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.

Parenthood: Week 419 – Slides & The Hulk

Slides

It seems like just a little while ago, Lucas was just barely mobile, and he is up on two feet. He doesn’t crawl at all anymore. He stumbles and falls quite a bit, but he is determined to be up on his two feet. With Ollie and Ethan, there was more of a transition when they would walk but still crawl a bit, but Lucas has been up on his two feet and determined to keep it going.

I didn’t generally think of Lucas as being as adventurous as Ethan. When Ethan was this age, he was full speed, running into things. Even now, when he goes outside, he runs away as fast as he can in the direction of a street. There’s a lot more chasing after him than there was for with Ollie.

While Lucas is a very calm child, in his mobility, he is very adventurous. When we go to a park, he goes off on his own, not worried about being too far away from us.

And then there are the slides.

Oh. My. Goodness.

That boy has no fear, and he just throws himself does these slides giggling the whole time down. As a parent, these moments fill me with joy, anxiety, and just disbelief that my little one is throwing himself down slides when it seems like just a little while ago, he could barely turn over.

The Hulk    

Ethan’s current favorite superhero is The Hulk. I don’t know exactly how he got introduced to him or when, but his love for The Hulk has taken off in the past two weeks. When he plays Avengers with Ollie, he takes off strips down to his underwear and screams, “Grr…I’m THE HULK! I’m angry because my shirt is ripped.”

Ethan thinks that The Hulk rips his clothing and THEN gets mad about it and becomes The Hulk. He has had many questions about this clothing and why and how The Hulk tears up his clothing.

Ethan has been fixated on wanting purple underwear so he can better dress up as The Hulk. So I found this two-piece outfit with a shirt that has a green printed torso and purple shorts. Ethan loves this outfit. He has worn it every day for the past week. It took some convening to get him to wear underwear under the purple shorts. I told him that The Hulk wears underwear under his purple shorts, which got Ethan to agree to do the same.

It is fascinating to me that Ethan has gravitated towards The Hulk. Out of all of my three sons, he is the one who is the quickest to anger.

I see the full range of emotions as not being “good” or “bad,” so I’m not stating this as a way to criticize Ethan. It’s just part of his personality. The Hulk, a character which is a meditation on anger, physical strength, and duality, Ethan has embraced. Maybe he seems himself in The Hulk, or perhaps this is a three-year-old’s way of processing his own emotion. Either way, it’s adorable, and the joy get out of his outfit and playing Hulk is one of the highlights of the past week.

Year 11 – Week 31: What Being A Parent Has Taught Me About Teaching

There are times when I think about how much easier it would be to handle my job as a teacher if I didn't have children. I'd have so much more time on my hands. I wouldn't be distracted by concerns and thoughts about my children while I was teaching, and I would be free of the constant tension of balancing out my work life and my role as a parent.

I don't remember my life as a teacher being a whole lot easier when I didn't have children. I didn't feel like I had enough time at work, my home life had stress as well, and there was the tension between me wanting to do stuff for work and doing things outside of my work life. In retrospect, this seems silly knowing how much more time I had for myself during those years, but at the time, I didn't appreciate this.

Often, we don't enjoy how much easier life is at a certain moment until that moment is passed and we are in a different life situation.

There are so many things that are hard about being a teacher while having young children of my own at home, but there are also benefits.

Having children has helped me find emotional space from my work and my students. When I was a younger teacher, I put more emotional energy into my relationship with my students. While I still care about them and work hard to get to know them, I'm not invested in them emotionally in a way that I feel that I need reciprocation. Sometimes teachers get too emotionally involved with students, and there were times when I was a younger teacher when things students would say would really hurt my feelings, and it would stay with me all weekend. Now, those things don't stay with me as much. I'm just their teacher. I'm not their parent, and my emotional energy is better served on my children.

Having children has forced me to work smarter. I have less time to focus on work than ever before in my career as a teacher. This means that not everything gets done on my to-do list, and not everything I want to do can be done. Now how is this a good thing? Sometimes teachers try to do too much. As a music teacher who puts on concerts, my own personal ambitions sometimes get mixed up with what is best for my students. When you have less, sometimes doing less for a concert means more of this work is on the students, representing their work more authentically.

