Missing you

My dear friend and mentor,

I can only suppose it was because you were such an extraordinary person in life that God chose you to be with Him sooner. It's the only reason I can come up with, and it comforts me. Last night as I bustled around the house doing small meaningless things, you were embarking on your last great journey, quietly, and with dignity.

I will always remember your voice and your laugh first. It was such a strong voice, the kind you notice when you are warming up your instrument and seventy others are warming up alongside you. This voice could cut through all that and promise that the work to be done that day would be Good Work.

When I told you of some funny story with my students, you'd laugh with that knowing look in your eyes, the crinkling at the edges telling me you'd seen all of it, and more, before.

I wish you could have seen my drastic new haircut, you'd have liked it.

When a pad fell out of my student's clarinet earlier this year, the first thing I could see in my mind was your fingers wiggling the keys in diagnosis. I looked at and thought about that pad for several days before I finally got up the courage to try to fix it myself. I asked myself, what would you have done? And then I did it, and the pad is fixed.

I appreciate so much how you would give lollipops to my children when we came to drop off instruments. They wouldn't sit still; they'd pat your dog and tear leaves off your plant and wander around your house and always beg to ask you for lollipops, and I always made them ask nicely because I wanted to show you what sweet kids they were, even if they were always touching your stuff.

I haven't told my students yet. To tell them will somehow make it real, that you are no longer with us.

What you did for me was take my band program to a higher level. You patiently explained to me things I should have known, like that I needed three original scores for Large Group and that I should have challenged one of my clarinet players to play a harder song for Solo & Ensemble. You showed me your space, your band, and explained how your program worked. It wasn't yours any more, you had passed your baton to younger hands, but the pride still shone on your face, the comfort and ownership still obviously evident.

You were a part of our community like no other teacher, like no other person. I can only hope to be a tiny fraction of what you were, and still are, to everyone.

I hope God has a pretty good trombone for you to play in his celestial jazz band, and that He put you in charge of all the wayward cherubim that haven't quite learned how to sit still in rehearsal. I hope God knows what He's doing, because He has made a lot of us down here sadder than we've felt in a long time.

I miss you so much and hope that I will see you again, maybe we'll finally get a chance to play in a band together. I need some help picking repertoire for the Winter Concert, for an ensemble heavy on clarinets and lacking low brass. I wish you'd just walk into my band room sometime and see how things are going...

I feel a little bit alone. I am not sure who now is going to teach me all that I need to know.

Your days got cut short, way too short. But did you ever LIVE. Every white glove, flute held straight, black shoe polished to a sheen, and every precise note and footstep is a testament to that.

Goodbye, Larry.

Your friend,
Kate

What Tom meant to me

My friend and mentor Tom is dying and we will never see him again. I can't even begin to count how many hundreds of thousands of mourners I am just one of. His students, their parents, the community, everyone who saw his bands perform was touched in some way by his expertise and his passion for music. This is a life well-lived, if you are mourned by so many. And mourned especially deeply for being taken at such a young age, only in his fifties. He had many rich years of retirement, mentoring, guest conducting, and enjoying his grandkids ahead of him.

My little pieces of Tom were just not enough to learn what I desperately need to know. He walked into my band room when I was 8 months pregnant with my daughter and tried to sell me his services, and I wasn't in the mood for salesmen then. He came back though, and I'm so glad he did because we made a relationship that would have lasted the course of my music teaching career if his life hadn't been cut short. He would come into my class and look at my equipment. He would listen to and work with my students on their solo & ensemble pieces and our selections for the large group contest and offer us constructive criticism. Most importantly, he let me come by his house after school whenever he was around and drop off instruments that needed new pads or had stuck valves. He always had lollipops for my kids. A few days later he'd return the instruments to me at school himself. He was that kind of guy.

My students loved him because they knew him and trusted him. They could tell instantly he was an expert, and they respected him for that.

I put my head down every once in a while, thinking of the brilliance of his mind that is being shut down by insidious cancer cells. My grandfather died the same way. He lay in his bed in the dining room of his house on the Chesapeake, looking out at the water and the sailboats. I hope that those familiar and beloved images penetrated his fog of confusion and gave him comfort in his last month. I imagine Tom the same way, surrounded by the sounds of music and the sights of his precious instruments and mementos from a life teaching music.

