Year 11 – Week 32: Back To The Table

I miss how I used to teach music.

I’m very proud of the work I’ve done this year teaching about music. I’ve taught around 250 students about racist lyrics and racist origins of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I’ve helped many of my students fall in love with Dolly Parton, and my students have done some great composing through iPad apps. Yes, we’ve done some drumming together, and that’s been fun, but there’s so much that is missing.

It’s weird. These past couple of months, I haven’t thought a lot about teaching students how to create music with each other through singing and playing instruments. In some ways, I haven’t really felt like a music teacher. I do enjoy teaching students about culture and history and how to be creative, but what is missing cannot be replicated.

I know how to teach students how to play instruments. I can teach most ages how to play almost most of the instruments out there. I can teach students how to access their head voice while singing, shape vowels, and bring life to a song through emphasize pulse and energizing long notes. I know how to get 120 children to sing together through the strength of my posture, the way I breathe, a look in my eyes, and the movement in my arms and hands.

There’s so much that I know how to do that I haven’t done this year as a teacher. Some of this feels like a loss, but there are pieces of all of this that feel like they are beneficial. Not having a winter program that added stress into an already overwhelming time of year was really nice. Many schools save their big winter program for after winter break, and I can the benefits of this.

It’s been really nice to be free of the pressure of preparing music for concerts which has allowed me to teach about really important and relevant musical topics. This year I had time to teach about music from the Presidential Inauguration, wonderful Black women country artists who are finding an audience, and Warren Snipe’s incredible sing language performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Superbowl. At best, in a regular year, these important and wonderful topics would have only been mentioned at the beginning or end of class briefly and would have been discussed in much depth.

There have been times this year that I think I would be happier stepping away from the performances and teaching more like I have this year than in years past, but this week was not one of those times.

Earlier this week, Ethan asked me to sing him a song as I was putting him to bed, and without thinking, I started singing “Crowded Table.” At that moment, it all came back to me: the first time I sang this song to my 3rd graders, teaching them the hand motions and discussions about the meaning of the lyrics.

I know we'll be back together making music like this.  It just feels like even now in this time of hope, it is so far away.