All articles originally appeared on the main page. They appear here in the same inverse order as the main page.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Sometimes, we are God's instruments
Sometimes, we can change the course of an individual's life without even knowing it.
This is a true story, and I'm almost embarrassed to tell it.
When I taught in Payette (ID), my teaching day started (at the time) at the middle school, and then I drove to the high school and taught the rest of my classes there. So I found myself in the high school band room after school ended each day.
One afternoon, probably thirty minutes after dismissal, I started down the hallway from my room towards the office (probably - I don't recall my destination for sure), and one of my students was at her locker - a freshman girl whom I'd taught since she started the instrument in sixth grade. She was meticulously cleaning her locker, and I thought nothing unusual about it.
I stopped and visited with her briefly, making small talk about how fastidious she was, and was my usual smiling, engaging self I tended to be with all my students. I don't want to say it was an act, because I really did and do care about those children like they were my own by the time I've taught them for four or more years, like this young lady. But the outgoing part of me is a bit of a show, since I'm an introvert by nature. As a teacher, I was a professional extrovert. But I digress.
Fast forward, let's see, about three and a half years, and the same young lady is now a graduating senior. A few days before graduation, she gives me her invitation to graduation (always just a memento, since I'll obviously be there to direct the band), and tells me a story that changed my life.
"Do you remember that day my freshman year when you walked by me and I was cleaning out my locker in the hallway?"
Yes, I lied. The vast majority of such interactions fade from memory as quickly as they're made.
"Did you ever wonder why I was cleaning out my locker then?"
No, to be honest, I hadn't. See previous answer.
"I was going to take home all of my personal belongings and leave all the school books there, so it would be easier for people to tidy up after I'd killed myself."
Long pause on my part.
"I thought, Nobody cares about me, nobody likes me, I'm a waste of space. There wasn't going to be anyone in my house that afternoon for a few hours, so I'd have time to poison myself and be dead before anyone else got home.
"And then you stopped what you were doing, and made a point to say hello, and visited with me like I was important to you."
"You were, and you are," finally able to speak.
"I understand that now. But at the time, it was a revelation. And I thought, well, if Mr. Smith cares about me, then I can make it one more day for his sake. And it turned out that was the bottom of the well, and the beginning of the road back up out of the worst of my depression.
"Mister Smith, you saved my life that day, and I just wanted you to know that. Thank you."
That was sobering enough, to be told you saved someone's life, and I'm honored to have played a small part in this young woman's story. But the more sobering thought is this: I don't remember the incident she described at ALL. To me, it was apparently just a typical, off-the-cuff interaction with a student in the hallway, engaged in rather instinctively and forgotten twenty minutes later. And it saved her from suicide.
How we deal with others on a day-to-day basis is more important than we realize. If you practice positive relations with everyone you engage with, you're likely to do much more than just lower your own blood pressure, create a positive reputation for yourself, and please God.
You might just save someone's life.
There was an old Sufi story which Robert Fulghum repeats in one of his books, which I'll abbreviate for space and to motivate you to read his books to find it - you could do far worse things with your time than reading through his anecdotes on life. It seems a man was granted a wish by a powerful genie, and he wished to go around doing good things for people without ever knowing that he was doing them. The genie granted that wish, and then thought it was such a great idea that he granted that same wish to every human being on the planet. And it's still that way today.
Sometimes, we can change the course of an individual's life without even knowing it.
This is a true story, and I'm almost embarrassed to tell it.
When I taught in Payette (ID), my teaching day started (at the time) at the middle school, and then I drove to the high school and taught the rest of my classes there. So I found myself in the high school band room after school ended each day.
One afternoon, probably thirty minutes after dismissal, I started down the hallway from my room towards the office (probably - I don't recall my destination for sure), and one of my students was at her locker - a freshman girl whom I'd taught since she started the instrument in sixth grade. She was meticulously cleaning her locker, and I thought nothing unusual about it.
I stopped and visited with her briefly, making small talk about how fastidious she was, and was my usual smiling, engaging self I tended to be with all my students. I don't want to say it was an act, because I really did and do care about those children like they were my own by the time I've taught them for four or more years, like this young lady. But the outgoing part of me is a bit of a show, since I'm an introvert by nature. As a teacher, I was a professional extrovert. But I digress.
Fast forward, let's see, about three and a half years, and the same young lady is now a graduating senior. A few days before graduation, she gives me her invitation to graduation (always just a memento, since I'll obviously be there to direct the band), and tells me a story that changed my life.
"Do you remember that day my freshman year when you walked by me and I was cleaning out my locker in the hallway?"
Yes, I lied. The vast majority of such interactions fade from memory as quickly as they're made.
"Did you ever wonder why I was cleaning out my locker then?"
No, to be honest, I hadn't. See previous answer.
"I was going to take home all of my personal belongings and leave all the school books there, so it would be easier for people to tidy up after I'd killed myself."
Long pause on my part.
"I thought, Nobody cares about me, nobody likes me, I'm a waste of space. There wasn't going to be anyone in my house that afternoon for a few hours, so I'd have time to poison myself and be dead before anyone else got home.
"And then you stopped what you were doing, and made a point to say hello, and visited with me like I was important to you."
"You were, and you are," finally able to speak.
"I understand that now. But at the time, it was a revelation. And I thought, well, if Mr. Smith cares about me, then I can make it one more day for his sake. And it turned out that was the bottom of the well, and the beginning of the road back up out of the worst of my depression.
"Mister Smith, you saved my life that day, and I just wanted you to know that. Thank you."
That was sobering enough, to be told you saved someone's life, and I'm honored to have played a small part in this young woman's story. But the more sobering thought is this: I don't remember the incident she described at ALL. To me, it was apparently just a typical, off-the-cuff interaction with a student in the hallway, engaged in rather instinctively and forgotten twenty minutes later. And it saved her from suicide.
How we deal with others on a day-to-day basis is more important than we realize. If you practice positive relations with everyone you engage with, you're likely to do much more than just lower your own blood pressure, create a positive reputation for yourself, and please God.
You might just save someone's life.
There was an old Sufi story which Robert Fulghum repeats in one of his books, which I'll abbreviate for space and to motivate you to read his books to find it - you could do far worse things with your time than reading through his anecdotes on life. It seems a man was granted a wish by a powerful genie, and he wished to go around doing good things for people without ever knowing that he was doing them. The genie granted that wish, and then thought it was such a great idea that he granted that same wish to every human being on the planet. And it's still that way today.
This is a true story, and I'm almost embarrassed to tell it.
When I taught in Payette (ID), my teaching day started (at the time) at the middle school, and then I drove to the high school and taught the rest of my classes there. So I found myself in the high school band room after school ended each day.
One afternoon, probably thirty minutes after dismissal, I started down the hallway from my room towards the office (probably - I don't recall my destination for sure), and one of my students was at her locker - a freshman girl whom I'd taught since she started the instrument in sixth grade. She was meticulously cleaning her locker, and I thought nothing unusual about it.
I stopped and visited with her briefly, making small talk about how fastidious she was, and was my usual smiling, engaging self I tended to be with all my students. I don't want to say it was an act, because I really did and do care about those children like they were my own by the time I've taught them for four or more years, like this young lady. But the outgoing part of me is a bit of a show, since I'm an introvert by nature. As a teacher, I was a professional extrovert. But I digress.