I am at the stage of disbelief. I have a clarinet that needs a new pad, and I wish I could just take it over to Tom's house today after school, show him how the kids have grown, chat with him about the prospects of my band program this year, and see him in a couple of days walk into my classroom. The kids would contentedly eat their lollipops on the way home.

But I can't. He probably wouldn't recognize me, and the nimble fingers that used to instantly identify where a problem was on a flute or saxophone would be clumsy.

Part of me wishes I could go to him and say goodbye face to face. The other part knows that the memories I already have are the best way to remember him. The way he came up to me at the large group contest and whispered into my ear while the clinician was working with my students, "you've come a long way, I'm really impressed." High praise indeed from a band director of his stature, which left me with an enduring motivation to keep working hard and instilling the love of music and ensemble playing into all of my students.

I believe that is his legacy to me and to all of us. Although I feel bereft of a vital resource, an essential component of my journey as a music teacher, I know he'd want us all to continue teaching the best way we can, make the best music possible and nurture our students toward a lifelong love of music.

So I shall.

For now, he rests quietly, waiting for his last moments while his friends and family comfort and care for him. I'll have to wait until he is at peace, and then I can truly begin to grieve.

Spa treatment

Not long ago in a post entitled The Monday from Hell it was noted that a spring broke on my personal oboe rendering it unplayable. Here's the anthropomorphized version of the story and what has followed to this date:

"Oh dear me," she cried, "I simply cannot go on like this. Look at me. I'm a wreck. My springs are loose, my pads are shredding, and my joints, screws, and rods are corroded and black. You keep thinking I'm fine, but please! Tear your eyes away from those adorable children and LOOK at me."

I answered, "You simply cannot break down now, dear, you and I have a date with Handel and Bizet in a few days. All of our friends will be there. You will just have to get a stiff upper reed."

"No, oh, no, I can't..." she said, and fainted.

I was floored. I was devastated. I drank several glasses of wine. I cried under my desk. But she would not revive. What to do with her??? Meanwhile, Handel and Bizet would not wait.

I accepted the services of a stranger for my musical meeting, noting...how crisp and clear was this oboe's action, how cool and collected she seemed.

Could my sweet old oboe really be in need of some pampering? Had I woefully neglected her? Would she come back to me with love in her keys and a song in her bore if I sent her to a spa for some special oboe treatment?

I found a spa on the internet. (Good old internet. The things you can find.) Nadia's Luxury Spa for Oboe Ailments, it was called, and it looked to be just the solution I was looking for. The best of the best, said the little voice in my head.

Your oboe will never feel better after our deep tissue massages, the spa appealed.

Indulge your English Horn in a full-system detox using only all-natural agents, the caregivers cajoled.

D'amore facials, pedicures, and skin-softening treatments will make your instrument sing again, the banners beckoned.

I looked over at my sad, forlorn little gal and sighed, "anything for you, dear!"

Luckily a box had just arrived for one of my adorable children, the perfect size for shipping off the old diva. I wrapped her tenderly in a WalMart bag, surrounded her with last week's local newspaper proclaiming the potatoes off to a good start--the best I could do, you see--and put her in the care of UPS, which bore my little girl safely across the 2,000 miles.

Nadia's voice came to me gaily across the cell phone towers: "It's gonna take a lot to get this ol' gal back in shape!"

A lot of tender loving care. A lot of taking-apart-and-putting-back-together. A lot of days eating only celery and drinking fresh spring water with no coffee and certainly no fried food. A lot of nights of good sleep.

A lot of cash. My husband said, "anything for you, dear."

Let's see: four times what I paid for my wedding dress and all the accessories. Not that I paid much, because I made it, but still, it sounds interesting to say so.

Six months of daycare for the wee daughter. Hmm.

Two sets of Chevy all-terrain truck tires.

An outlandish yarn crawl? (Like a pub crawl except one doesn't drink, one purchases yarn.)

Ok.

It was starting to seem...not that unreasonable. I sighed again.

Especially because it's--well--it's her. She's part of me.

