Nothing about the past six months has been fair, and it all hit me in one hot emotional mess when I gathered all my seniors together so I could give them a pep talk.
I wanted to help them deal with their social and emotional needs as their senior year starts off with all of us in our own spaces instead of being gathered together in our cozy family-oriented band room. I thought I could help them feel better.
Boy, was I surprised at their response. It wasn’t what I’d imagined.
Hang in there, teacher friends.
This is hard. It will continue to be hard. But if you watch this 4 minute video, you’ll get some stellar advice you might not expect – and it isn’t coming from me, but it just might help you put this all in perspective.
I feel your struggle. Be patient with yourself. You are enough just as you are.
There was SO much information they needed to know on that very first day, but the most important lesson of all was that it will all be okay. The kids needed to hear that they are not alone and that I’m here to walk this walk with them.
This will be a hard road, and if they don’t get the chance to build relationships with one another while we are in a 100% virtual environment, it’ll be pretty hard to keep them engaged when they no longer get to play in ensembles with their friends in their band classes.
By the time they go to register for classes next year, they’ll be burned out and disconnected from the band kids unless we intentionally spend time building the kind of culture online that so organically occurs in our classrooms.
When kids listen to stories as children, most of their memories involve feeling peaceful and being interested in what’s happening. Story time is usually something children love … no matter how old they are.
So we connected on our first day of virtual high school band for the 2020 school year with good old story time.
As soon as my voice fell into the familiar beat of the rhyming patterns they’ve heard so many times before and they saw pictures of the very people they made memories and music with in past years, I could see their faces visibly relax as the stress dissipated and smiles began to appear.
The kids are as overwhelmed as we are and they said over and over again how grateful they were that we are taking the time to do this before jumping into content.
As you move through your school year, remember why you are pouring so much love and energy into an impossible job. It’s hard. It’s never enough. And people still complain.
Know that you are making difference in kids’ lives every single day. I am hearing stories about the conditions under which you are teaching and I am in awe.
Music teachers are incredibly resilient – but that can also be our downfall because we (and others) expect ourselves to just figure out how to do the impossible because we always seemed to solve unsolvable situations in the past.
I, too, am feeling the strain of trying to teach huge classes online without being able to see most of them while monitoring the chat room and breakout sessions and internet issues and screenshares and the list goes on and on. I have to plan out my classes with the same level of detail I did my first year…and this is my 33rd year!
I decided that there’s just too much stuff out there right now. Lots of great apps. Tons of great platforms. A million pre-designed lessons.
We’ll get to that later.
None of that matters until my kids and I connect and we create an online classroom truly worthy of being called a “band room”, that magical place where students thrive through music, relationships, and love.
“Connecting Through Music” is the theme my students selected for this year. We will use music to connect us as humans, but it’ll be in new and innovative ways. The delivery and some of the content changes. The fact that we are teaching little humans remains the same.
I wish you a year of growth and grace. Lesley
That is the actual Kaypro computer I got when I started college in 1983! They sure didn’t tell us we’d eventually be teaching high school bands using computers back when I was at Indiana University!