Fast forward, let's see, about three and a half years, and the same young lady is now a graduating senior. A few days before graduation, she gives me her invitation to graduation (always just a memento, since I'll obviously be there to direct the band), and tells me a story that changed my life.
"Do you remember that day my freshman year when you walked by me and I was cleaning out my locker in the hallway?"
Yes, I lied. The vast majority of such interactions fade from memory as quickly as they're made.
"Did you ever wonder why I was cleaning out my locker then?"
No, to be honest, I hadn't. See previous answer.
"I was going to take home all of my personal belongings and leave all the school books there, so it would be easier for people to tidy up after I'd killed myself."
Long pause on my part.
"I thought, Nobody cares about me, nobody likes me, I'm a waste of space. There wasn't going to be anyone in my house that afternoon for a few hours, so I'd have time to poison myself and be dead before anyone else got home.
"And then you stopped what you were doing, and made a point to say hello, and visited with me like I was important to you."
"You were, and you are," finally able to speak.
"I understand that now. But at the time, it was a revelation. And I thought, well, if Mr. Smith cares about me, then I can make it one more day for his sake. And it turned out that was the bottom of the well, and the beginning of the road back up out of the worst of my depression.
"Mister Smith, you saved my life that day, and I just wanted you to know that. Thank you."
That was sobering enough, to be told you saved someone's life, and I'm honored to have played a small part in this young woman's story. But the more sobering thought is this: I don't remember the incident she described at ALL. To me, it was apparently just a typical, off-the-cuff interaction with a student in the hallway, engaged in rather instinctively and forgotten twenty minutes later. And it saved her from suicide.
How we deal with others on a day-to-day basis is more important than we realize. If you practice positive relations with everyone you engage with, you're likely to do much more than just lower your own blood pressure, create a positive reputation for yourself, and please God.
You might just save someone's life.
There was an old Sufi story which Robert Fulghum repeats in one of his books, which I'll abbreviate for space and to motivate you to read his books to find it - you could do far worse things with your time than reading through his anecdotes on life. It seems a man was granted a wish by a powerful genie, and he wished to go around doing good things for people without ever knowing that he was doing them. The genie granted that wish, and then thought it was such a great idea that he granted that same wish to every human being on the planet. And it's still that way today.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
Hollywood Christmas Parade stories...
Back in an essay surrounding the Rose Parade, I mentioned one of the "big" trips I ever took a band on was to the Hollywood Christmas Parade, back in November of 1999, and made the comment that I really needed to devote an entire post to that trip someday.
"Someday" just became "today".
I had just started teaching the band program in Payette, Idaho, having been lured out of the burgeoning metropolis of Boise that the dirt-scrabble town of Kuna was being devoured by. (It turns out that I like visiting cities, but I prefer living in small towns. Who knew?) Bill Parks, a band director from whom I learned a ton of things from (good, bad, up, down, you name it), had already laid the groundwork for a combined Payette/Fruitland/New Plymouth "county band" to march in the HCP that coming Thanksgiving weekend, so I got in on the second floor and Parks, my good friend Joel Williams and I led three bands combining to about two hundred who usually competed against each other to make ONE band to perform at this big event. [Big parades like big bands. Bands around 100 students aren't usually "big enough" to be accepted by these big-time shindigs. I'll tell you a story about THAT later....]
[No, I'll tell you now:
When I was growing up in northern California, I lived in two school districts - kids on my side of the street usually chose to go to Placer HS, which had an amazing band director named Clyde Quick, from whom I learned more about teaching than anyone except my own parents, who had a strong program that performed well but was more dedicated to creating exceptional human beings first. Kids on the other side usually went to Del Oro HS, which had an amazing band director named Ron Jones, a military man who raised exceptional human beings as a by-product of creating military-styled marching bands that were the stuff of legend.
When Del Oro was first growing, as a school and as a band program, Ron applied his Del Oro Golden Eagle band to perform in the Pasadena Rose Parade. The school was small, and though he had bands with 20-30% of the school population in them, that was still only 100-120 students. He showed me the rejection letter once, saying they didn't take "insignificant little bands" in their parade. This was in the late 1960s. Twenty years later, when DO had traveled to Austria, among other places, and had literally retired the sweepstakes trophies in several of the major competitions in Northern CA - I wish I could say I had anything to do with that, as I'd started teaching one of his feeder schools in 1984, but my contributions were minimal even then, and zero in the formative years - the Rose Parade actually reached out to Ron and asked if he would bring the Del Oro band to perform in Pasadena before he retired in the next couple of years.
His answer was classic. "I'm sorry, but we don't perform in 'insignificant little parades'."
Best comeback I've ever heard, because it took twenty years to set up.]
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
We had to create 200 brand new uniforms for the event (green, just about the ONLY color none of our three schools had in our own repertoires, "so none could boast"). We had to raise a HUGE amount of money for 200 students, another 40 or so adults, find rehearsal time OUTSIDE our normal school scheds to put the three bands together and put together not ONLY our parade routine at a world-class level but ALSO a standstill routine for a contest to be held at the HOLLYWOOD BOWL the day before! Oh, and I was a new teacher in a new school, learning a new system. We won the district marching band title that year anyway, by two-tenths of a point. And my wife was pregnant with a child we would eventually lose at birth. Worked our BUTTS off that fall!
Here's one of my favorite moments from the parade itself, which was AMAZING (three miles long, huge grandstands PACKED the entire length - it was the most incredible actual PARADE I ever participated in!). There were all sorts of celebs scattered throughout the parade, which we knew ahead of time, but we only knew what our band order was - which band we were ahead of, which one we were behind. Then the bands merged with the celebrity/car/horse part of the parade about three blocks before the step off in front of Graumann's Chinese Theater (y'know, where all the handprints are?) on the red carpet. Who did WE end up next to? My then three-year old son's favorite television star...the Bear In The Big Blue House himself! One of the Fruitland parents walking alongside got a picture of me posing with Bear at that moment, and when my little Hamilton saw that? I was a celebrity myself... Lord, I wish I had a copy of that picture today!
One of the most interesting lessons I learned in the entire process of putting the programs together was the disparity of teaching and conducting styles involved, and how style had little to do with success. I mentioned above being influenced by the two high school directors of my youth - Clyde was people first, which made the process work out for the best; Ron was process first, which made the people work out for the best. (And on top of that, my elementary director was a retired orchestra teacher, a 'little old lady' named Ardis Whitehead, who did amazing things with us and was as far removed from both Clyde and Ron as you can imagine!).
I also had the experience when I was one of the two elementary/junior high teachers for Ron Jones' program - I was a loud, energetic, demonstrative, always laughing kind of teacher, and the other feeder program was run by the wonderful Mrs. Joss Bravo, the exact opposite of my style. Whenever we combined our bands for Del Oro events (as we often did), my students would have to squint to find Mrs. Bravo's conducting, and her students wouldduck and cover when I started waving the stick around like Harry Potter! (JK Rowling hadn't written those stories yet - just pretend, OK?)