Especially since the old gal will have to continue to live in her own skin, she's not getting a facelift, it's just not happening. She'll be stuck with her same old plating because the only reason I'd give her that treatment is if I were going to say goodbye, and she and I are old childhood friends and will remain so. She and I will age together, looking a little raggedy on the outside but shiny on the inside. Still able to get the job done, just without turning heads any longer.

So I told Nadia to please commence luxury oboe spa treatment as soon as she was able.

We'll have our rendezvous on the Jersey Shore to look forward to right after she gets back, and I intend to be ready for her. In the months after, we'll spend many more hours in the company of the world's finest composers and the world's best...junior high students.

So now I'm listening to the adorable children snore the afternoon away, and think of my little old gal sipping carrot smoothies, head and feet wrapped in towels, attentive hands soothing away the years of tarnish and replacing the creaky parts, luxuriating in double-reed bliss at Nadia's spa.

On Receiving Tenure

Flipping through newspapers, newsmagazines and watching the news on TV, one can find a lot of information and opinion on the hot educational topic of tenure.

To some, it's a dirty word. Some believe tenure rewards mediocre or even crappy teachers with a lifetime of guaranteed employment as long as they don't get caught with drugs, doing inappropriate things with students, or looking at pornography. Never mind the kids, these slacker teachers can just sit back and coast because no one can do anything to them, because they have the immunity of tenure.

To some, it's a reward system for teachers who bust their butts proving themselves and have earned the right not to be questioned. The first three years are of necessecity probationary, and one misstep, indeed, no reason at all, can get you fired. Three years is enough of that, and they should be welcomed into the higher eschelons of the ranks who have Got It.

I had a lot of opinions on tenure before receiving it caused me to look more personally at it. Before I even set foot in a classroom with my name on the door, I was more in the first camp. To me, tenure was an excuse for some lazy teachers to not have to work hard. Districts were stuck with them, no matter what they did, and shame on those poor administrators for participating in this old and outdated institution.

And then the golden door opened to me. My thoughts on tenure have changed so much now that I really can say I know what I'm talking about, at least as it applies to me. (Which wasn't the case before.)

I did bust my butt for three years. I busted it through the out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire first year, when I scrambled to learn how to do this teaching stuff. I busted it when my job was just another opportunity for professional employment with its own standards, practices and lingo, no different than my job as a Registrar at the art museum.

I busted it through the second year when I was a junior sponsor, pregnant--no wait, nursing an infant, pumping milk three times a day, skipping valuable catch-up time at lunch to nurse, taking a correspondence class I still can't figure out why I needed, suddenly becoming the parent of a troubled teenager and trying, with my husband, to figure out how to un-trouble him, and managing the schedules of myself and two children. And suddenly realizing how much I cared about my students.

I busted it through my third year when, finally, I had no obligations to provide milk of my own body, no juniors to sponsor, and no classes to take, and I could concentrate on upping my own personal practices as a teacher, time manager, inventory manager, and building leader for the sake of my students and the potential I knew they could achieve. (See: Contest, Large Group.)

Suddenly I was being called into my boss's office where they told me that they were going to recommend to the board that I receive tenure. They didn't want me to lose sleep over it. I said I hadn't, really, I was too busy preparing for the Spring Concert and getting ready for end-of-year instrument inventory. I said, thank you very much, it's an honor.

A few weeks later when it became a reality I was in the middle of a workshop learning some new technology I could implement in my large band classes, and I hardly paused to absorb the news because I was working to learn the new program.

Now that I've had time to process the fact, I can say several things about it. First, it really doesn't change how I feel about actually doing my job. I'm a professional. I approach teaching the same way I approached graduate school, from which I emerged with a 4.0, and the same way I approached my Registrar job, where I know I left the permanent collection and the collections records of the museum better than I found them. I can't imagine not continuing to teach with professionalism, enthusiasm, and a constant drive to learn and do better. Duh.

Second, this special vote of confidence makes me feel on some level a sense of acceptance greater than I have felt. The day after the board meeting, I was back at school for graduation rehearsal and the following day for graduation itself, for which I played the processional and recessional on the piano. I noticed that I wielded my keys and walked into the building with my head higher, with a stronger sense of belonging than I have ever felt before. I think I even played the piano better, because I wasn't quite so nervous. I played as if I belonged, as if it were my rightful place instead of one I simply inhabited because they needed someone to fill it.

