Year 5: Week 6 – Week In Review

Monday
There wasn’t a lot of playing music during 8th grade band class, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We joked around, watch some international speed-walking competitions, discussed how the past couple weeks had gone and then finally got around to actually playing our instruments. Was it the most productive class musically? No, but if simply creating great music was my mission I wouldn’t be teaching middle school band.

Tuesday
My instinct was to get mad when my 3rd graders giggled at the off-key, shrill recording of a Native American octogenarian singing a chant. I felt it was important for them to hear an authentic recording of this chant and while it wasn’t a good example of singing technique, it was an important representation of this culture. Before we listening to this recording I told them that some of them might feel like giggling and that was ok, but they needed to stifle themselves and I would be asking them why the were laughing.

Some of my student did smile a giggle while listening to the singing, so we talked as a class why someone might laugh at this recording. They had very honest reasons: her accent sounded funny, it was unfamiliar, the words sounded silly, and I didn’t understand what she was saying. I validated their reasons and talked about how sometimes when I’m uncomfortable, I giggle, but its important to move past that. The second time we listened to the recording, no one was laughing and they dived deep into the chant learning the words and the melody and captured the mood of the music.

Wednesday 
The beginning of the school year 6th grade music is crazy. We voice test students and have them try to play all of the band instruments. After this process the students choose between band and choir. After that the band students need to rent instruments and then we begin teaching the kids how to actually play the instrument . . . kind of. Last week was spent teaching the kids how to open their cases right side up and how to put their instruments together. This week we finally got to producing a great tone and learning couple notes.

Susan wasn’t doing anything wrong on the clarinet, but she felt like she was a failure. While all of the other clarinet players were getting a nice low dark tone, she kept playing the higher octave of the instrument. My first three suggestions didn’t work, but after one crazy idea, a metaphor that barely made sense, she produced a beautiful rich dark tone. Susan wasn’t sure how great her sound was but I think she got the idea when I jumped out of the chair and jumped in joy.

Thursday
A spent almost all of my prep time responding to one parent’s email. Is this any way to balance my time between the families of the almost two hundred students that I teach? Yes. Being fair doesn’t mean that every family gets the same thing from me every day. We give to our parents according to what they need and sometimes one parent needs more time than others.

Friday
The best part of bringing Ollie to school for our annual County Fair was when he met the 8th grade girls. As we approached the 8th grade atrium, I helped Ollie stand up on the ramp leading up to the where the 8th graders were gathered. One of the girls recognized Ollie from pictures I had shared, announced “OMG!! It’s LITTLE TANG!!!” Then a group of about twenty girls rushed towards Ollie. They all stopped about two feet away from Ollie creating an arc around him, and kneeled and crouched down to greet him. As they smiled at him, and reached out to him, he stood laughing in delight at the attention.

Close-Up

Parenthood: Week 71 - Unpacking Your Chidlhood

One of the common exercises that is done in diversity work is for a person to examine their own journey in the field of diversity. This requires the person to ask themselves questions and come to terms with their own feelings is an open and authentic way. This is not an easy thing to do and sometimes it can take a lot of strength. However, this is one of most important steps because everything a persons says or does related to diversity work is influenced, whether the person knows it or not by feelings and experiences from the past.

The same goes with parenting.

Parents make all kinds of choices about parenting every single day. There’s many different influences that help us parenting, from the doctor to the random blogger. We rationalize our decisions by trying to base them on sound advise but the reality is that much of the time, we go with paths that we feel more comfortable with and then find the person, research, author, or random person on the street to back up and help us rationalize our decisions.

Our choices are also informed by how we feel about our own childhood, how our parents raised us and how we think our parents raised us. All of these things, swirl around in our subconscious and come bubbling up when we least expect it and have a far stronger influence on the choices we make as parents than any of us would like to believe.

We as parents have to unpack our own childhood and ask ourselves a lot of tough questions so that we can get to the root of our own feelings about being a parent and the decisions that we are making.

