It’s the most wonderful time of the year…kind of.
For music teachers this is often the most stressful time of the year, which is why on your music teacher friend's Facebook pages there are posts and memes about giving music teacher hugs and how much we have aged over the month of December.
On top of the stress of the holiday season and how it takes over music teacher's personal lives, many music teachers have to put on performances right before winter break. For many music teachers it’s not a great time in the arc of the school years since December really isn’t the middle of the school year in many school calendars and depending when you start the school year, it can feel really early to put students on stage.
This leads to many music teachers in the month of December feeling a lot of stress. This week while I’ve been preparing for my paternity leave, which is going to happen over my 3rd and 5th grader’s Winter performance and happening during a critical time for my band students to prepare for their performance after break is no small task. Yes, I have an AMAZING paternity sub lined up, but it’s still a lot to prepare for, and a lot to process. This has been stressful.
The stress that I have, I’ve realized is slightly misplaced, and mostly self-induced and I wonder if this is similar for other music teachers. I have a standard, and a way that I want my students to prepare and to perform. I am pushing myself to that standard. Can my students to one fewer song? Yes, probably, but like most music teachers, I don’t really play it safe. I want to push my students to their full potential, which means I’m taking some chances, doing things, I haven’t done before and putting stress on myself.
There’s also the stress of community and parental expectations, which is mostly through my own perception. Most parents want their children to present in performance as being prepared and enjoying themselves. That’s it, and what we do to raise them to a higher level of musical excellence, which adds a lot of stress on us, is really on us.
The stress that I feel and the worry I am processing, I wonder about. Is this stress based on the work that will truly benefit the students, or is based on my own expectations of my professional work, which many times does benefit the students, but I’m sure on some level is more about me.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to push yourself as a teacher to grow and to do more year to year, but I also feel teachers need to do this in a way that helps students and create opportunities to grow with limited stress.
It’s important that students feel the importance of our work and value the limited time we have in making music together, but I do not believe that stress motivates and help students grow. And undo stress that teachers feel and often put upon themselves, makes teachers forget the sheer joy of creating music with children.
My time is running out. I don’t know exactly how many more days I have before my leave and at some point in the middle of the past week, I stopped let myself have fun with my students. It’s weird. I know that I’m not good at motivating my students through being stern but I seem to revert to that in times of stress. And when I smiled, and showed my students how much joy I got out of their hard work, we all started to have more fun and be more productive.
I let stress take my smile a way for part of this week, and it didn’t help my students prepare for their performances.
We have to figure out where are stress comes from, and see where it leads us. There are so many important things to teach in preparation for performances. If we get to a polished performance through a process full of stress, then that’s all our students will remember.
Music is not about stress,. Music is about understanding and sharing the human experience in ways that words cannot. In this way music is life-affirming and powerful. If this happens in our classroom leading up to our concert, this is what they will remember regardless of how well a concert goes.
The glory of a great performance only last an evening, understanding the joy and meaning in the process of learning music lasts a lifetime.
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