One semester, I taught Ron's freshman band class, and I started teaching like I usually did, Ron quickly pulled me aside and said, very nicely, "I know you're good at what you do the way you teach, but in my program, I'm going to insist you teach in my modality, since these kids go back and forth between instructors." And then he did something amazing. To demonstrate this, he proceeded to teach one class period the way I TEACH. It freaked his students out, and he could make it work, but it wasn't HIM. His point? When you run your program, you need to run it the way YOU need to run it to be most effective. Style isn't important. Consistency is. Students need to know what to expect. I've never forgotten that.
And that came back to me a decade later in 1999.
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
When we held combined rehearsals, you had Bill, who made ME look quiet and conservative on the podium. There's a reason Bill burned out in about four years, took a couple off, and then went to a new band job for the next few years - it would've been impossible to keep up the pace he kept up! (Two years after this, he went into administration full time.) And then you had Joel, who as fun-loving a guy as he was and is, would have reminded you of Ron Jones with the baton: his students came to attention when he took the podium, even in concert band. There was NO talking except his.
In between? There was me. Bill's students freaked out at Joel's expectations; Joel's students freaked out at Bill's. I ended up doing a lion's share of the student-coordination work, simply because my style was most palatable to the entire body of students involved. Eventually, everyone got used to everyone else, but it was an interesting meshing of disparate styles that made me remember Ron Jones' words often.
(Ron used to come to Idaho after he retired to judge marching contests, often ones I had my bands in. His tape recorded commentaries were delightful, because he'd give us the usual narrative that a director would oft play for the students the next class period...and then there'd be a break, to give me an option to turn off the player, and then slip in about 30 seconds of "I'm glad to see you doing this or that with your band here, Gordon..." Always a treat. Not quite the treat I got when I brought Clyde up to judge festivals here, and seeing his pride in what I'd become as a director as a parent felt like the closest I could get to my dead parents' praising me. But close.)
There were bands from throughout the nation there - we had ridden busses from Payette County to LA, seventeen hours over the Nevada desert overnight, but some had ridden 36 hours on busses (the band from South Dakota!), and some had their kids scattered on seven different flights from Virginia into LAX (that poor director was SO worried that something would happen to one of his group's flights!). Bill and I had our own busses, and our own bus drivers - all former truckers, veterans of the road! - but Joel's Fruitland district had 'locals', what they called 'housewife drivers', whom they didn't trust to make a trip like that. So while our kids were riding big yellows across the desert, Joel's kids were on luxury busses riding in reclining seats! Our kids felt a bit jealous...until the hired gun drivers got themselves lost going from the Hollywood Bowl to Magic Mountain, and spent SIX HOURS on the road while our kids were enjoying the park! Never were we so thankful for our own drivers and our 'big yellows'!
Speaking of our "big yellows"...we were riding those big yellows through the streets of the city to get from our hotel over to the Hollywood Bowl for the "standstill competition" (a thinly veiled excuse to simply be able to say we've played in the world-famous Hollywood Bowl of Bugs Bunny opera fame!). On the way, we're stopped at a stoplight, and we notice on the right side of the bus, across the street, there's this bank in a strip mall that's literally being held up by three or four bank robbers as we watched! Being Hollywood, we're scoping for camera crews, all that sort of stuff, but none to be seen: apparently, it was a legit robbery in progress! Then we saw a SWAT team (don't know whose - probably local police?) creeping up along the street side of the bank, which would've been their blind side. About five cops looking like in about thirty seconds all heck's gonna let loose.
So the kids on my bus are BEGGING to stop and watch what happens, or worse yet, get out and try to help the cops stop the crooks! It's utter bedlam on my bus (Two other busses of ours are right behind us - one of them never even noticed them, and the other only as they were passing it on a green light.) And finally "Mack" McKensie, the biggest guy in the band (also played lineman on the football team. All of the linemen...), shouts out the best bathplug to the bedlam he could have possible said: "Yeah, 'cause THAT'S exactly what those cops need right now - a bus load of HIGH SCHOOL kids!" Um, yeah, point taken. Never mind. Don't know what happened; it sure looked like the good guys were going to win...
Magic Mountain amusement park was an amazing experience, and the second to last thing we did on the six day trip. (The televised parade itself was on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, and we literally got off the street, changed out of uniform, put everything on the trailers, and started home overnight.) Bill Parks and I had slaved away at the arrangements for this trip, and all the little stupid stuff we had to put up with for MONTHS to make this work, and we decided that the heck with all of this! We slipped away from the gaggle of students from our bands who wanted to hang out with us, and went off to ride rides on our own, and spent several hours whining to each other about all the problems we'd faced to make this stupid trip happen, and poor little us! Finally, Fruitland's band arrived, and then that evening we had the awards ceremony from the Hollywood Bowl competition we'd had that morning.
Some logistics you need to understand: the Hollywood Bowl is built on a hilltop - LA itself is hill country - and that South Dakota band was in a hotel at the very foot of that hill. (We were all in a dozen different hotels. One of my jobs upon our arrival was to help our 200 kids find their hotel rooms, and explain to our rural bumpkins that "304" meant their room was on the third floor. That knowledge had never come up in their lives before!) Remember, that South Dakota band had ridden on busses for 36 hours to get there. So, listen to what the contest director told us that evening (and I'm paraphrasing - it's been eighteen years...):
"Hey, everyone, I need to tell you about something that happened after you all left the Bowl this morning. The South Dakota band was walking down the hill towards their hotel after the competition. A mom and dad, band parents for them, walking down the hill on the sidewalk with their nine year old daughter, watched as a reckless driver crashed off the road, across the sidewalk in front of the couple and killed their daughter right in front of them."
And at that moment, Bill Parks and I looked at each other, and were ashamed for having complained about the trivial crap that we'd been whining about all day. I lost touch with Bill in the late 2000's, when he and his wife moved back to their home town of Stockton, CA. But the two of us were changed as teachers and as people in that moment. The new question was now, "Did everyone survive the trip? Then it couldn't have been that bad." Priorities. Be careful of what you complain about, because it could be SO much worse.
[And isn't that true of us in every direction we look? "Boy, it's hard work being a Christian!" Really? Want to go to Africa or Asia, where they're known to kill people just because they believe in the truth of the Living God? And you're bitch'n because you can't pray out loud in class? Shut. Up.]
Back in an essay surrounding the Rose Parade, I mentioned one of the "big" trips I ever took a band on was to the Hollywood Christmas Parade, back in November of 1999, and made the comment that I really needed to devote an entire post to that trip someday.
"Someday" just became "today".
I had just started teaching the band program in Payette, Idaho, having been lured out of the burgeoning metropolis of Boise that the dirt-scrabble town of Kuna was being devoured by. (It turns out that I like visiting cities, but I prefer living in small towns. Who knew?) Bill Parks, a band director from whom I learned a ton of things from (good, bad, up, down, you name it), had already laid the groundwork for a combined Payette/Fruitland/New Plymouth "county band" to march in the HCP that coming Thanksgiving weekend, so I got in on the second floor and Parks, my good friend Joel Williams and I led three bands combining to about two hundred who usually competed against each other to make ONE band to perform at this big event. [Big parades like big bands. Bands around 100 students aren't usually "big enough" to be accepted by these big-time shindigs. I'll tell you a story about THAT later....]
