Chance

Tags

chance, choices, luck, music, teaching

Yesterday on her blog A Big Life, Australian writer Olivia Hambrett described a pivotal moment in her history. Staring out the window – her window – at the beauty of a German spring day, she reflected on how a single choice, made in her early twenties, had set in motion a chain of events leading to this moment. She marveled at how unrecognizable her life might be had she made a different choice five years ago.

Lately I too have been thinking about the life that I have built, and how the complex structures of my adult existence sprung from one precarious moment in my early twenties.

Two months away from my college graduation, I attended a professional conference. I had applied for twenty-two music teaching jobs from Maine to Virginia and was waiting to be called for interviews.

Hopefully, readers, you will agree that I am a reasonably intelligent woman. I’m also, if I may say so, a pretty thorough planner. So I can’t even attempt to explain why I went to this conference, just shy of graduation, with a suitcase full of blue jeans and zero copies of my resume. It was a moment of spectacularly poor planning that, thanks to my pluck and a little dumb luck, didn’t seem to matter.

I walked into a session on classroom management and recognized the clinician as the director of fine arts for a wealthy community just west of Boston. I had sent her my resume three days earlier. She was hiring a high school choral director.

I knew that if I wanted the job – and I was pretty sure I did – I had to introduce myself. Although I was loath to draw attention to my undergraduate attire at a Big Boys and Girls conference, I knew that there was only one choice. So when the session ended I strode to the front of the room, extended my hand to the clinician, and introduced myself as a candidate for her choral job.

Much to my surprise, she invited me to join her for an interview in the hotel coffee shop. And although I had not even a business card to offer her when it was over, one week later I found myself in her office – in a suit – for my second interview.

I didn’t get the job. She was ultimately looking for someone with choral conducting experience, of which I had little. But as I was walking out the door she told me that a small seaside community north of Boston was looking for a music teacher, and that I should apply.

I mentally composed my cover letter on the two-hour drive home. I assembled my application materials and dropped them in the mailbox that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang, and I had my first conversation with the woman who would mentor and inspire me for the next ten years. She had received my name from a colleague – the same one who tipped me off about the job opening just hours before.

For ten years I have taught music in that seaside town, weaving its faces and voices into the fabric of my being. I have often wondered what my life would look like today had I decided not to shake the hand of that fine arts director. It’s hard to imagine.

Somebody That I Used to Know

Tags

breakups, gotye, music, teaching

My friend Eileen picked me up on the way to dinner tonight and immediately asked me if I have heard “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye. I enthusiastically exclaimed that I have, and that I love the song. What made this moment so remarkable is that I had been humming the song on my way down the stairs and out to her car, and that I had just watched the video three times on YouTube.

For a music teacher – in particular, for a music teacher whose career is so heavily focused on contemporary a cappella – I am woefully out of touch with the popular music scene. I have not listened recreationally to a trendy song since I was my students’ age. My music collection is mostly made up of obscure singer songwriters and forties jazz musicians. So it is unusual for me to ride the popular music wave as I am doing now, with a song that is peaking ten months after its release.

In fact, it was my students who introduced me to this uniquely compelling song. I heard it for the first time last week when one of my a cappella groups began rehearsing it. Five students had collaborated on an arrangement and came back from vacation ready to teach it to the rest of their group. For the first time in my career, I sat at my desk while my group learned a new song entirely on their own – a moment that I would have found moving regardless of the song choice.

Their arrangement is nothing like the original, but it made me hold my breath the first time I heard it put together. It is marked by grinding dissonance, a brooding bass line, and soaring three-part harmony in the chorus. It struck me as unusual that the group moved so quickly from the learning of notes to a discussion about expression. Even in their first rehearsal, they transitioned seamlessly from drawn-out dissonant harmonies (reminiscent of paralyzing depression) to a wailing, melodramatic chorus that perfectly suits teenage voices. It is unusual for them to connect so viscerally with a song – at least, not before extensive rehearsal and lyrical analysis.

Two days later, a student in my online American Popular Music class wrote a beautifully-crafted essay about Gotye’s music video, prompting me to look it up on YouTube.  I found the video, with its stop motion animation and highly expressive facial close-ups, to be the perfect compliment to a song that already thumped in my chest. I’ve watched the video every day since then, contributing to its more than 190 million views.

