I spent the literal majority of my life's Decembers with a baton in hand conducting "Winter Concerts", since there are somehow people in America who consider the term "Christmas" offensive. (But it's okay to do a "Halloween activity", even though that holiday is designated to acknowledge demonic spirits, among other things. Hypocritical at best, satanic at worst.) This is my 33rd year teaching, 29 of those running music programs in Idaho and Northern California. (The most recent four years have been as director of the alternative school here in Jerome, because my failing health prevents me from having sufficient strength to do what a band director needs to be able to do.) Being just 52 years old, that means it's been well over half my life! [That's what happens when you start teaching at 20!]
Usually twice during the month, I'd type and print and fold programs for parents to drop underneath the seats of whatever passed for an auditorium in that particular school. When I taught in Kuna, ID, it was in the middle school gymnasium, even for the high school band. In tiny Penryn, CA, we had an all-purpose cafeteria/short gym/band room/auditorium. At least we didn't have to move equipment. I'd usually do one concert for the high school bands, and one for the middle school bands.
School concerts, for me as a teacher, were always about half parent-teacher conferences. "Here's what your child is working on in class." I was rarely as interested in 'perfection' on stage as for the performances to be representative of where the band was in its growth. You want perfection? You're probably not at a small town school band concert! Of course, we tried to prepare to make each performance as strong, accurate, and entertaining as we could - I've sat through more than my share of boring concerts, and I don't want to subject our band families to that if I can help it!
One of the hardest things for a school band director is to realize whether you keep your job or not is dependent on the whims of teen and pre-teen children. If they don't like being in band, parents will generally pull them out, if not immediately, then certainly at school year's end. It doesn't matter if I'm doing a "good job" or not - if it's not enjoyable, if it's not "fun" for the kids, I'm out of work.
So that's step one. But since I couldn't live with myself if I wasn't also providing a quality education for these kids, I had to learn how to do both for them. Fortunately, I had several great role models as band directors. The two most influential were my high school teacher, Clyde Quick, whom I also worked with after high school off and on for quite a few years; and my mother, Dorothy Smith, who taught a small elementary school music program, including the band. When she started getting sick with cancer, I lent a hand with her band classes - and not only found I loved it, but I was decent at it for a teenager, and most importantly it felt like I was doing something worthwhile with my life. I'd been a music composition major (along with a math major), and found that teaching was a wonderful way to include both math and music in my life. It turned out that while I generally taught some math every year, I was a full-time band director that whole time.
And following the leads of Clyde and my mother, I became a band teacher first, and director second. One of my favorite lines when people ask what I teach, is to say, "I teach children. The means I use is through music." The great thing about what I did all those years, working in small towns, was that because I always ran the middle and high school programs, I would work with a student for seven full years sometimes, if they started with me in sixth grade and graduated still in band. We can have a lot of influence on a child's development that way.
But I've found that even for the students who only spent one year, perhaps only one semester with me, sometimes we teachers can have a profound impact. I've learned that more readily running the alternative school here - sadly, for some of the students I work with, I'm the first teacher they think cared whether they succeeded or not. One young man I'll remember the rest of my life - still in high school now, but as a younger student had to re-take Algebra with me over the summer. In those six weeks, he tells me now, his life turned completely around. He learned he was smart - and he'd never thought that about himself before. This goes against common practice, but I try not to learn about students before they enter my class (except for the required parts - children with disabilities that need certain accommodations, that sort of thing). Why? The last thing I want to hear is that a kid's "too dumb" to do something. Because I don't even want that in my thoughts when I'm working with a child, or it will color the way I treat the child, and it becomes self-fulfilling.
Another of my favorite young men, about forty now, was eleven when I first met him, and he wouldn't mind my saying that he was a little nebbish back then. Scrawny, unwashed, poorly dressed. Had a pair of drumsticks and muddled his way poorly through my sixty-student-in-the-gym beginning band class in sixth grade. To my astonishment, he signed up for seventh grade band. I asked somebody why, and the answer struck me like a bullet: "He may not have done much in your class - but it's more success than he's had anywhere else." Once in seventh grade band, where we had an actual band room to use, he started to blossom. By twelfth grade, he was my drum captain and repair guru; after graduation (the first in his family to do so, I think), he joined the Marines, Last I saw him, a couple of years ago, he was happily married and running IT in a major school district. A definite swan.
(To be continued tomorrow...)
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