The Christmas "Season", part two

To read the first part of this essay, click here, please.

During December, it was the choir teacher who had the busiest schedule (as a marching band teacher all those years, that was a nice change!), because everyone wanted the singers to come carol for Christmas! (I taught choir in my small California school, but in my quarter-century in Idaho, I always had too big a band program to be able to cover choir as well.) Usually, we just had our winter concerts and a few basketball games to play pep band at, but we did our share of caroling and town tree lightings and snowy parades, sometimes on the back of flatbeds, welcoming Santa to town. We marched through malls big and small, around parking lots in driving snow: whatever we were asked to do that the kids would be safe doing and that didn't impede the educational process in the classroom.

Twice, we practiced our parade marching in winter weather in Idaho in preparation for decidedly UN-wintery locations - once, for the Fiesta Bowl Parade in Glendale, Arizona; once for the Hollywood Christmas Parade in, duh, Hollywood. The trips themselves were amazing - one of the realizations I came to early in my career about teaching in SMALL towns was that most of the children had never been out-of-state before, let alone perform in fancy places like the Hollywood Bowl, where we got to perform in 1999, or to march down Main Street Disneyland, as we did three times in my career. Christmas often reminds me of the good fortune I had to have those experiences, and to share those experiences with children across 29 years of teaching...

AND the parents who chose to participate as well! Many of the adults who were interested and able to jump in and help with our program in any of the four towns I taught in are still close friends, some of the most important friendships I've ever had. They also (I think and hope) had some fantastic times through our band programs - not just on the big trips but on the little ones, even hanging out in booster meetings. I recall telling some parent once not to worry about making it to a particular meeting, and they felt hurt: "That's where all my friends are!"

Here's how much our band was about the people instead of the curriculum: What do you think the best part of a competition road trip was for many of the students (AND parents)? The bus ride. Never in my career did I ever take a band on a plane trip anywhere - although we did once take a ferry across from Tsawassen, BC, over to Vancouver Island to perform in Victoria at the provincial capitol building. I've never been in a "rich" district - I never wanted to make students raise a thousand dollars per participant to be part of the band. (Many of our fundraisers were expressly for subsidizing the poorer families' participation!) The bus rides were elongated slumber parties, in a sense (how anyone can sleep on a bus escapes me!) - they spent hours with their best friends, watching videos or hanging out or whatever else teenagers do (in public settings!) to enjoy the company.

For me, the key was to make every trip educational in and of itself, so we didn't have to fake that part. Every Disney trip, for example, included a studio session in backstage Disney, where they worked with professional clinicians and equipment and simulated the process of laying down a soundtrack for a Disney film! The students always emerged from that with eyes widened. I programmed rest stops at scenic locations - if we went to Portland (from Idaho), we stopped at Multnomah Falls; if we went to Seattle, we spent time at the Experience Music Project there; if we went across the Sierra Nevadas, we tried to stop at Donner Pass.   

The other key to trip planning with a hundred or so teenagers of mixed gender, by the way, is to plan the entire trip down to five minute intervals (not that you won't be changing it on the fly when a bus breaks down or something!). Don't give them free time to get in trouble! We also slept in open gymnasiums whenever it was practical (not the night after a seventeen-hour bus ride, though!) - again, the students LOVED it because it was a literal slumber party with all their best friends. Then, "Uncle Gordy" would read a bedtime story (Really! Robert Fulghum, Chicken Soup, that sort of thing), update the itinerary for the next day, recap the highs of the day just past, and then have a definite bedtime for ALL. THEN, the adults would take shifts (this took me a few years to convince them to do, by the way) and there would always be someone available when there was a sick child, or to discourage mischief (boys were on one side of the gym, girls on the other, and Uncle Gordy slept on the six-foot wide DMZ), or whatever else needed to be taken care of. Intentionally, I scheduled slightly less than ideal sleep, so they felt the need to use the time for sleep, AND to make the final bus ride home a quiet one!

"The children were nestled all snug in their seats
In hopes that the teacher wouldn't turn on his beats. 
For he didn't need as much sleep as the rest,
And that's why he managed to pass the kids' test.
And they heard him exclaim, as the bus rolled away:
Merry Christmas, and Thank God this isn't a sleigh!"