That my students introduced me to the song in the same week that I suffered a painful falling out with a close friend has no doubt intensified its magnetic appeal for me. I had forgotten about the unique devastation of a polite nod from a former loved one.

Now that the song is on my radar, I notice it all over Facebook (along with a number of covers and parodies.) Clearly my students and I are not the only people moved by Gotye’s song, which gives voice to feelings that are hard to talk about.

Talking Shop

Tags

teaching, TESOL, arts education, music education

I had the good fortune this weekend to be surrounded by passionate educators at varying stages in their careers. We spent several hours talking about what motivates, frustrates, and inspires us about the profession. I’m so glad I got the chance to share best practices with people who are enthusiastic about teaching – this does not happen often enough in my professional routine.

Yesterday, as I have already noted, was the last day of my TESOL foundations course. From this point on we will continue our studies online through the Global TESOL College. No doubt it will be just as rigorous and interesting as our class has been, but I will miss the company of my teacher and classmates. Our class was unique, as it was made up entirely of women, most of whom have taught in some capacity, whether in public schools or overseas. Their stories have impressed and inspired me.

We spent much of the morning asking our last burning questions about the field of ESL and sharing our experiences in the classroom. We talked about classroom management, assessment strategies, and adapting to the culture of a school. I was struck by the wealth of knowledge that we classmates shared, and by how rarely I get the opportunity to “talk shop” with fellow educators.

Later that evening I attended a dinner party with ten women, all of them active in arts education. We gathered around a table laden with a bountiful feast and shared our thoughts on our field. We talked about the essential values that have guided us in our careers, our strategies for coping with professional adversity, and what we have learned through our classroom experiences.

One woman talked about the importance of actively evolving in one’s profession. She spoke of “making the familiar unfamiliar,” a phrase that resonated with me in light of my recent TESOL education. After ten years of teaching, I was surprised to find that TESOL felt quite foreign to me. Even though the teaching techniques are largely similar to those that I practice – in fact, my approach to music literacy is based on the process of language acquisition – I felt very much like a beginner as I fumbled my way through the course.

I think it’s good to feel like a beginner once in a while. It gave me an appreciation for the sense of security I feel every day, teaching a subject that I love and understand deeply. It also gave me a glimpse of what my students experience as they grapple with the uncertainty of new information every day.

In a profession that can feel surprisingly isolating, it felt really good to connect with people who think like me.

Split Ends

Tags

hair, teaching, TESOL, travel

One of my worst habits as a student is my occasional fixation on my split ends.

My hair care routine is incredibly lax – I will confess that on some lazy mornings I don’t even bother to brush it before twisting it up into a loose chignon and securing it with a spider clip. I don’t highlight it or straighten it or deep condition it. Most days I barely remember it’s there. But there are moments – usually in a classroom setting when I am unable to focus but obligated to sit still – when my hair utterly fascinates me. I grasp a tuft of it between my fingertips, hold it a few inches from my face, and study my split ends. I examine and silently curse each one. Very rarely do I have access to scissors when this happens (and for that matter, very rarely does it happen at a time and place that hair trimming is socially acceptable behavior.) So I stare and stare and stare.

This happened during today’s TESOL class. Now, I feel obliged to point out that my class is far from boring – my teacher and classmates are lively and intelligent, and the subject is interesting to me. But on this first official day of April vacation, morphology and syntax did little to hold my attention. My mind drifted from my summer travel plans (hmmmmm, did you know that Europe and Africa are separated by a mere eight miles of water?) to my unkempt ends.

Whenever I think of trimming my hair I think of Chloe, a former student who was as beautiful as she was talented. She was willowy and graceful with wide brown eyes and long chestnut hair. From fifth grade until the spring of her senior year, her signature look changed very little until the day she came to school having cut approximately six inches off of her hair. It now fell just below her shoulders. She looked older, sophisticated, and well-groomed. We all complimented her on her stylish new hairdo, and when she told us that she had cut it herself we applauded her skill.

