This school year is flying by so fast, I feel I haven't had time to reflect, just to keep moving. We have had a number of furlough days and also started the school year in August instead of after Labor Day- an idea I have yet to understand given that August and September are the hottest months here in SOCAL and thus will COST the school district lots of extra money in air conditioning. But I digress. The point is that we are now in March, and the end of the school year looms. Concerts and festivals and end-of-year events are all being squeezed into a few weeks in May and April.
It feels like we just got back from Winter Break, and we are already looking at Spring Break. People who wonder what teachers do should just step back and look at trying to fit a whole year of knowledge into 175 or so days. I feel for the classroom teachers. But if they have to squeeze all that learning into 175 days, we music teachers must fit all we do into 40 hours...if we're lucky! If we have been able to schedule our classes for two meetings a week, then we might have as much as an hour or an hour and a half a week with our students.
Classroom teachers feel the squeeze of our shorter school year too as they try to cram all their test preparations, special projects and field trips in to their allotted 175 days. Some of those activities overlap the days I have music scheduled. It is not unusual for me, at this time of year, to be sitting in an empty music room because my entire class is taking a test, or is on a field trip, or has a special science presentation. It's just the way it is. But I have to remember not to beat myself up when my first-year students can barely play or recognize or read three notes by this time of year. We would not expect children to learn to read anything or perform any complex task with the number of instructional minutes they have for music. Add to this the fact that most students have really no idea what "practice" means, though I have specifically tried, especially this year, to address this and help them to understand what they are supposed to do at home.
The solution for these beginners is to find things to do that can reinforce and make fun out of the little bit they have learned. If I can keep them playing till the end of the year, and get them back for a second year, everything changes for them. They will play more in the second year. They will even start to practice, because there are songs they want to play. My mantra for their first year just has to be "keep them playing".
So for beginning string classes, D scales with interesting bowings and rhythmic variations on Hot Cross Buns or Twinkle will get us through the rest of the year. For the beginning winds, a sheet with lots of three-note songs will suffice to make sure they at least know THOSE three notes, really well. They can all play these songs for their spring concert and they will feel like stars. That may be all I can do this year. Next year,( if there is a next year- we face huge budget cuts AGAIN in California) will be even shorter, will start even earlier, and will have just that much more pressure on everyone- classroom teachers, specialist teachers and most of all on students- to achieve the impossible in a few short months.