What if you tell yourself that you use disposable diapers because of the time it saves when in reality the reason you are doing this is because cloth diapers remind you of the times your parents forced you to change your younger siblings diapers?

Unpacking our childhood experiences may not change any of the choices we make but it will make it more clear what insecurities, feelings, fears and hopes are influencing you as a parent.

You’ve got to dig deep and it’s really hard. There are some parts of my childhood I like thinking about and other parts I’ve left behind. It’s probably the later, which keeps me up at night when I can’t make a decisions about something related to Ollie.

We aren’t destined to become our parents when we have kids. But we are destined to try to capture the best parts of our own childhood for our children and steer them away from the moments we’d rather forget. This is not a bad thing, but we have to be careful. What was glorious for us, may not interest our children and what once felt so scaring, may not be so bad through the eyes of the next generation.

Kid’s force us to look back at our own childhood. Don’t fight this, stay with it. Have tough conversations with your parents and siblings, figure out what worked and what did it. Don’t always try to rationalize your parenting instincts with other people’s words, look within and try to find that reasoning in your own experience as a child.

Once you understand this and accept your childhood then you can let go of it when you need to make decisions about your own child. Only by finding those fears and insecurities, looking at them and getting to their core, can you then put them aside.

There’s a lot of things that are hard about being a parent. Being forced to reexamine your own childhood is one of the hardest things. This process may be rough. Under further examination the good things may not seem so great, and the bad things, well, you might realize, really weren’t that bad.

Year 5: Week 5 – The Honeymoon

This year I had my first honeymoon.

There’s this idea I’ve heard about ever since I started teaching about the “honeymoon period.” It’s this theory that kids are really well behaved and easy to teach during the first couple weeks of school and then they become a terror.

Why would this occur? There’s a couple theories. Some kids are simply scared of their teacher and this makes them straighten up. This fear eventually wears out and the kids start pushing the boundaries. Older students often give a teacher a chance, but once they see that the teacher doesn’t have their stuff together, they will dive right in and let the teacher have it.

In the past, I didn't experience a honeymoon period. If a class is going to be difficult, they usually start out difficult with me. This has led to having some pretty challenging starts to the school year. .

This year was different.

I was simply amazed with how smoothly this one class ran. They had great discussions, really dove into the activities without hesitation and worked together well. And then last week happened. It’s not that they were all that poorly behaved. They were actually quite typically with how much they interrupted each other and how many of them would talk out of turn.  That part of this change wasn’t that surprising. It was just simply shocking how quickly they made this change.

Probably what happened is that the class was giving me a chance, which I appreciate, but then at some point they decided to start acting real. .

I prefer what I experienced in earlier years, with not having a honeymoon period. I guess it’s nice to have a softer start of the year with a group of kids but I would much rather start the year with the kids pushing boundaries immediately.

Maybe the reason I haven't had honeymoon periods in the past is because I'm not a intimidating teacher at all and I'm pretty real with my kids from day 1.  I don't try to put on a front that I am more serious than I actually am.  I don't do the whole "don't smile until November," thing.  It's just not me and feels disingenuous.

I guess my honeymoon was nice, but the trip away wasn’t worth the rough landing back into reality.

Hand In Hand

Parenthood: Week 70 - Read to me?

It was my turn last Saturday to get up early with Ollie.  He’s a morning person and will get up around 6am every day. On the weekends we usually switch off who gets up early with him and who sleeps in.  Last Saturday morning it was my turn.

He played by himself for a little bit as I got myself through my morning routine. When I sat down on the floor he immediately grabbed a book and pushed it towards me. I excitedly read his book of choice to him. Then he chose another book for me to read, followed by more books. At a certain point, a toy distracted him and I started to doze off only to be awoken by the feeling of a board book being shoved into my throat.

Wearily I wiped the sleep off from my eyes, found a little bit of energy and began reading to him once again because of a promise I had made to myself and to Ollie.