A few days later she showed up with a chin-length bob. Once again we complimented her look – the short length highlighted her facial features perfectly. We all asked if she had once again done the job herself, and she confirmed that she had. We were all impressed by her control and her confidence – short hair was unusual in girls her age, let alone self-styled short hair.

The following week she came to school with an edgy, tousled shag. A week after that she was sporting a closely-cropped pixie cut. Each style seemed to suit her more than the last. She couldn’t stop cutting it – she loved the way each new style made her look and feel, and she loved the fact that she had done it herself. She is in college now, and I rarely see her – but every time I do, she still has short hair.

I understand why Chloe grew addicted to the feeling of a new hairdo, for I imagine she felt about her scissors the way I feel about my passport. My first trips were to English speaking countries. Gradually I branched out to places like France, Austria, and Germany where I looked like I might fit in (at least until I opened my mouth to prove otherwise.) On subsequent trips I began to explore countries where pale blue-eyed blondes are an anomaly and found that, in fact, I quite enjoyed feeling like the odd one out. Now when I hear my classmates talk about places like Kosovo and Burkina Faso I am surprised to find myself nodding and thinking “I could do that, too.”

But there are lots of things I need to accomplish first. Like, for starters, trimming my split ends.

Looking Back

Tags

MMEA, music, news, teaching, writing

Today I wrote a column that will run in the June issue of Mass Music News. Yes, that’s right – I wrote a “news” column that will run two months from now. If that’s not creative writing, I don’t know what is.

—

The summer months are upon us! I’m sure I’m not alone when I tell you that last March’s unseasonably warm spell jump-started my summer musings. My thoughts turned to travel, beach days, and barbecues, but also to next fall’s musical, ensemble auditions, and new repertoire. This is the life of a teacher – we are always planning ahead.

It is important, though, to reflect as much as we plan – like Janus, the Roman two-faced god of transitions, a good teacher looks forward and back simultaneously. As we wind down for summer, we are at an opportune moment to do exactly that.

Last fall, in my first chairperson’s letter for Mass Music News, I told you of the extreme measures that I had taken to rejuvenate after a tough school year. For the first time in my life I took a true summer vacation – I wrote no curriculum, arranged no songs, and answered no emails.  It was my attempt to press the reset button, and it served as a reminder that before I can inspire young minds, I need to inspire my own. Reciting (and living by) this mantra over the following school year gave me the necessary energy to embark on new projects and adventures with my students.

It has been a year of exciting developments in the Northeastern District. We adopted an online scoring system that streamlined our audition procedures and allowed our dedicated volunteers to work more efficiently. At our board meetings we began a discussion of how we can go beyond the festivals to better serve our membership. We were excited to co-sponsor the SGMM General Music Festival last spring and are discussing professional development opportunities for next year.

Now we are turning our attention to our festival procedures. We are gathering data on what is working well and what needs attention. One of my projects this summer will be to edit our choral audition mp3s. I will also be collecting recommendations for new additions to our adjudicator list for the senior and junior festivals. Please send me your suggestions!

As you reflect on your year and look ahead to the next one, I hope you will take a few minutes to give me some feedback. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the work that we are doing in the Northeastern District – what are our areas for growth? Please take our online survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FN66P6K.

Happy summer!

Amanda Roeder

Lesson Planning

Tags

college, plans, teaching, TESOL, UMass

It’s Good Friday and, regardless of your faith, I think we can all agree that it is good because I did not have school.

Which is not to say that it was a day off, for I spent the better part of it at my computer writing a lesson plan and supporting materials for tomorrow’s TESOL class.

Much like my earliest experiences with teacher training, I am required to write and teach sample lessons, on which I will be critiqued by my teacher and my classmates.

I forgot just how terrifying this is.

I keep thinking back to my first micro-teaching experience. It was the fall of my freshman year at UMass, and the assignment, for Intro to Music Ed, was to teach a five-minute lesson on the topic of our choice. We were told that it need not be musical. As I was working at a skating rink at the time, I decided to teach a lesson on how to remove and clean roller blade wheels. The only requirement for our five minute lessons was that we were to separate the telling and the showing of information. We were told that it is important to use these two methods of instruction separately so that our students would strengthen both aural and visual skills without excessively favoring one.

