Thanksgiving

Oh, I so didn't want to go to work today. The day before a four-day weekend, not many children have music class on their minds as they leave home for the day. So they forget their instruments. Consequently, a day like this is guaranteed to have low music class attendance. At one of my schools, even on a good day I might have only 10 kids total for an hour of teaching. So my heels were dragging in the last few moments before I headed out to work. I kept thinking that if I cancelled the day, no one would really care, and some of the teachers might actually be grateful for one less disruption in an already irregular day. I even have lots of sick leave accrued. My shoulder and elbow have both been bothersome lately, and I thought I could actually give them a rest today, and NOT carry my 20 pounds of gear around. But, after dithering and complaining awhile, I went.

When I arrived at the first school, I found the room unlocked. This is a good thing. Sometimes I have to go find the custodian to have him open it, wasting precious setup time. It also means that the children would be able to leave their violins so that I could tune them before they come. This gives us a good half hour of instruction. As I cleaned the white board, and took care of a little paperwork, a small stream of 5th grade violinists wandered through and deposited their cases on the music room floor.

There were 12 students for class, out of a usual 19. Not bad. We worked diligently on a song for the upcoming holiday program. I felt I had given them something solid to work on over the next week, and also that they had a good enough grasp of it to practice on their own. I was starting to feel pretty good about coming to work.

On to the next school. As I had figured I would, I had a total of 5, only about half of the enrolled students. Several have dropped already this year, citing their failing math scores as the reason they have to quit. I'm not going to get into the reason so many kids seem to be having trouble with math at this school, but I will say that the students who now come to music have begun to show some real affinity for their instruments and music, and have become really fun to work with. The first two were violin players and it was only yesterday that one of them had put the bow on the string to play for the first time. She was so happy!  The other boy had been in my class last year, but hadn't really "gotten it" at that time. But this year, maybe only because he's a year older, he is doing really well. Today we cruised through the songs, using their bows, that they had been playing only pizzicato up till now. I accompanied them on the piano, and it was real music. The day was improving.

Then 3 of the 4 beginning wind players came in. Two clarinets and a trumpet. The trumpet boy had started half way through last year and has been champing to play harder music, since the other kids are all beginners. So today I had brought for him the three songs for the all-district festival coming in February. This is a concert featuring a giant band made of all the second year players in the district. I wasn't sure how we would schedule time to work on this music. But as the two first year clarinets (who, by the way, have named their clarinets) sailed through the songs on the pages I had assigned yesterday, I started to think maybe they could also handle the festival music. I brought out the part for the easiest of the three songs. They were amazed that the whole page was ONE song! We did a quick introduction to eighth notes and slurs (they have only just learned how to TONGUE and were thrilled to get to NOT tongue on the slurs!) and they were off. We got through the whole piece, noting the places where bits of tune were repeated. They were very eager to go off and practice.

This was my reward for getting my butt out the door this morning. And it's stuff like this that gets me going every day. I am very thankful for this wonderful work.