When It All Comes Together

When It All Comes Together

I was never a textbook person, not when I was a student, and not when I became a teacher. I loved the arts, especially the band, where I played the drums, the most kinesthetic instrument invented. I liked “doing things” as opposed to sitting still and thinking, especially about someone else’s ideas written in books. I’m glad to say that as I’ve aged these traits in me have changed. I really enjoy reading now, and love to sit still to write. However, this was not so when I entered the teaching profession.

As a choir director, I was constantly on the move with my students. My first year in Missouri, I taught a high school girl’s group, and when they needed money for matching outfits, we took pledges and spent the night in rocking chairs in the parking lot of the local grocery store. Two concerts were performed each of those first two years and both of those were huge projects. All the pieces had to be learned, the concert hall, I mean gymnasium reserved, and programs designed and printed. These were my first lessons in how to pull off the big project with students.

When I moved back to Arkansas, I took a job as choral music director at Ramay Junior High in Fayetteville. These were the glory years in terms of the big project. Each concert was an attempt to outperform the last. We hooked in every opportunity to show off and make money as well. In December the choir families ordered Poinsettias in advance. The day of the concert, the florist, whose child was a singer in the choir, delivered the flowers which lined our stage during the concert. It was sheer pandemonium after the concert as families collected their flowers and tried to beat it out of the parking lot before everyone else. We always had a few small size flowers and families who had ordered the large size left at the end of it all, but an apology usually fixed the problem.

During my fourth year at Ramay I decided to make an album of my students’ singing. Those ninth graders were some of the most talented students I had ever taught, and I felt this was the year if ever there was to be one. I hired a sound technician to record us and reserved the church he recommended as the best acoustically. I chose the songs we would record, and the order the groups would sing. I arranged for parents to sit with students who were not singing. I ordered hundreds of pounds of pizza for the 250 singers in the program. I arranged for a picture of our group to be taken from the roof of the church ordered copies and glued them on the album jackets.

It was an amazing thing to pull off, and it went without a hitch except for two disappointing incidents. I thought our seventh graders should record first because they were the least mature and would only sing one time. I should have scheduled the boys next, but I didn’t realize how crazy they would get while waiting. By the time they came in, they had gotten angry with each other and they simply couldn’t sing together. They wouldn’t listen to each other and couldn’t sing in tune. They were singing angry, and that sound was captured on the recording.

The second incident involved me personally. I directed a small group of girls called the Accents! I scheduled them last because they were the smallest group and by then I would have sent the rest of the students home. When this group performed, students played drums and keyboard while I played the piano. I was completely unprepared for the number of times we would have to stop and start again because of my own mistakes. Although the recording was a hugely successful undertaking, I was disappointed by the time we reached the end. I knew my student’s best singing wouldn’t make it to the record. At least one of my students sensed my feelings about the project because when I arrived at the school the next day, a student had left a note on my desk that said simply, “No man ever climbed a ladder with his hands in his pockets.”

I began teaching math in my eighth year, at the other junior high in Fayetteville, but I took that “big project” mentality with me. My students made manipulatives and performed math skits. We wrote computer programs on the most archaic equipment imaginable, which was state-of-the-art at the time. We combined with other classrooms to do math activities in large-group.

When I began teaching overseas, I became a band director, as well as an elementary music teacher for grades kindergarten through sixth, for the first time in my career. Suddenly responsible for so much I had never taught, I quickly slipped into a mild form of survival mode. We gave concerts at every opportunity. We celebrated Mozart’s birthday by making white wigs for every student and held an assembly which included a concert by a real violinist playing Mozart’s music.

At the end-of-the-year concert, the fourth through sixth grades put on a jump rope demonstration to Van Halen’s tune Jump, followed by the Pointer Sister’s Jump For My Love. All kinds of group and solo jump-rope tricks were displayed (I loosely connected this to the study of rhythm, which any teacher in survival mode is bound to do). Near the end, my oldest daughter Rebekah, who was in the fourth grade, climbed onto my shoulders. I held a long jump rope and we jumped together. The crowd went nuts. I was a freakin’ genius. Actually, merely a teacher in survival mode.

The second year we lived in the Netherlands, the band I taught was combined with a band from Brussels so we could participate in a festival among other Department of Defense schools in England. The other band director’s name was Jennie, and she hosted our band for a day of combined practices. Her school had a fine auditorium and we practiced there on the stage.

I took the first turn leading a piece I would direct when our bands were in concert. Thirty minutes later, it was Jennie’s turn. With our bands combined, we took up every square inch of the stage area. Students in chairs were right up to the edge of the stage. The conductor’s podium was surrounded by music stands, and flute players behind them. It too, was right up against the edge of the stage.

As Vickie stepped up onto the podium, I decided I would just jump off onto the hall floor below. It was too crowded for me to try to walk the edge of the stage with all those players there. It had been no problem for Vickie as she stood almost five feet tall and had a runner’s body. So, without looking below, I stepped off the podium to jump down off the stage. Then I took a look at what lay below.

