself, then maybe our experience of my pathetic attempts to instill social conscience and just intonation will have the desired effect, and maybe they won't. Whatever happens, I'll actually be doing what I'm trying to teach them about. Trusting in the idea that if you really let go of control, really listen, really love the people around you it makes the world a better place.

I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow after 4 first grades in a row!