[No, I'll tell you now:
When I was growing up in northern California, I lived in two school districts - kids on my side of the street usually chose to go to Placer HS, which had an amazing band director named Clyde Quick, from whom I learned more about teaching than anyone except my own parents, who had a strong program that performed well but was more dedicated to creating exceptional human beings first. Kids on the other side usually went to Del Oro HS, which had an amazing band director named Ron Jones, a military man who raised exceptional human beings as a by-product of creating military-styled marching bands that were the stuff of legend.
When Del Oro was first growing, as a school and as a band program, Ron applied his Del Oro Golden Eagle band to perform in the Pasadena Rose Parade. The school was small, and though he had bands with 20-30% of the school population in them, that was still only 100-120 students. He showed me the rejection letter once, saying they didn't take "insignificant little bands" in their parade. This was in the late 1960s. Twenty years later, when DO had traveled to Austria, among other places, and had literally retired the sweepstakes trophies in several of the major competitions in Northern CA - I wish I could say I had anything to do with that, as I'd started teaching one of his feeder schools in 1984, but my contributions were minimal even then, and zero in the formative years - the Rose Parade actually reached out to Ron and asked if he would bring the Del Oro band to perform in Pasadena before he retired in the next couple of years.
His answer was classic. "I'm sorry, but we don't perform in 'insignificant little parades'."
Best comeback I've ever heard, because it took twenty years to set up.]
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
We had to create 200 brand new uniforms for the event (green, just about the ONLY color none of our three schools had in our own repertoires, "so none could boast"). We had to raise a HUGE amount of money for 200 students, another 40 or so adults, find rehearsal time OUTSIDE our normal school scheds to put the three bands together and put together not ONLY our parade routine at a world-class level but ALSO a standstill routine for a contest to be held at the HOLLYWOOD BOWL the day before! Oh, and I was a new teacher in a new school, learning a new system. We won the district marching band title that year anyway, by two-tenths of a point. And my wife was pregnant with a child we would eventually lose at birth. Worked our BUTTS off that fall!
Here's one of my favorite moments from the parade itself, which was AMAZING (three miles long, huge grandstands PACKED the entire length - it was the most incredible actual PARADE I ever participated in!). There were all sorts of celebs scattered throughout the parade, which we knew ahead of time, but we only knew what our band order was - which band we were ahead of, which one we were behind. Then the bands merged with the celebrity/car/horse part of the parade about three blocks before the step off in front of Graumann's Chinese Theater (y'know, where all the handprints are?) on the red carpet. Who did WE end up next to? My then three-year old son's favorite television star...the Bear In The Big Blue House himself! One of the Fruitland parents walking alongside got a picture of me posing with Bear at that moment, and when my little Hamilton saw that? I was a celebrity myself... Lord, I wish I had a copy of that picture today!
One of the most interesting lessons I learned in the entire process of putting the programs together was the disparity of teaching and conducting styles involved, and how style had little to do with success. I mentioned above being influenced by the two high school directors of my youth - Clyde was people first, which made the process work out for the best; Ron was process first, which made the people work out for the best. (And on top of that, my elementary director was a retired orchestra teacher, a 'little old lady' named Ardis Whitehead, who did amazing things with us and was as far removed from both Clyde and Ron as you can imagine!).
I also had the experience when I was one of the two elementary/junior high teachers for Ron Jones' program - I was a loud, energetic, demonstrative, always laughing kind of teacher, and the other feeder program was run by the wonderful Mrs. Joss Bravo, the exact opposite of my style. Whenever we combined our bands for Del Oro events (as we often did), my students would have to squint to find Mrs. Bravo's conducting, and her students wouldduck and cover when I started waving the stick around like Harry Potter! (JK Rowling hadn't written those stories yet - just pretend, OK?)
One semester, I taught Ron's freshman band class, and I started teaching like I usually did, Ron quickly pulled me aside and said, very nicely, "I know you're good at what you do the way you teach, but in my program, I'm going to insist you teach in my modality, since these kids go back and forth between instructors." And then he did something amazing. To demonstrate this, he proceeded to teach one class period the way I TEACH. It freaked his students out, and he could make it work, but it wasn't HIM. His point? When you run your program, you need to run it the way YOU need to run it to be most effective. Style isn't important. Consistency is. Students need to know what to expect. I've never forgotten that.
And that came back to me a decade later in 1999.
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
When we held combined rehearsals, you had Bill, who made ME look quiet and conservative on the podium. There's a reason Bill burned out in about four years, took a couple off, and then went to a new band job for the next few years - it would've been impossible to keep up the pace he kept up! (Two years after this, he went into administration full time.) And then you had Joel, who as fun-loving a guy as he was and is, would have reminded you of Ron Jones with the baton: his students came to attention when he took the podium, even in concert band. There was NO talking except his.
In between? There was me. Bill's students freaked out at Joel's expectations; Joel's students freaked out at Bill's. I ended up doing a lion's share of the student-coordination work, simply because my style was most palatable to the entire body of students involved. Eventually, everyone got used to everyone else, but it was an interesting meshing of disparate styles that made me remember Ron Jones' words often.
(Ron used to come to Idaho after he retired to judge marching contests, often ones I had my bands in. His tape recorded commentaries were delightful, because he'd give us the usual narrative that a director would oft play for the students the next class period...and then there'd be a break, to give me an option to turn off the player, and then slip in about 30 seconds of "I'm glad to see you doing this or that with your band here, Gordon..." Always a treat. Not quite the treat I got when I brought Clyde up to judge festivals here, and seeing his pride in what I'd become as a director as a parent felt like the closest I could get to my dead parents' praising me. But close.)
There were bands from throughout the nation there - we had ridden busses from Payette County to LA, seventeen hours over the Nevada desert overnight, but some had ridden 36 hours on busses (the band from South Dakota!), and some had their kids scattered on seven different flights from Virginia into LAX (that poor director was SO worried that something would happen to one of his group's flights!). Bill and I had our own busses, and our own bus drivers - all former truckers, veterans of the road! - but Joel's Fruitland district had 'locals', what they called 'housewife drivers', whom they didn't trust to make a trip like that. So while our kids were riding big yellows across the desert, Joel's kids were on luxury busses riding in reclining seats! Our kids felt a bit jealous...until the hired gun drivers got themselves lost going from the Hollywood Bowl to Magic Mountain, and spent SIX HOURS on the road while our kids were enjoying the park! Never were we so thankful for our own drivers and our 'big yellows'!
Speaking of our "big yellows"...we were riding those big yellows through the streets of the city to get from our hotel over to the Hollywood Bowl for the "standstill competition" (a thinly veiled excuse to simply be able to say we've played in the world-famous Hollywood Bowl of Bugs Bunny opera fame!). On the way, we're stopped at a stoplight, and we notice on the right side of the bus, across the street, there's this bank in a strip mall that's literally being held up by three or four bank robbers as we watched! Being Hollywood, we're scoping for camera crews, all that sort of stuff, but none to be seen: apparently, it was a legit robbery in progress! Then we saw a SWAT team (don't know whose - probably local police?) creeping up along the street side of the bank, which would've been their blind side. About five cops looking like in about thirty seconds all heck's gonna let loose.