When I was a younger teacher, I would make arrangements for most of the songs that I taught. I don't have time to do this anymore. So now I have to use other people's arrangements, and shock and awe, there are many great educators and composers out there who are better than me at making arrangements. My ego has been tempered through the need to rely on other people's work, and that's not a bad thing. Being a great teacher is not about doing everything yourself for your students. It's about creating the best educational experience possible for your students. If that means that you use people's work from a music method book does the job better than you could. Great!

Having children has helped me understand that being that teaching is of the most important jobs in society, and being a teacher is not the most important thing in my life.

My two older children's teachers, including their wonderful therapist, have significantly influenced Ollie and Ethan. Their self-esteem, their love of learning, and the light in their eyes have all been nurtured and have all grown because of their outstanding teachers. I will forever be grateful for all of the teachers who have given so much to my children. Their devotion to my children is inspiring, and an affirmation of all that is good and beautiful in this world. As a parent, I know how important great teachers are to children, families, and the world.

I love being a teacher, and I feel blessed and privileged to be engaged in the wonderful work of educating students, but I'm a father first. I join other fathers like President Obama, who hold their identity as a father ahead of their jobs as being central to who they are as people.

At some point, when I leave my current job, they will hire someone to replace me. No one can replace my role as a father in my children's lives. As we better understand our own lives, we can bring more of our authentic selves to our students, which makes us more effective at the practice of teaching.

Parenthood: Week 418 - Peace In the Forest

I'm not what you would call "outdoorsy." 

Before I had children of my own, I'd go on hiking on occasion, but more often than not, I would stay inside. I do enjoy the 5th-grade outdoor education trip that I've been on most years. It includes long hikes, some at nighttime without flashlights. These are challenging hikes, and at times they have been cold and wet, but I'm always glad that I go on these trips. However, I do spend a couple afterward thinking how I'm never going to go on one of these trips every again.  

I've definitely spent more time outside since having my first son Ollie. Going on walks and parks is one thing you do as a parent with a baby or young child. The child needs fresh air, and so do you. A parent can easily spend all day inside, and that can make a person stir-crazy, so taking a baby in a stroller around the block helps the parent and the child.  

As Ollie got older and the other two came along, getting outside was one of those things we did more and more. All our children are early risers, and we found that if we got them out of the house early in the day, they would be in a better mood for the remainder of the day.  

So, while it's tough to get moving on a weekend when your kids get you up at 6:45 am, the effort to get moving and out of the house is almost always worth it.  

When the pandemic, we responded by getting our children out to nature even more. It was unclear a year ago what was safe. Taking our children to the book store, library, and other indoor outings seemed like they were not a good idea or off-limits, so we went to forest preserves instead. 

Almost every weekend, and many weekdays when we could, we got out children outside, even when the weather wasn't great. During the summer we spent more time at the beach than we have in any previous summer. We have continued to get outside almost every weekend morning, even when there were two feet of snow on the ground.  

Yes, our children are in better moods if they spend the morning outside, but it's more than that. My children are rarely bored when we are in nature. They are less likely to get bored in an outside playground than at home, and they are even more unlikely to get bored if we are exploring the woods of a forest preserve.  

Ethan and Ollie are fascinated by poking sticks into pools of ice, climbing over fallen trees, and finding new paths in the forest. They find sticks to play with and examine how plants grow, and while they scare off most animals with how noisy they are, they enjoy seeing birds and bugs that they find.  

I find myself standing in the woods, often tired but feeling content that I'm away from it all, hearing the activity of my children behind me. Buffy at my side, I feel that we are doing right helping our children have a good relationship with nature. Sometimes when you do things for children, you end up doing something for yourself that you would never otherwise do. Spending time in nature is one of those things for me that my children have helped me do for myself, and especially in all of the chaos of the past year, it has brought me moments of peace.

Year 11 – Week 30: To The End Of The School Year

What am I going to do for the rest of the school year? 

Usually, I come back from Spring break with preparing for my 5th graders' performance and the middle school band concert. 3rd grade is usually deep into their recorder unit and moving along at a good pace.  

