A personal goal

Life in the country schools is all-around good; my kids are pretty darn good kids and I work with good people. But I'm realizing more and more (through failure) that teaching is really about having a lot of patience and love.

The past couple of weeks I have been trying to get my kids to work super hard on a marching band song we're playing from memory in a Halloween parade. It's been slow-going, and I've been getting extremely frustrated with small things and with my students in general. I have been jumping all over them and giving them lots of talks about how they have to take this seriously and get memorizing and pay attention in class more. I get angry quickly. I snap at students who interrupt me or who just happen to be looking away at the moment I look to them to see if they're paying attention. I sometimes talk down to them when they irritate me. And I realized last week, that is not the teacher I want to be.

The teacher I want to be is one full of love and patience. I don't want to be consumed with getting my students to create the best performance they can and with doing whatever it takes to get them there. No; I want to be consumed with developing young musicians - young people - that are going to work hard but still enjoy what they are doing. ...That are going to be good people who have experienced love and respect from adults and who are eventually going to become those adults. I shouldn't have to jump all over them for small things just because MY patience is lacking and just because I may be getting frustrated. We should be able to get things done AND have fun. And I really do think that if the students are enjoying band and having fun, they will want to keep working and practicing and making things better.

So I've come up with a personal goal this week to just be more patient and loving towards my kids. Love is what they need most anyway; so many of them get yelled at enough at home and from other teachers - I don't need to contribute to that. And I think what will help me most with being patient is just trying to have fun with them and laughing more. Like, by remembering the day they all held their instruments on their heads as hats. Wish I had had a camera. :)

And for a nice laugh...you can enjoy watching this trombone tumble: (Look near the 40 yard line on the right side of the 50)