Up to that point, I hadn’t noticed that student desks had been stacked, at least two deep, along the stage. I was going to land in this mish-mash of metal. My only hope was to clear the debris by leaping instead of falling from the stage. I gave a mighty push with the foot that was still on the podium. I did clear the desks, but I landed on my bottom, rolled onto my back, my feet flying overhead. One of my loafer shoes landed several feet from where I lay.

I looked up at the stage to see what havoc my mighty leap had wrought. Jennie was lying on her back on the podium; I had literally pushed it out from under her. When the podium flew forward, it crashed into the flute stands, causing them to fall on top of Jennie. Sheets of music were still floating in the air, and an entire row of flute players, with looks of horror on their faces, held their instruments tightly to their chests in a desperate attempt to protect them both.

The momentary silence which followed such a sudden act of violence was surprisingly brief. Before I could get off the floor, everyone in the place was seized with laughter. I immediately checked on the well-being of my friend, who was also laughing. The students were doubled over, and I was incredibly embarrassed. Jennie got to her feet and the podium was returned to its position. The flute stands were righted and music was collected. I don’t know how we restored control and our dignity. Well, we actually gave up on the dignity and settled for control. The rest of the rehearsal was productive, but looking back I don’t see how.

When we moved back to the states, I took a job teaching fifth through ninth grade music and moved “math position” to the top of my prayer list. Once again, I fell into survival mode, which after one year evolved into severe survival mode. Having no room, curriculum, or materials for fifth grade music, I felt perfectly fine spending two months teaching every fifth grader to play the recorder. Once a class could actually agree on the same note at the same time, with a minimum of seizure-inducing squeaks, we took our show on the road.

I notified all teachers via email that our students were ready to come to classrooms and perform recorder concerts. We took our little tape recorder that played accompaniment tapes and stood in a ring around the class so the younger students could see an older student playing up close. I would talk a little between the three songs, but the greatest part of our time in the room was spent playing music.

I got the idea that we should combine the best four of the seven fifth grade classes and put on a concert at the primary school on the other side of our district. That concert was always the most fun because we were the special guests of the school and were treated like royalty. Many of the fifth graders had attended the school the previous year and would look for their former teacher as students made their way into the gymnasium for the concert. It was impossible to keep them from bolting from their places to get a hug and hello from their teachers. It was a pretty precious thing to witness.

In what would be my final year as the fifth-grade music teacher, I conceived the best idea ever for the primary concert. We played a tune that sounded kind of spooky. We decided we would all make spooky looking masks. We tied the masks with string so they would hang behind our backs during the first part of the concert. That way they would be a big surprise when we displayed them. Then I decided the coolest thing to do would be to give every student a glow-light, the kind that comes on when bent enough to snap. It was a hard sell, but the vice-principal finally agreed to cover the cost, some hundred and twenty dollars, taken from the coke machine profits.

We rehearsed the spooky tune for three weeks. This was the plan: the kids would leave the stage and make their way around the crowd, encircling the audience. Then the lights would go off. While the introduction to the song played in the dark, the students would adjust their masks. Then, at just the right moment in the music, they would all snap their glow-lights and begin playing recorders. We practiced and practiced, pantomiming the placement of the masks and saying “snap” at just the right time in the music, pretending to snap the glow-lights. I told them so many times how awkward it would be for one light to come on before the rest I’m sure they all had the speech memorized. It was a brilliant plan. We would put recorder performance on the map in Arkansas.

On the day of the concert, everything went as planned. We played the first few tunes and then like clockwork, students left the stage to take their places around the audience. I explained to the students sitting in rows on the floor that we were going to do something special. When all the players were settled, I gave the nod to the teacher manning the light switches and darkness filled the spacious room.

What happened next is forever burned in my memory.

Every single child, and possibly some of the teachers, began screaming at the top of their lungs. I…had not predicted this. The music started and I could barely hear it. If the students couldn’t hear it, they would miss their cue for the glow-light snap; one pandemonium would quickly lead to another. The brilliant plan would degenerate into that stupid thing the misguided music teacher, who probably didn’t have the slightest idea what he was doing, had tried at the Primary School.

The misguided music teacher, who really didn’t have the slightest idea what he was doing, implored the children through the microphone to stay quiet and watch. They couldn’t hear me for the screaming. Luckily, the players could hear the music and at just the right moment, the glow-lights, hanging around the neck of every player, blinked on to reveal the very spooky masks.

That’s when the real screaming began.

The recorder music calmed them some, but screaming could be heard beyond the last note, right up to the moment the lights came on. When it was all over, we had put on an incredible concert. It was one for the books. We’d played some great music, put on a visual show like no other, and scared the hell out of an entire primary school, all in the allotted forty-five minute time slot.