There is no live performance. My 5th graders cannot sing and play recorder as part of the COVID-19 mitigation practices, and we can't bring parents into our school for a performance anyways, so that is done. The middle school band concert is canceled for the same reason. We haven't had band or choir all year. This year I'm not teaching 3rd grade for the first time in almost a dozen years because of scheduling issues, so I'm with 4th grade, and I'm not sure what we are doing in that class when we get back from break.  

I'm unsure.  

Like every stage of this school year, there are new challenges and changes. My 4th and 5th grader classes were split up into six pods/grade of 9-10 students, and they will now be combined into three pods (classes)/grade. The CDC recommends that social distances in schools can be changed from 6 feet to 3 feet means that we can combine these students into the class sizes that we have done in previous years.  

This will be a significant change. Having twice as many students in a classroom will feel different. Having only 9-10 students spaced out in a room felt pretty good. It felt right for students to have so much space around them, so this will feel crowded. I'm probably going to feel a bit uneasy being in those classrooms with so many students. That is something I am going to have to process.  

The classroom community will need work. It takes a while for a group of students to feel out the social and power dynamics in a class. It will be interesting trying to balance out the time needed for this classroom community to realign and reorganize with curricular goals. I'm not sure how to play it yet. Part of me just wants to get to curricular work and establish norms as we work, but part of me thinks clear reminders and discussions may be necessary.  

I'm excited.

My 8th graders have been in their larger sections about 18 students this whole year but have not been able to be in classrooms because of the 6-foot social distancing recommendations. Now that we are down 3 feet, they can finally be in classrooms. I've been teaching them in hallways, in part of the library, an art classroom, which worked pretty well, so it's going to be nice to teach them in a classroom. Teaching them in two rows spaced out down a hallway is not fun. I'm not going to miss that.  

And I'm worried.

Will we more exposures at my school, which will lead to more quarantines? Now that I'm vaccinated, I'm not concerned about my health that much, and with the layers of mitigations my school has put into place, we have not had students get COVID-19 from being exposed to COIVD-19 from other students in classrooms.  

The first time I was exposed to a COVID-19 positive student was one of the most challenging days of my teaching career. That was before I was vaccinated, and it was very stressful. Since then, I've been exposed two other times after being vaccinated, and it's still hard to process. I don't have to quarantine since I am vaccinated, but the students do, and it's unsettling.  

I don't want the year to end with more of this, but that may be something I need to accept. I don't know if I should mentally prepare for more quarantines or hope to make it to the end without these situations coming up. The fact that we have not had spread from our classrooms means that our mitigation practices are working. That is a good thing, but the fact that we even have to deal with this feels still so wrong after all this time.  

What will the end of the school year feel like? Will it feel like a moment of great accomplishment in the worst of times, or will it be filled with regret? What will the parents say, what will the teachers say, and what will our students say about all we did this year to make in-person school work? 

We will find out, and until then, like everything about my job in the past year, we have to take it one task at a time, one day at a time. Accept uncertainty, be flexible, and stay focused on what is best for the students.

Parenthood: Week 417 – One-on-one

I never had my parents all to myself.

I was the second born out of two. My brother had three years when it was just him and my parents. Ever since I was born, my brother had to share my parents with me. Ethan and Lucas are the same way. Ollie had a couple of years when it was him, me, Diana, and Buffy. That was our family. That was his universe. Then Ethan arrived, and then Lucas. Like me, they never had a period when they were an only child.

Partially because of the pandemic, we've had a lot of time when we are in the house together as a family. There are fewer extracurricular activities, a lot fewer places we could take our children, and there was no in-person school for some time.

The moments when I'm truly one-on-one with one of my sons feel rare. Even when Lucas and Ethan take a nap, and I'm playing video games with Ollie, I'm not fully alone with Ollie. At any time, one of the boys could wake up. But there are moments when I feel fully with him and not having my attention split with my other children. The same goes for when I'm going on a walk with Lucas and Ollie or taking Ethan grocery shopping.