So the kids on my bus are BEGGING to stop and watch what happens, or worse yet, get out and try to help the cops stop the crooks! It's utter bedlam on my bus (Two other busses of ours are right behind us - one of them never even noticed them, and the other only as they were passing it on a green light.) And finally "Mack" McKensie, the biggest guy in the band (also played lineman on the football team. All of the linemen...), shouts out the best bathplug to the bedlam he could have possible said: "Yeah, 'cause THAT'S exactly what those cops need right now - a bus load of HIGH SCHOOL kids!" Um, yeah, point taken. Never mind. Don't know what happened; it sure looked like the good guys were going to win...
Magic Mountain amusement park was an amazing experience, and the second to last thing we did on the six day trip. (The televised parade itself was on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, and we literally got off the street, changed out of uniform, put everything on the trailers, and started home overnight.) Bill Parks and I had slaved away at the arrangements for this trip, and all the little stupid stuff we had to put up with for MONTHS to make this work, and we decided that the heck with all of this! We slipped away from the gaggle of students from our bands who wanted to hang out with us, and went off to ride rides on our own, and spent several hours whining to each other about all the problems we'd faced to make this stupid trip happen, and poor little us! Finally, Fruitland's band arrived, and then that evening we had the awards ceremony from the Hollywood Bowl competition we'd had that morning.
Some logistics you need to understand: the Hollywood Bowl is built on a hilltop - LA itself is hill country - and that South Dakota band was in a hotel at the very foot of that hill. (We were all in a dozen different hotels. One of my jobs upon our arrival was to help our 200 kids find their hotel rooms, and explain to our rural bumpkins that "304" meant their room was on the third floor. That knowledge had never come up in their lives before!) Remember, that South Dakota band had ridden on busses for 36 hours to get there. So, listen to what the contest director told us that evening (and I'm paraphrasing - it's been eighteen years...):
"Hey, everyone, I need to tell you about something that happened after you all left the Bowl this morning. The South Dakota band was walking down the hill towards their hotel after the competition. A mom and dad, band parents for them, walking down the hill on the sidewalk with their nine year old daughter, watched as a reckless driver crashed off the road, across the sidewalk in front of the couple and killed their daughter right in front of them."
And at that moment, Bill Parks and I looked at each other, and were ashamed for having complained about the trivial crap that we'd been whining about all day. I lost touch with Bill in the late 2000's, when he and his wife moved back to their home town of Stockton, CA. But the two of us were changed as teachers and as people in that moment. The new question was now, "Did everyone survive the trip? Then it couldn't have been that bad." Priorities. Be careful of what you complain about, because it could be SO much worse.
[And isn't that true of us in every direction we look? "Boy, it's hard work being a Christian!" Really? Want to go to Africa or Asia, where they're known to kill people just because they believe in the truth of the Living God? And you're bitch'n because you can't pray out loud in class? Shut. Up.]
"Someday" just became "today".
I had just started teaching the band program in Payette, Idaho, having been lured out of the burgeoning metropolis of Boise that the dirt-scrabble town of Kuna was being devoured by. (It turns out that I like visiting cities, but I prefer living in small towns. Who knew?) Bill Parks, a band director from whom I learned a ton of things from (good, bad, up, down, you name it), had already laid the groundwork for a combined Payette/Fruitland/New Plymouth "county band" to march in the HCP that coming Thanksgiving weekend, so I got in on the second floor and Parks, my good friend Joel Williams and I led three bands combining to about two hundred who usually competed against each other to make ONE band to perform at this big event. [Big parades like big bands. Bands around 100 students aren't usually "big enough" to be accepted by these big-time shindigs. I'll tell you a story about THAT later....]
[No, I'll tell you now:
When I was growing up in northern California, I lived in two school districts - kids on my side of the street usually chose to go to Placer HS, which had an amazing band director named Clyde Quick, from whom I learned more about teaching than anyone except my own parents, who had a strong program that performed well but was more dedicated to creating exceptional human beings first. Kids on the other side usually went to Del Oro HS, which had an amazing band director named Ron Jones, a military man who raised exceptional human beings as a by-product of creating military-styled marching bands that were the stuff of legend.
When Del Oro was first growing, as a school and as a band program, Ron applied his Del Oro Golden Eagle band to perform in the Pasadena Rose Parade. The school was small, and though he had bands with 20-30% of the school population in them, that was still only 100-120 students. He showed me the rejection letter once, saying they didn't take "insignificant little bands" in their parade. This was in the late 1960s. Twenty years later, when DO had traveled to Austria, among other places, and had literally retired the sweepstakes trophies in several of the major competitions in Northern CA - I wish I could say I had anything to do with that, as I'd started teaching one of his feeder schools in 1984, but my contributions were minimal even then, and zero in the formative years - the Rose Parade actually reached out to Ron and asked if he would bring the Del Oro band to perform in Pasadena before he retired in the next couple of years.
His answer was classic. "I'm sorry, but we don't perform in 'insignificant little parades'."
Best comeback I've ever heard, because it took twenty years to set up.]
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
We had to create 200 brand new uniforms for the event (green, just about the ONLY color none of our three schools had in our own repertoires, "so none could boast"). We had to raise a HUGE amount of money for 200 students, another 40 or so adults, find rehearsal time OUTSIDE our normal school scheds to put the three bands together and put together not ONLY our parade routine at a world-class level but ALSO a standstill routine for a contest to be held at the HOLLYWOOD BOWL the day before! Oh, and I was a new teacher in a new school, learning a new system. We won the district marching band title that year anyway, by two-tenths of a point. And my wife was pregnant with a child we would eventually lose at birth. Worked our BUTTS off that fall!
Here's one of my favorite moments from the parade itself, which was AMAZING (three miles long, huge grandstands PACKED the entire length - it was the most incredible actual PARADE I ever participated in!). There were all sorts of celebs scattered throughout the parade, which we knew ahead of time, but we only knew what our band order was - which band we were ahead of, which one we were behind. Then the bands merged with the celebrity/car/horse part of the parade about three blocks before the step off in front of Graumann's Chinese Theater (y'know, where all the handprints are?) on the red carpet. Who did WE end up next to? My then three-year old son's favorite television star...the Bear In The Big Blue House himself! One of the Fruitland parents walking alongside got a picture of me posing with Bear at that moment, and when my little Hamilton saw that? I was a celebrity myself... Lord, I wish I had a copy of that picture today!
One of the most interesting lessons I learned in the entire process of putting the programs together was the disparity of teaching and conducting styles involved, and how style had little to do with success. I mentioned above being influenced by the two high school directors of my youth - Clyde was people first, which made the process work out for the best; Ron was process first, which made the people work out for the best. (And on top of that, my elementary director was a retired orchestra teacher, a 'little old lady' named Ardis Whitehead, who did amazing things with us and was as far removed from both Clyde and Ron as you can imagine!).
I also had the experience when I was one of the two elementary/junior high teachers for Ron Jones' program - I was a loud, energetic, demonstrative, always laughing kind of teacher, and the other feeder program was run by the wonderful Mrs. Joss Bravo, the exact opposite of my style. Whenever we combined our bands for Del Oro events (as we often did), my students would have to squint to find Mrs. Bravo's conducting, and her students wouldduck and cover when I started waving the stick around like Harry Potter! (JK Rowling hadn't written those stories yet - just pretend, OK?)