When I think of the most meaningful milestones Ollie’s first words don’t come to mind or the first time he crawled. What comes to mind was the first time he giggled at Diana and the first time he brought a book to me to read.

The first time I read a book to Ollie he was six days old. It was kind of cute but at that point he could barely see, so it felt a little pointless. I wanted to start him our right but honestly reading to a newborn is kind of drag, so instead I just spent time talking to him, cuddling with him and changing his diapers.

As time went on and he became more responsive we read to him more and more. A lot of the time he would try to eat the book or crawl away before we got past the first page of the book. We kept at it and made a ritual of family story time every night.

Ollie slowly started to show preferences for certain books, giggling at certain pages and pointing to specific pictures repeatedly. And then that magic moment happened: Ollie crawled over to a pile of books he had pulled off his shelf, specifically chose one book and pushed it into my lap.

I read this book and he laughed without prompting at jokes in the book at the right time. When I finished the book and put it down with the other books, he crawled over, picked up the book and insisted I read it again. This happened about five times before we finally called it a night.

Ollie displayed incredible cognitive growth that evening. He recognized a specific book and related the contents of the book to its cover. Ollie followed along with the story, predicting when the jokes occurred and responded to the pictures and my voice. Also, Ollie communicated to me preference, his opinion, telling me not only what he wanted but what he enjoyed.

I was so proud of him. In that moment we saw the spark of a love of reading and I made a promise to him that night that I would do whatever I could to help develop in him a love for reading. If that means going to bookstores and libraries on a weekly basis or reading books to him whenever he asks, I would make it happen for Ollie.

I will even read that book where that narrator insists on saying goodnight to everything.  I get saying goodnight to a kitten but a bowl of mush?  Shouldn't you have brought that to the kitchen instead of leaving it out all night?  And honestly who says goodnight to "nobody"?  That's just creepy and weird.

Year 5: Week 4 – Letting Go

When I first started teaching I would try to make my own worksheets and I wasn’t comfortable with other people coming in and teaching my class. I felt that a great teacher had to do everything him or herself and that it was important that my students go their knowledge and success came from only me.

Now I’m all about using other people’s materials and bringing in as many people as possible to work with my students. The priority is my students’ learning and not who helps facilitate this growth.

Teachers often enter the field with a little “teacher-hero” fantasy. We want to be that teacher who single-handedly inspires a student to grow and learn. Part of this fantasy is that we do this all ourselves while fighting administrators, parents and other teachers.

The reality is that one of the things that truly great teachers do is utilize resources. There is not enough time in the day for teachers to gather all the materials, create worksheets and utilizing innovative instructional activities all by themselves. Smart teachers understand this and utilize available resources that take advantage of other people’s great work and skill.

Teachers who carefully utilize textbooks and other resources are freed from the time it takes to create those materials and can spend more time focusing on their students as learners and human beings.

Students don’t care who came up with a worksheet or band arrangement. The only people who really care about this is the teachers who make them. If you are making these materials looking for recognition from your school community, then you need to seriously look at your reasons for being a teacher. Something is off-balance in your teaching philosophy if recognition is your motivation for your work.

I used to get really uncomfortable with the idea of bringing someone in to help teach my class. I was afraid that my kids would realize that this other person was better than me and then not respect me as a teacher.

What I realized years later is that there is someone out there who dramatically outshines me in almost every facet of my teaching. There are better band directors, general music teachers, arrangers, and curriculum writers out there. It’s silly for me to present to my kids that I’m the best at all of this stuff when I’m not.

When I started bringing in more teachers to work with my students I didn’t see any difference in the level of authority that I had over my students and their level of respect they expressed towards me. Instead they expressed gratitude to me for setting up visits from other teachers.

Use textbooks and other people's arrangement.  Borrow colleague's materials and bring in other people to help your students learn.  If a video can teach a concept better than you, then use it and sit back and relax.  The greatest teachers know when its best to let go.

Don't forget, this song is not about you.