Third, receiving tenure means that if I don't do anything really dumb, which I am simply not programmed to do (thanks Mom and Dad) and our district continues to thrive and even become a magnet for students outside our boundaries, my family will have security for the forseeable future. I will be able to help provide for them and give them the role model of a mother able to balance work and family effectively and who takes joy in her professional life. Yes, of course my husband ably fills the other half of our comfortable cup, and then some, with the joy he takes in his work and the professionalism he exhibits and all of that. But I know I can continue to do my part to make sure our kids grow up with all the experiences I want them to have.

Simply put, tenure rocks. I can breathe a little sigh of relief and go on a little easier. I can put the energy I spent thinking about it into other things like readying myself to teach college level art appreciation and figuring out how to get more instruments for the school.

Well, I would love to say more about how great tenure feels, but I have to start writing some lesson plans for the fall.

Quick List

Top Ten Things About This Past Tuesday's Concert:

10. There were prom decorations already on the stage we could use. Plug them in, instant atmosphere.

9. I only had two piano accompaniments, both of which went well. Meaning, I didn't screw up so badly due to piano performance anxiety that I messed up my soloist.

8. I had the best attendance I've ever had, about 85%.

7. I reserved the first 3 1/2 rows for the students, and they were well-behaved, except for a few that thought they were at a football game and kept shouting things like, "Yeah, Go for it! Woot! Woot! Woot!"

6. Aside from conducting the 5th grade beginning band, 6th grade band, and middle-high band, I had a long string of soloists that I didn't have to do anything for, just watch and encourage, which I did, happily, from the sidelines--I mean wings.

5. Only one percussion instrument got lost.

4. My graduating seniors went out with a bang and not a whimper.

3. I feel very satisfied with how it went, and the students thought they did well.

2. My boss liked it.

1. I don't have to put another one together 'til December.

The Monday from Hell

5:48 am: The alarm goes off, but I don't actually wake up until 6:01. The AM station my radio has been stuck on all night blares six headlines in a row without actually giving me any information I can use.

6:45 am: I tell Andrew, who has been crying, whining, and running around with no underwear all morning because he wants the Mater underwear but can't get his jammie shirt off, for the bazillionth time, "big boy voice, please." He decides to have his jelly/tortilla sandwich AND some cereal to take in the car for breakfast.

7:11am: I realize that I forgot to bring the rest of Chloe's muffin, so that my son has two breakfasts and my daughter has had only half a breakfast.

7:12 am: I realize that I also forgot to bring my cell phone.

9:03 am: The "crazy" 5th grade class shows up. I stop two boys from trying to jam a tuning slide into a trombone, and fearing the slide is good and truly stuck, I ask what happened. I get blaming from one and silence from the other. Twenty minutes and two additional teachers later, I am finally told it was an accident.

11:30 am: I wrap up my chord progression-writing assignment with the 6th grade class. We get ready to play, and I give my own personal oboe to my student to use. I only do this if the aforementioned instrument, which I've had since I was 14 (22 years) and toward which I am as protective as my own child, will not leave my immediate sight.

11:35 am: One of my students, a tiny boy whose feet have just begun to grow to gargantuan proportions and over which he therefore has the same control as one might over an untrained 9-month-old Labrador puppy, hustles up to me to ask a question and bumps my big toe with his shoe. The subsequent agony I express causes the noise level in the class to drop to zero.

11:48 am: My repair guy shows up with some fixed instruments and a bill. I decide to show him the weak spring on my (personal) oboe, which, while weak, is still working.

11:49 am: Tom twiddles with the spring. It falls off.

11:50 am: I decide not to burst into tears in front of my class. I decide that running out of the room in hysterics because playing Handel and Bizet up through Saturday on my oboe is now impossible is a bad idea.

11:51 am: I decide to blame Tom for destroying my oboe.

11:52 am: I decide, while trying to pick up the pieces of my class, that Tom really isn't to blame, but I haven't quite decided who is.

11:53 am: I wonder what I am going to do for an oboe for tomorrow's rehearsal and Saturday's concert.