One semester, I taught Ron's freshman band class, and I started teaching like I usually did, Ron quickly pulled me aside and said, very nicely, "I know you're good at what you do the way you teach, but in my program, I'm going to insist you teach in my modality, since these kids go back and forth between instructors." And then he did something amazing. To demonstrate this, he proceeded to teach one class period the way I TEACH. It freaked his students out, and he could make it work, but it wasn't HIM. His point? When you run your program, you need to run it the way YOU need to run it to be most effective. Style isn't important. Consistency is. Students need to know what to expect. I've never forgotten that.
And that came back to me a decade later in 1999.
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
When we held combined rehearsals, you had Bill, who made ME look quiet and conservative on the podium. There's a reason Bill burned out in about four years, took a couple off, and then went to a new band job for the next few years - it would've been impossible to keep up the pace he kept up! (Two years after this, he went into administration full time.) And then you had Joel, who as fun-loving a guy as he was and is, would have reminded you of Ron Jones with the baton: his students came to attention when he took the podium, even in concert band. There was NO talking except his.
In between? There was me. Bill's students freaked out at Joel's expectations; Joel's students freaked out at Bill's. I ended up doing a lion's share of the student-coordination work, simply because my style was most palatable to the entire body of students involved. Eventually, everyone got used to everyone else, but it was an interesting meshing of disparate styles that made me remember Ron Jones' words often.
(Ron used to come to Idaho after he retired to judge marching contests, often ones I had my bands in. His tape recorded commentaries were delightful, because he'd give us the usual narrative that a director would oft play for the students the next class period...and then there'd be a break, to give me an option to turn off the player, and then slip in about 30 seconds of "I'm glad to see you doing this or that with your band here, Gordon..." Always a treat. Not quite the treat I got when I brought Clyde up to judge festivals here, and seeing his pride in what I'd become as a director as a parent felt like the closest I could get to my dead parents' praising me. But close.)
There were bands from throughout the nation there - we had ridden busses from Payette County to LA, seventeen hours over the Nevada desert overnight, but some had ridden 36 hours on busses (the band from South Dakota!), and some had their kids scattered on seven different flights from Virginia into LAX (that poor director was SO worried that something would happen to one of his group's flights!). Bill and I had our own busses, and our own bus drivers - all former truckers, veterans of the road! - but Joel's Fruitland district had 'locals', what they called 'housewife drivers', whom they didn't trust to make a trip like that. So while our kids were riding big yellows across the desert, Joel's kids were on luxury busses riding in reclining seats! Our kids felt a bit jealous...until the hired gun drivers got themselves lost going from the Hollywood Bowl to Magic Mountain, and spent SIX HOURS on the road while our kids were enjoying the park! Never were we so thankful for our own drivers and our 'big yellows'!
Speaking of our "big yellows"...we were riding those big yellows through the streets of the city to get from our hotel over to the Hollywood Bowl for the "standstill competition" (a thinly veiled excuse to simply be able to say we've played in the world-famous Hollywood Bowl of Bugs Bunny opera fame!). On the way, we're stopped at a stoplight, and we notice on the right side of the bus, across the street, there's this bank in a strip mall that's literally being held up by three or four bank robbers as we watched! Being Hollywood, we're scoping for camera crews, all that sort of stuff, but none to be seen: apparently, it was a legit robbery in progress! Then we saw a SWAT team (don't know whose - probably local police?) creeping up along the street side of the bank, which would've been their blind side. About five cops looking like in about thirty seconds all heck's gonna let loose.
So the kids on my bus are BEGGING to stop and watch what happens, or worse yet, get out and try to help the cops stop the crooks! It's utter bedlam on my bus (Two other busses of ours are right behind us - one of them never even noticed them, and the other only as they were passing it on a green light.) And finally "Mack" McKensie, the biggest guy in the band (also played lineman on the football team. All of the linemen...), shouts out the best bathplug to the bedlam he could have possible said: "Yeah, 'cause THAT'S exactly what those cops need right now - a bus load of HIGH SCHOOL kids!" Um, yeah, point taken. Never mind. Don't know what happened; it sure looked like the good guys were going to win...
Magic Mountain amusement park was an amazing experience, and the second to last thing we did on the six day trip. (The televised parade itself was on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, and we literally got off the street, changed out of uniform, put everything on the trailers, and started home overnight.) Bill Parks and I had slaved away at the arrangements for this trip, and all the little stupid stuff we had to put up with for MONTHS to make this work, and we decided that the heck with all of this! We slipped away from the gaggle of students from our bands who wanted to hang out with us, and went off to ride rides on our own, and spent several hours whining to each other about all the problems we'd faced to make this stupid trip happen, and poor little us! Finally, Fruitland's band arrived, and then that evening we had the awards ceremony from the Hollywood Bowl competition we'd had that morning.
Some logistics you need to understand: the Hollywood Bowl is built on a hilltop - LA itself is hill country - and that South Dakota band was in a hotel at the very foot of that hill. (We were all in a dozen different hotels. One of my jobs upon our arrival was to help our 200 kids find their hotel rooms, and explain to our rural bumpkins that "304" meant their room was on the third floor. That knowledge had never come up in their lives before!) Remember, that South Dakota band had ridden on busses for 36 hours to get there. So, listen to what the contest director told us that evening (and I'm paraphrasing - it's been eighteen years...):
"Hey, everyone, I need to tell you about something that happened after you all left the Bowl this morning. The South Dakota band was walking down the hill towards their hotel after the competition. A mom and dad, band parents for them, walking down the hill on the sidewalk with their nine year old daughter, watched as a reckless driver crashed off the road, across the sidewalk in front of the couple and killed their daughter right in front of them."
And at that moment, Bill Parks and I looked at each other, and were ashamed for having complained about the trivial crap that we'd been whining about all day. I lost touch with Bill in the late 2000's, when he and his wife moved back to their home town of Stockton, CA. But the two of us were changed as teachers and as people in that moment. The new question was now, "Did everyone survive the trip? Then it couldn't have been that bad." Priorities. Be careful of what you complain about, because it could be SO much worse.
[And isn't that true of us in every direction we look? "Boy, it's hard work being a Christian!" Really? Want to go to Africa or Asia, where they're known to kill people just because they believe in the truth of the Living God? And you're bitch'n because you can't pray out loud in class? Shut. Up.]
Monday, January 2, 2017
...and I'm a Rose Parade junkie...
Why does the Rose Parade hold such fascination for us that in the long-standing era of exclusivity in broadcast rights (Super Bowl ONE was the last sporting event covered by dueling networks, fifty years ago this month!)? John Nabor, a Pasadena resident and native, was asked that very question at the end of the ABC coverage this morning, and had most of the right answer: While the rest of the country is snowbound, we're celebrating a New Year with flowers and beautiful weather. It's a celebration of 128 years of tradition....
All of that is true. But there's more.
Yes, there's all that tradition - for example, if you watched today you were reminded that the reason for not holding the Tournament of Roses on a Sunday was that the parade would scare all the horses parked outside the churches on a Sunday morning. No more horses outside churches. A, we don't use horses to go places anymore - only horsepower - and B, we don't go to church any more, at least as a society.