One of the interesting things is how my children are different when they are away from their siblings. Different sides of their personality come out when they are by themselves. They are often calmer since they don't have to fight me for attention. I can focus on what they are saying more since my attention isn't split, and I feel like I can be more present, not worried about what is going on with another child who is not directly in front of me.

I feel bad sometimes because I know that I probably could be more patient with my children if there weren't three. At the same time, I know that their lives are enriched because they have each other. And I think that learning how to share people you love with others is a very important lesson. This can be learned outside of the context of having siblings, but it's a lesson learned early when you have brothers and/or sisters.

I love seeing how my children interact when they are all together, and I love seeing them by themselves explore the world with me by their side. As they get older, it will be interesting to see how their relationships with each other change. And I'm looking forward to seeing how our time together one on one builds our relationship as father and son.

It's hard to find the moments to focus on one of my children, but it's worth it. There's the practical piece of it. I've discovered that focused time on one of them, even for a short period, eases stress in the house. If I spend five minutes reading a book to Ethan, he is a lot less likely to bug me when I'm trying to clean up the kitchen or change Lucas's diaper.

More than the practical, the one-on-one time helps me better see, hear, and understand my children as individuals. I see myself as a dad different. With all three, I sometimes feel inadequate  and overwhelmed. When it's just one child, I'm reminded how good I am at this parenting thing and that among the chaos, my children love me, and I love them. 

Year 11 – Week 29: Lift Every Voice...

I started each class by playing Beyoncé's epic performance of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" from Coachella in 2018. I asked my students as they watched to listen and see if they had heard this song before. 

 

With every class, I did this, out of 10% of my students raised their hands when I asked them who knew this song. This includes students in 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th grade.  

I teach in a school that is predominantly made up of students who are white. It wasn't a surprise that most of the students had not heard this song before, and I get it because I would have been one of those students.  

I first heard "Lift Every Voice and Sing," when I was in graduate school. My elementary music education professor taught us a sample unit on this song. She was illustrating how to teach a song while teaching the historical context and meaning of the song. She wanted to push us to go beyond teaching notes and rhythms when educating our students. I loved her ideas, and they have shaped teaching for my entire career as an educator. 

I've always wanted to teach about "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to my students, but I've unsure what it means for mostly white students to sing this song. Also, this song doesn't really fit into a middle school band curriculum with the level at which my students play. This year though, because of COVID-19 mitigations, we can't sing, and we can't play band instruments, so I figured to just go for it.  

After having the students be blown away by Beyoncé's epic performance, we listened to the NPR's episode on "Life Every Voice and Sing" as part of their American Anthem series.

I explained to my students that I could tell them the same information that this news story could, but it didn't feel right. I explained that this is a song created by two African-American brothers, which has had a profound effect on Black culture and Black history. As an Asian-American, I do not have an experience with this song in the same way that the people in this story do. I told them that we should hear directly from those within a community when studying music from that community whenever we can. Even if I gave the same information, it would feel different from the Black people featured in this radio story.  

Afterward, we analyzed the lyrics. We spent a lot of the time on the second verse thinking about what "Felt in the days when hope unborn had died" meant and thinking about what the "tears" and the "blood" in this verse are references to in American history. In contrast "The Star-Spangled Banner," which we had been studying, we talked about it meant to acknowledge the darkness in American history as opposed just to tell the story of American resilience. I was impressed with my students' work and their focus when working on these lyrics. 

We explored other version of this song include versions by Kirk Franklin, Ray Charles, and Kim Weston:  

 

My 8th graders thought deeply about this song. They wondered if white people singing "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was cultural appropriation. They wondered if we should have two official national anthems or no anthem at all, and they wondered if this was the "Black national anthem," then what was the "The Star-Spangled Banner"? The white one? I let them discuss these topics. I didn't give them an answer, and I told them that I was proud of them for asking these really important questions.  

My younger students overall really like this song after we were done with the lesson.  

At the end of class, one of the Black students reflected the Kirk Franklin's version reminded her of her church. The other students were intrigued.  She explained how people responded to the church leaders, and the music in the church sounded just Franklin's version. She spoke with pride, and it was clear that she loved the attention and interest the others students were giving her.

It was a wonderful moment that I'll never forget.