When the big day came, we split into small groups and took turns teaching our lesson. I delivered my lesson on skate care and maintenance. The professor announced that five minutes had passed and asked the class to evaluate those of us who had presented. She asked if we had successfully separated our showing and our telling.

My classmates looked apologetically at me and reported that no, I had not. That was when I first discovered that teaching is harder than it looks.

I’ve come a long way in the last fourteen years, but I’m still nervous about tomorrow.  So today I spent hours studying the TESOL manual, searching the web for homophone jokes, and brushing up on language learning methodologies.   And frankly, I don’t want to spend another second at this computer.

So I’m going to cut this blog entry short for tonight. But if you’d like to test your knowledge of homophones, including everyone’s favorites there, they’re, and their, knock yourself out.

Practice with Homophones

There Their They’re

Virtual Conflict

Tags

controversy, gay rights, morality, online, teaching

There was an incident in one of my classes today.

We were in the midst of a unit about American popular music at the end of the 1960s. We had spent the whole week talking about music as a tool for protest. We talked about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. Finally, I asked the students to draw comparisons between the protest movements of the 1960s and their contemporary concerns. I asked them what social or political issues could be explored today through song.

One student – let’s call her Elena, an articulate but inconsistent participant in class discussions – said that she would like to see the issue of gay rights explored through song. She spoke of the movement for marriage equality as well as the alarming trends of bullying behaviors towards gay teens. She cited the infamous case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers Univeristy student who committed suicide after his roommate secretly videotaped and publicized his encounters with another man.

Much to my surprise, another student – we’ll call her Anne – jumped into the discussion with a sharply critical response to Elena’s statement. It was unusual behavior for Anne, who for the last two months has been an agreeable and affirmative presence in our class. “I have to say that I totally disagree with you,” she said. “I understand that people can choose to be gay if they want, but we all have our own freedoms, including freedom of speech. I’m not going to be a jerk about it, but I was raised to believe that it is wrong to be gay, and it’s my right to say so.”

I was immediately struck by the realization that I had to say something. Clearly this was a teachable moment that could not be ignored. But I had absolutely no idea what to say.

Elena and Anne are members of an online class that I teach through the Virtual High School Global Consortium. I teach American Popular Music to students from around the world, and in exchange, students from my school can enroll in any course in the Virtual High School curriculum.  This is my school’s first year in the program and my first exposure to online education.

As a teacher I am careful about how I address the sensitive matters of politics, religion, and morality in the classroom. I recognize that a teacher’s position of authority can make students uncomfortable to voice dissenting opinions. I try to avoid controversial topics altogether. When they do come up, whether unexpectedly or by necessity, I choose my words carefully and avoid charged statements.

There were several points that I wanted to argue with Anne, but I didn’t know how to do it.

Some gay rights advocates have called this moment in history our new civil rights issue. I considered sharing this perspective with the class in order to make a direct comparison between the world in which we live and the one we have been studying. But I hesitated before clicking “post” and ultimately decided against it. To compare the two would be to compare Anne to a racist.

I happen to think it’s a valid comparison. Perhaps if the discussion had taken place in my physical classroom I might have gone there. Today, in my virtual classroom, I steered clear of the subject.

I’ve taught at the same school for ten years. I have known some of my students for just as long. I know many of their parents and siblings. I understand the community – its heritage, its tolerances, its foibles, its and its limits. I know what I can say in my classroom and what I can’t. I do not conceal the convictions that define who I am, because I believe it’s important for teachers to be genuine, but neither do I endorse candidates or make pointed political statements. I do encourage my students to practice active, respectful listening and democratic decision making, and I hope that this will have some small impact on their political participation later in life.

My online students come to me from around the world. When the virtual altercation broke out, I didn’t even remember what states the two girls were from – I had to look that information up in my student roster. Not that knowledge of their place of residency helped a lot. I don’t know the culture of their schools or the values of their families. I don’t know who is reflective and who is reactive. I don’t know how these girls respond to criticism or how they interact with adults and peers. What ultimately discouraged me from posting my civil rights comment was the realization that I don’t know how they interpret the things that I write.