But it's not just looking back - on New Year's Day (or its equivalent), we make our resolutions looking forward. We pray for a better year than the one just past. We want a sign of HOPE for the future, and what better sign of hope than a beautiful parade, entirely positive in nature (you never noticed that? It's very intentional...), on a fantastic sunny day in beautiful Pasadena, California. There's a reason every network that can afford to sends their crews to be a part of it - it's as important a part of that transition from old to new as the ball dropping on New Year's Eve in NYC...in the cold...often in the snow...always in the dark...get the contrast?
There's more to it than all of that for me personally, too.
I went to school in Pasadena for a year and a half, a student at the California Institute of Technology (as we never called it - it's always been CalTech). I was a band director for twenty-nine years, and taught marching bands that traveled the western US for most of those years. (Never marched in the Rose Parade, as student or director. And it's six miles long and starts at 8 a.m. - I don't regret missing it.)
So, I particularly appreciate watching parades in general, and the Rose Parade in particular. [I also admit that the purist in me HATES the Macy's Thanksgiving trend of making the entire parade stop so they can do a Broadway number for the cameras. Imagine the rest of the parade: stop, start, stop, start... When we took the Jerome HS band ("the Ambush of Tigers", thank you very much) to march in the Portland Tournament of Roses parade in 2012(the little sister of the Pasadena version), we'd have to literally stop the parade every twenty minutes or so for a two-minute television commercial break!(There was also a fifteen minute delay for one of those Occupy Wall Street protests, but that's another story...)]
Over the years I took high school bands to several different "events" - maybe the most "glamorous" was the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which I got to take my band to back in 1999. Turn the corner, and the lights covering the televised portion of the parade (it's a nighttime parade) looked like Close Encounters UFOs were landing. The first quarter, half mile of the parade was marched on a red carpet, for Pete's sake! The crowd estimate was something like 1.5 million, and I absolutely believe it. I need to dedicate a blog entry to that entire trip. I'll save the rest and write that up sometime.
Some of the other trips we took were just as memorable, even if they weren't nationally televised. Yeah, the Fiesta Bowl parade was cool, but probably the most fun any of my bands and I had was on a trip where not a single performance had more than a thousand viewers. In 2002, we took a trip to Seattle (performed at the Seattle Center, marched through the complex), went north to Edmonds and competed in an indoor marching show, crossed the border six months after 9/11 (and THAT story alone is worth a blog entry!), performed in Vancouver, and ferried across the strait to Vancouver Island alongside three whales, toured Butchart Gardens, performed at Victoria's Parliament building.... none of it earth-shattering, but every person who went on that trip had the experience of a lifetime.
And then there are the "every year" events, the ones you do as part of your community. The county fairs, the homecoming parades, the annual city celebrations... That's where you connect with your patrons as an employee of their school district. I used to always try to include my seventh and eighth grade band kids with the high school band and color guard whenever we marched for Homecoming when I taught in both Payette and Jerome. We'd end up with two hundred kids sometimes, hardly looking like what the Rose Parade precision did today, but the reactions! Parents seeing their kids perform with "the big kids", the classmates seeing them perform, and most importantly, the elementary kids getting to watch a huge band march by, and hopefully piquing their interest down the road....
Last story for today, but gosh, there are so many to tell! Since I retired from band directing, when I started getting sick, it pains me to report that the band program here (where I still teach the alternative school) has shrunk dramatically. Good young director who hasn't figured out how to connect with a larger number of kids yet. So, my daughter CC told me last month about a conversation she had with some fifth grade classmates after the high school band visited their school...
"The band isn't all that great, are they...", said the friends.
"Do you remember how the band used to be?" she asked.
"Yeah..."
"My dad was the director of THAT band..."
Pride is a sin. And I'm still working on purging it from my Christian personage. But obviously, I'm not there yet...
All of that is true. But there's more.
Yes, there's all that tradition - for example, if you watched today you were reminded that the reason for not holding the Tournament of Roses on a Sunday was that the parade would scare all the horses parked outside the churches on a Sunday morning. No more horses outside churches. A, we don't use horses to go places anymore - only horsepower - and B, we don't go to church any more, at least as a society.
But it's not just looking back - on New Year's Day (or its equivalent), we make our resolutions looking forward. We pray for a better year than the one just past. We want a sign of HOPE for the future, and what better sign of hope than a beautiful parade, entirely positive in nature (you never noticed that? It's very intentional...), on a fantastic sunny day in beautiful Pasadena, California. There's a reason every network that can afford to sends their crews to be a part of it - it's as important a part of that transition from old to new as the ball dropping on New Year's Eve in NYC...in the cold...often in the snow...always in the dark...get the contrast?
There's more to it than all of that for me personally, too.
I went to school in Pasadena for a year and a half, a student at the California Institute of Technology (as we never called it - it's always been CalTech). I was a band director for twenty-nine years, and taught marching bands that traveled the western US for most of those years. (Never marched in the Rose Parade, as student or director. And it's six miles long and starts at 8 a.m. - I don't regret missing it.)
So, I particularly appreciate watching parades in general, and the Rose Parade in particular. [I also admit that the purist in me HATES the Macy's Thanksgiving trend of making the entire parade stop so they can do a Broadway number for the cameras. Imagine the rest of the parade: stop, start, stop, start... When we took the Jerome HS band ("the Ambush of Tigers", thank you very much) to march in the Portland Tournament of Roses parade in 2012(the little sister of the Pasadena version), we'd have to literally stop the parade every twenty minutes or so for a two-minute television commercial break!(There was also a fifteen minute delay for one of those Occupy Wall Street protests, but that's another story...)]
Over the years I took high school bands to several different "events" - maybe the most "glamorous" was the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which I got to take my band to back in 1999. Turn the corner, and the lights covering the televised portion of the parade (it's a nighttime parade) looked like Close Encounters UFOs were landing. The first quarter, half mile of the parade was marched on a red carpet, for Pete's sake! The crowd estimate was something like 1.5 million, and I absolutely believe it. I need to dedicate a blog entry to that entire trip. I'll save the rest and write that up sometime.
Some of the other trips we took were just as memorable, even if they weren't nationally televised. Yeah, the Fiesta Bowl parade was cool, but probably the most fun any of my bands and I had was on a trip where not a single performance had more than a thousand viewers. In 2002, we took a trip to Seattle (performed at the Seattle Center, marched through the complex), went north to Edmonds and competed in an indoor marching show, crossed the border six months after 9/11 (and THAT story alone is worth a blog entry!), performed in Vancouver, and ferried across the strait to Vancouver Island alongside three whales, toured Butchart Gardens, performed at Victoria's Parliament building.... none of it earth-shattering, but every person who went on that trip had the experience of a lifetime.
And then there are the "every year" events, the ones you do as part of your community. The county fairs, the homecoming parades, the annual city celebrations... That's where you connect with your patrons as an employee of their school district. I used to always try to include my seventh and eighth grade band kids with the high school band and color guard whenever we marched for Homecoming when I taught in both Payette and Jerome. We'd end up with two hundred kids sometimes, hardly looking like what the Rose Parade precision did today, but the reactions! Parents seeing their kids perform with "the big kids", the classmates seeing them perform, and most importantly, the elementary kids getting to watch a huge band march by, and hopefully piquing their interest down the road....