12:17 pm: I call someone who has the number of someone who might possibly let me borrow her oboe, which is the same as mine but newer, thinking that she would be crazy to lend it to me, because I would be crazy to lend mine out if it was going to leave my immediate sight. He doesn't have the number right then but he tells me he'll email it to me.

12:35 pm: I walk into my alternative performance class, which I should be monitoring, except that I can see only a narrow tunnel in front of myself and can think of only my poor unplayable oboe, and hear cussing. Again. I lose it. I then apologize, not with actual words, but by saying something silly and lighthearted.

12:47 pm: I call the someone. Without missing a beat she agrees to loan me her oboe. I decide to bake her several loaves of bread and possibly clean her whole house for her.

12:48 pm: I go with just the bread.

1:01 pm: I call my dad, and burst into tears. (His friend has repaired my oboe in the past. I am convinced that this is not an easy repair.) My dad tells me the spring probably would have bust in the middle of my solo during the concert and I'm lucky. He tells me that an oboe as old as I am is bound to have a few springs bust. He tells me he loves me and that he delights in thinking of me playing my oboe so regularly and enthusiastically again. I burst into more tears.

1:25 pm: I notice that the pain in my toe, while lessened considerably from the initial shock, has not gone away completely, just as my 7th graders walk in the door

1:30-2:22 pm: I give the chord-progression-writing assignment again and experience 7th Grade Spring Fever Hell for fifty-two minutes. I decide that 7th grade is the #1 Worst Idea God Has Ever Had.

2:47 pm: SThe 7th grade students, confused and whiny about their assignment, refuse to leave.

2:48 pm: I am finally able to have a conversation with my children's preschool teacher who tells me that my daughter has had more diarrhea today. This means that at any moment of the rest of my day and week the phone could ring and I will have to drop what I am doing and take her out of school immediately.

2:49 pm: This reminds me that I have no childcare for the dress and concert on Saturday, which reminds me to call my babysitter, which reminds me I forgot my phone.

3:18 pm: I decide to head over to the weight room to lift, because I haven't done that for a while and I promised the gym teacher, who is really good at laying on guilt trips, especially because I owe him about seventeen six-packs of Coors for all the times he's taken the "crazy" 5th grade class in addition to the other one while I was off gallivanting at Large Group and Solo & Ensemble or home with sick kids who refuse to nap or home with cranky well kids because I couldn't find a babysitter, that I would.

3:19 pm: I begin to change my clothes only to discover that I have no sports bra.

3:20 pm: I cop out and decide that I don't want to do any physical activity in public wearing a black satin bra under a white t-shirt.

4:37 pm: I'm ready to go get the kids and go home. There will be an addendum to this post if anything additional Monday-from-Hell-ish happens between now and when I collapse into bed tonight.

Solo & Ensemble

You get to a point with students where you just throw your hands in the air and say, they'll sink or swim on their own.

These last few weeks since the Large Group Contest have been a bit haphazard, with state tests and holidays and stuff like that interfering with the kids' time in class to prepare. It was this week that I had to say, sink or swim.

I was out of the middle-high band class for one day, and during the time they had a sub I realized that without me to keep a lid on them, they would not do what they were supposed to do.

So today I told them to get their instruments out and sit, we would have a master class. Basically, what I told them, was that they needed to prove to me they were ready or go home and practice over the four-day weekend. If they didn't come get their instruments after school I'd call home and find out what the problem was.

I wish I could have lined them up across the back wall, such was my mood. However, I let them sit where they felt comfortable and had them stay silent, or try. One by one, they came up and played for me. Most of them I got all the way through, some I stopped halfway because I was satisfied with their progress one way or the other.

I told the kids that I just needed to know so I didn't lose sleep. (Not that I'm losing sleep over that, I'm losing sleep over dreams about astronauts and rockets.) But it was also to show who was ready and who was not.

At one point one kid asked why we were not giving feedback. I said, the time for feedback is over. You all know what you need to work on. Some of them came up and futzed with their reeds trying to blame their lack of progress or tone quality on that, and I said, it's not the reed, it's your brain. I offered constructive criticism to those I knew would take it, and made sure the rest of the class knew what they needed to do.

I got through about 2/3 of this class of 7th-8th-9th graders. I sure as heck am not going to lose any sleep over THEM. It's the Rachmaninoff accompaniment I'm worried about.