I sent both girls private messages about the delivery of their arguments. I gave them some tips for how to speak and write with clarity and conviction. I advised them that, when arguing opposite sides of a controversial subject, it’s smart to make specific and concise statements.

Knowing that I had to make a public acknowledgement of the debate, I posted this message on the discussion board:

Wow. We’ve certainly touched upon a hot button issue, haven’t we? This is a very complex subject that tends to inspire strong reactions from both sides. In this way it is not unlike some of the heated and controversial issues that we’ve recently studied – which makes it a perfect subject for a protest song.

The debate stopped, and the girls went to their respective virtual corners. I patted myself on the back for managing conflict in my “classroom.”

But did I teach something to these girls in two far-flung cities across the country?

It’s hard to tell.

Cracking the Gate

Tags

gnp, music, politics, teaching

In today’s piano lesson, my student and I spent half an hour practicing the same three-measure segment of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. She was struggling with a passage that involved quarter note triplets against a steady, staccato accompaniment. (To further complicate matters, the passage called for her to cross one hand over the other while playing.) She knew that she was not playing the rhythm correctly but could not identify when it was right and when it was wrong. She was, understandably, terribly frustrated by this.

The piano can be an incredibly isolating instrument. Whereas my formative years of flute playing were spent in bands and chamber ensembles, I practiced piano in solitude. This sometimes led to the development of sloppy habits and misconceptions that my teacher would gently correct at each weekly lesson.

My college band director Mr. Parks always used to tell us that the old adage “practice makes perfect” was a fallacy. “Practice makes permanent,” he told us. “Only perfect practice makes perfect.” He had it so right. Flawed practice habits, I learned, are worse than not practicing at all, because they only serve to reinforce mistakes.

I explained to my student that she was finding it difficult to distinguish between correct and incorrect patterns because she had practiced the incorrect rhythm so diligently. I told her that her it’s perfectly normal to get hung up on tricky rhythms like this one, and that this is precisely why musicians take lessons. When we rely too heavily on our own powers of self-assessment, we tend to get stuck in our ways. We simply do not recognize our own errors.

Recently my local NPR station ran a story about Americans’ increasing disability to empathize with the perspectives of others. In an interview with Here and Now host Robin Young, psychologist Jonathan Haidt spoke of our deepening social divisions:

We’ve moved into gated moral communities in which many people on the left never meet or socialize with people on the right, or vice versa …

It’s so true. My close friends and I are nearly in lock step on social issues. We vary only slightly in our opinions on fiscal matters and foreign policy. My family is somewhat more diverse in our politics, but we are all basically good people who prefer to keep the peace, so we generally avoid the subject altogether. I have a few Facebook friends who are outspoken in their religious or political convictions. I must confess that I have unsubscribed to most of them. Social networking makes it easy not only to connect with like-minded individuals but also to shut out those who think differently from us.

I once dated someone for about a month whose passionately held political convictions were diametrically opposed to mine. He belonged to a movement that, at the time, was the butt of many late-night talk show jokes. The relationship was short-lived. I tried – I really did. I wanted to look past his politics. I told myself that his values were more closely aligned with the men in my family than my own, and if I love them, maybe I could love someone like him.

The ultimate deal breaker was that when we went out, he never let me pick the restaurant. I thought it spoke volumes about his character. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

I like my moral community. I respect my fellow residents. They tend to have good ideas that make sense to me. So I don’t think I’ll be leaving any time soon. But I am willing to leave the gate open on occasion.

Both my student and the NPR story offer a valuable reminder of the importance of seeking other perspectives. The cultivation of musical skill and human understanding takes practice – practice that cannot be executed in a vacuum, lest our habits and perspectives become permanent.

Here’s the Plan.

Tags

a cappella, plans, priorities, teaching

Over the last two days, my students and I have been busy making plans. With each of my choral groups I have been mapping out the rest of our school year. We used the white board to brainstorm our bucket lists of potential upcoming projects: play with our new recording equipment. Learn new songs. Record old ones. Take publicity photos. Collaborate with other groups. We have so many exciting ideas and, incredibly, few rehearsals left in which to bring them to fruition.