Last story for today, but gosh, there are so many to tell! Since I retired from band directing, when I started getting sick, it pains me to report that the band program here (where I still teach the alternative school) has shrunk dramatically. Good young director who hasn't figured out how to connect with a larger number of kids yet. So, my daughter CC told me last month about a conversation she had with some fifth grade classmates after the high school band visited their school...
"The band isn't all that great, are they...", said the friends.
"Do you remember how the band used to be?" she asked.
"Yeah..."
"My dad was the director of THAT band..."
Pride is a sin. And I'm still working on purging it from my Christian personage. But obviously, I'm not there yet...
Saturday, December 17, 2016
The Christmas "Season"
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.
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!"
Friday, October 7, 2016
Fall for me means something BESIDES football.
Normally on a Friday, I might spend a minute or three looking at Saturday's college football games and give you some shots in the dark on some games of interest (I'm really looking forward to Fla St @ Miami, ND @ NCSt, BYU @ Michigan St, UW @ Oregon, Tennessee @ A&M, Houston @ Navy, and even North Dakota St at upstart Missouri St!), but tomorrow holds more interest for me for a different event:
The Mountain West Marching Band Invitational at Idaho State University.
I spent twenty-nine years waving a stick at teenaged musicians, resisting the urge to yell "Avada Kedavra!" whenever they missed a note. But truth be told, I probably got more sheer joy putting together marching shows that were enjoyable for the students and I to put together and, hopefully, for the audience to watch as well. If you've ever created, whether it was art or music or even a child, you know that joy of getting to "show off" the results of your sweat and tears to an attentive audience. And going to marching band competitions was the chance to put our creations on display - and going to ISU was always our favorite contest.
Why? Well, it's close (we often traveled to Washington or Nevada or Utah to find competitions), and so there were lots of bands we knew there. It wasindoors, and in Idaho in October that's sometimes not only a plus but a must. And it was a great chance for our own patrons to see the show in a finished state without a talkative football audience to contend with, AND from a vantage point where they could actually SEE what we were trying to make on the field. (No matter which school I taught at, our home stadium was never more than twenty feet high; hardly conducive for watching marching band formations!)
But Pocatello also holds many specific memories for me... warm-ups in the parking lot, with six other bands going through their warm-up simultaneously... going down that steep ramp into the dome (and back up the OTHER steep ramp after the show!)... trying to aim at the press box where the judges were - which was seemingly a mile up in the air!... having to stand out on the field fifteen extra minutes waiting for a judge to return, and I decided to go out on the field and visit every single student to reassure them not to freak out... making my LAST show there, the show called LIFESPAN that described the (fictional) life of my bride Melissa and myself... bag lunches at the busses after the show - or before, when we got large enough to compete in the largest division...doing the Macarena in the parking lot of the Pocatello Golden Corral after the show...
We spent most of the day lounging in the upper deck, where we get to see tiny bands we can sympathize with (thankfully, my students always internalized the message that we were there once, and that there were admirable qualities with every band) and incredible bands we bowed at the feet of (on the occasions that the SLC valley didn't have a competing show, we'd get to see groups like American Fork HS, who competed on a completely different plane than we ever did. (One of my students once pointed out that they had more coaches than we did wind players!) But MAN, did they deserve every accolade they ever got!
Once we happened to be at that Golden Corral with many of their students after the show. 2009. We did the Macarena with them, said our goodbyes, loaded buses, and went our separate ways. Fifteen minutes laters, one of their buses crashed, killing a woodwind teacher of theirs. Despite the fact that my students had just won their first ever District IV title there that day, all they could do was grieve and send condolences to the AFHS band and staff - they wore ribbons all week in mourning. It took a reminder at the last football game of the year by our athletic director to get them to celebrate their own achievement.
Over the weeks, I'll share with you many more stories from those days. But if you're in the Poky area tomorrow, stop in at Holt Arena and support some kids who work their tuckuses off to produce something that the "instant gratification" generation can rarely put together. For that matter, if you're around ANY marching competition this fall, spend a couple of hours enjoying the best of what our teenagers can do. You won't be sorry.
The Mountain West Marching Band Invitational at Idaho State University.
I spent twenty-nine years waving a stick at teenaged musicians, resisting the urge to yell "Avada Kedavra!" whenever they missed a note. But truth be told, I probably got more sheer joy putting together marching shows that were enjoyable for the students and I to put together and, hopefully, for the audience to watch as well. If you've ever created, whether it was art or music or even a child, you know that joy of getting to "show off" the results of your sweat and tears to an attentive audience. And going to marching band competitions was the chance to put our creations on display - and going to ISU was always our favorite contest.
Why? Well, it's close (we often traveled to Washington or Nevada or Utah to find competitions), and so there were lots of bands we knew there. It wasindoors, and in Idaho in October that's sometimes not only a plus but a must. And it was a great chance for our own patrons to see the show in a finished state without a talkative football audience to contend with, AND from a vantage point where they could actually SEE what we were trying to make on the field. (No matter which school I taught at, our home stadium was never more than twenty feet high; hardly conducive for watching marching band formations!)
But Pocatello also holds many specific memories for me... warm-ups in the parking lot, with six other bands going through their warm-up simultaneously... going down that steep ramp into the dome (and back up the OTHER steep ramp after the show!)... trying to aim at the press box where the judges were - which was seemingly a mile up in the air!... having to stand out on the field fifteen extra minutes waiting for a judge to return, and I decided to go out on the field and visit every single student to reassure them not to freak out... making my LAST show there, the show called LIFESPAN that described the (fictional) life of my bride Melissa and myself... bag lunches at the busses after the show - or before, when we got large enough to compete in the largest division...doing the Macarena in the parking lot of the Pocatello Golden Corral after the show...
We spent most of the day lounging in the upper deck, where we get to see tiny bands we can sympathize with (thankfully, my students always internalized the message that we were there once, and that there were admirable qualities with every band) and incredible bands we bowed at the feet of (on the occasions that the SLC valley didn't have a competing show, we'd get to see groups like American Fork HS, who competed on a completely different plane than we ever did. (One of my students once pointed out that they had more coaches than we did wind players!) But MAN, did they deserve every accolade they ever got!
Once we happened to be at that Golden Corral with many of their students after the show. 2009. We did the Macarena with them, said our goodbyes, loaded buses, and went our separate ways. Fifteen minutes laters, one of their buses crashed, killing a woodwind teacher of theirs. Despite the fact that my students had just won their first ever District IV title there that day, all they could do was grieve and send condolences to the AFHS band and staff - they wore ribbons all week in mourning. It took a reminder at the last football game of the year by our athletic director to get them to celebrate their own achievement.
Over the weeks, I'll share with you many more stories from those days. But if you're in the Poky area tomorrow, stop in at Holt Arena and support some kids who work their tuckuses off to produce something that the "instant gratification" generation can rarely put together. For that matter, if you're around ANY marching competition this fall, spend a couple of hours enjoying the best of what our teenagers can do. You won't be sorry.
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