Back from Spring Break last week, Monday started out with a plop. Kids were forgetting they had music class, and fooling around not concentrating on learning music when they did come. Spring break never seems long enough, but this year it seemed especially hard to come back. Not sure why. Old age. My own spring fever. The proximity of our return to classes to the start date of the standardized testing window. Or some combination of it all. My poor, patient husband let me complain and moan, sympathizing, while puzzling why I should feel so.
By Thursday, my gloomy mood was beginning to lift a little, and I had a good chuckle first thing in the morning. At one school, I teach on the second floor, and have been given a key to the elevator. It is really nice not to have to schlep my stuff up a long flight of stairs. A few weeks ago, as the elevator door was closing, a small child (honestly, I'm not sure if this child is a boy or a girl) peaked into the elevator quickly and then backed up, saying "Oh, I see it's a ThyssenKrupp!" as if this is a name we all should know. On Thursday, this same child (I am going to say "she" because I just have a hunch...) appeared once again, just as I was getting into the elevator. She is small, maybe 1st grade. She asked very politely if I would mind if she watched the elevator. Of course I said she could watch, and she replied by saying she had seen the button light up and knew I was going to use the elevator. I said I was going to push the button inside and then the doors would close and....then when the door opened on the second floor, there she was, waiting for me! I said "You must really like elevators!" To which she said yes. I said "well, would you like to go for a ride on the elevator?" (not sure at all if this was something that's even allowed, but at 7:30 in the morning, with that kind of enthusiasm, I couldn't resist offering). She said that yes, she would like to, but her teacher promised her that when she learned her "times tables up to 5" she would get to have a ride. Well, then. The whole encounter brightened my day, just for the sheer simplicity of it.
The next neat thing that happened was that one of my fifth grade beginning trumpet players came by at recess with his trumpet in hand telling me he wanted to quit.
"What?!" I exclaimed.
"Why!?"
"Because I'm no good at trumpet," he answered.
I told him that no one would expect him to be good at it yet; he's only been playing just a few short months. Truly, though, this was a student who HAD been struggling to play, seemed to be really hard on himself in general, and I wasn't surprised really that he was thinking of quitting. But, as I would hope all teachers would do, I tried to talk him out of it. And I succeeded. I told him that he should keep with it, and there are lots of kids who struggle at first and then get it, and it was really too soon to tell with him. He finally said he would keep trying, and went off to recess.
The class he's in has just three students now. A clarinet player, a saxophone player and this trumpet player. I had my clarinet and trumpet both at hand to play with the kids, and picked up the trumpet first, thinking it would be good to support the sound of my struggling student. But something happened that surprised us both. For some reason (had he been practicing? had he just had a big attitude adjustment in his conversation with me? Dunno) he could play! All 5 notes, plus the new one we added. All the songs he had been sputtering through all year, he could now play! He was delighted with himself, and I was delighted too. As class ended, I asked him if he was glad he hadn't quit, and he said he was .
By Friday, with a fun weekend home project waiting in the wings, I was feeling pretty good. On Fridays I meet with the big 4th grade beginning band classes I had started in November. These classes are both at the same school, and both have a mix of instruments. But they have been making progress at very different rates. The one class had gotten up to spring break barely able to hold the instruments right, and blow a note or two. The other class had taken off and was actually playing recognizable songs before the break. I teach these kids the same, but, inexplicably, one class got it, and the other didn't.
So I was ready on Friday to do some real remedial drilling with the first class to see if we could jump start their learning curve and get some music happening. But, as had happened with the trumpet player the day before, they came into class and played well! Recognizable music came out of their instruments. I don't know what to say about this, but it made my week. The second, better, class tore the place up and played several new songs easily.
Maybe spring does something to 4th and 5th graders' brains. I can't recall if I have experienced this kind of dramatic leap of ability in other classes in other years, but this year it happened, and it restored my faith in my teaching, as well as my enjoyment of my job!