So our next step, after brainstorming, was to discuss the merits and limitations of each possible project before voting to determine which ones will get our attention over the next three months. The end result was a streamlined list of attainable goals and daily benchmarks to be met from now until June.

Bringing fourteen teenagers to a consensus about goals and priorities is like herding passionate and very opinionated cats. It was an interesting exercise. It got me thinking about the large and small decisions I make each day regarding allocation of my limited time and resources. There are lots of things that I would like to do – more than I will ever fit into a day, or even a month.

I want to take the time to write something of substance on my blog. To say something original and thought-provoking and articulate. Even on the days when none of these adjectives describe me.

I want to play the piano, not because my job requires it but because I like it.

I want to plan my upcoming vacation, which will be absolutely no surprise to any of my readers. Actually, finding time for travel planning is not really an issue for me. Stopping myself from travel planning when I should be doing other things is a bit trickier.

I want to read the five books on my reading list. One of them has actually been sitting on my coffee table for a month. There is a photo of the author on the front. Every day he stares at me while my fingers click and clack across my keyboard. I have yet to pick him up. I can’t help but think he looks a little bit more judgmental with every passing day.

I want to watch a movie – any movie. French films from the library. A chick flick from my modest but reliable collection. The Hunger Games (I don’t really know what all the fuss is about.) I’m pretty sure the last movie I saw was in 2011.

I want to take my dog on off-leash romps in the woods near my house. I want to cook through a backlog of Food and Wine recipes. I want to take a nap. I want to take a graduate course. I want to eat dinner with my friends.

On most days I accomplish one or two of these things. Others are sorely neglected. That’s life. I do the things that are most important in the moment and hope my actions are at least somewhat consistent with the things that are important to me in the long run.

On a related topic: April vacation is two weeks away, and I can’t wait.

TESOL

Tags

English, language, teaching, TESOL

Today was my first day of training at the Target International Student Center where, after successful completion of a foundation course and an online specialization, I will earn my certificate as a Teacher of English to Students of Other Languages (commonly referred to as TESOL.)

The Target School is on Commonwealth Avenue on the outer reaches of the green line. Until recently, on my mental map of Boston, this is where dragons lurked.

The school offers classes for English language learned of every level and caters to the international students who come to study at Boston’s many colleges. They also offer training for people like me who seek the certification to teach ESL. The idea has intrigued me since I first started traveling and befriending English language learners. Certification is a labor intensive and expensive process. When the Target School offered discounted training through Groupon, I took it as a sign and registered. Teaching English could be a great summer job.

The school’s neighbors include an Asian supermarket and a Turkish cultural center. An apartment rental agency displays a prominent sign welcoming international students. Its windows are adorned with dozens of national flags. On the street I passed women in hijabs and smelled the tantalizing aroma of roasted meats and pungent spices. In the space of one city block I heard Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish being spoken. All this was less than an hour from my house.

Much like many backpacker hostels, the Target School is rather lacking in aesthetic charm but possesses a laid back and welcoming appeal. Even on a Saturday afternoon when classes were not in session, international students gathered in the break room to talk with friends, watch TV, and use the computers.

There are nine women in my class, ranging in age from a recent college graduate to, uh, me. Most of us are already teachers in some capacity. We all speak at least one foreign language. Some of them have studied languages that I had never heard of until today. All of us are well-traveled. My eleven foreign countries (and two principalities) made up one of the more modest travel logs in the class.

For eight hours we exchanged tales of travel, pet surgeries, and zombie 5k races* in between rounds of copious note taking about teaching methodologies and learning styles. We were sent home with three massive books, sample lessons to plan, and material to study for next week’s quiz.

This TESOL thing is no joke.

With ten years of music teaching under my belt, it’s fascinating to apply familiar teaching techniques to new material. I was struck by the broad overlap between language acquisition and music literacy. In both cases, learners progress from hearing new sounds to producing them before progressing to reading and writing them. The methodologies echoed those I learned in grad school and in my own school district’s professional development.

Like many state-certified teachers, I have always been skeptical of “back-door” routes to education careers. While this class is no substitute for a masters degree, I am impressed by the rigor it offers. I suspect that over the next few weeks this experience will challenge many of my assumptions about teaching.

* So apparently zombie 5ks are a thing now.