Year 11 – Week 36: The Inevitable

 Among the many lessons learned in education this past year and a half is that nothing is inevitable.

There is a feeling that education just happens. Lessons get taught, instruments get learned, and concerts come around like the seasons.  With solid structures and systems in place in many education communities, education can feel like a machine moving forward. In other places, individuals work unrecognized and underpaid far beyond they should make things work. Most schools are somewhere in-between.

When the pandemic hit last year, the critical assumptions that made up the foundations of what we can do and how we can do things feel apart.  Teaching music without singing, creating a classroom community with remote students, and struggling to figure out how to do any in-person events have made every single that we do require a new level of effort. It became clear early in this year that nothing was "going to happen," nothing was inevitable except for the passage of time.

Yesterday, we had our first in-person concert in over a year. Every piece of this required work in ways that I had not had to plan for in the past. We had to plan with our medical advisory committee things that I never had to think about before planning concerts. There had to be discussions about whether this performance could be outside or inside, how many people could come, how chairs had to be spaced out, and many other factors. Some of these decisions were easy to be made, and other decisions had to be discussed over time with much thought.

Instead of having months to plan a concert, we had weeks from the moment our medical advisory committee approved an outdoor performance to the latest date we could do this before the senior retreat. Everything had to move faster in the planning of this concert than ever before. Issues that we usually face felt more urgent.

For example, first, we were going to do this event on our field, but because we don't have lights on our field, we had to do the concert early in the evening to avoid sundown. This meant we had conflicts with sports games. Eventually, this got resolved when we moved the concert into our courtyard and found funds to rent lights.

The main lesson from the experience of planning of concert is that music is not inevitable. In previous years the lift felt easier only because others through the years and throughout the school made an effort to make the music feel routine and not extraordinary.

The event went very well, and because of hard work by many committed people at our school, we were able to bring the magic of live music back to our students and their families.  It was reminder of what we had missed, but more importantly it was vision of our future. 

We've lost so much in music education in the past year and a half, and we can stop the loss sooner than later, but this is not going to happen on its own. As we face the end of the school year thinking about the future, we must remind ourselves and our educational communities that things will not magically go back to "normal." Transitioning smoothly out of the pandemic is not inevitable.  As we move towards the best times that we never forget the work that it takes to bring music back to our schools.