Year 12 – Week 3: Looking Back Together In Song

"They don't know my head is a mess."

It was a last-second idea.

The assembly was for grades 4 and 5, which are both graders I teach. I had started the school year teaching them the same song, "Don't Look Back In Anger." I chose this song because I wanted the students to learn a song that felt easy to sing, was catchy and felt like a sing-along. Also, I liked the theme of forgiveness and letting go in the lyrics.  With all that has been going on in the world, I felt like my students needed this song. I know that I did.



I taught this song thinking that we would do a large group sing-along at some point, and I wanted to have something ready to go. I didn't expect that this opportunity would come so soon.

The students enjoyed learning this song in class. I could tell by the way they left the classroom humming and singing this song to themselves. That's always a good sign that kids like a song. They had gotten better at the song, and even though they didn't know it well enough to perform it, they knew it well enough to participate in a sing-along.

Maybe.

So I emailed the principal who was organizing the assembly and asked if we could do a song at the end of the assembly, and he enthusiastically replied, "yes, please."

Teaching singing has been a joy this year and a challenge. After a year where students were told they couldn't sing because it wasn't safe, I had to try to get them comfortable singing in class. This is a challenge in a "normal" but even more so this year. Mask hinders jaw movement and hides the movements of lips. It is helpful for me to see student's lips move as we are learning a song.  Many students softly sing when they are first learning a song, and seeing their lips move is a way to tell if they are working along with the class when I can't hear them.

I'm still unsure of the best way to adjust my teaching to deal with singing with masks, but I'm not frustrated with this issue. On the contrary, I'm more joyful and encouraged by every class. I hear more students sing louder and louder. It's a great feeling.

Even though I didn't have a very high level of confidence that this sing-along would go well, I pushed ahead.  I wondered if having the students sing along with the recording would make it less risky, but I decided against that. Students wouldn't participate as well as if it was just me and a guitar.

After a year and a half of not teaching singing (and not singing much myself) or playing the guitar, I was a mess on stage. I had noticed how out of shape I was in class.   I was missing guitar chords that should not have been a big deal, and sometimes I struggled to keep my right steady. Also, my voice is not in shape. Usually, I can sing full voice to G sharp or A before switching to head voice.  Right now, I'm at around an F before I need to flip.  It's been over a decade since my voice has been this out of shape. All of this was only worse on stage.

When my hands failed me on guitar playing a song that I've known how to play for a quarter of a century, I just stopped playing, and when my voice struggled to hit high notes, I stepped away from the mic and motioned to the students to sing louder. And even though they were spread out around the auditorium and were all wearing masks, I could hear that we were singing together.  For the first time in a year and a half, a community of students sang together in the auditorium.

All of us are a mess right now. The pandemic isn't over, and we are all struggling in different ways, and that's okay.  Even when we don't get it all together, it's important to remember that we can still do good work, find joy in the community, and still make magic happen with our students.