Category / Music Education

by nflanagan

The Return of the Tradteacher

Been reading about the tradwife lately? Although explicit definitions vary, the general gist is returning to a post-war conception of a stay-at-home wife, most likely with children (or planning for children), in relationships where men make all the family decisions, and control the finances. Reinforcing patriarchal norms and glorifying the satisfying and ‘natural’ role of housewife.

If you’re hearing a touch of cynicism there, well—I lived through a time when the tradwife, even if she was working, could not get a credit card or substantial business loan. While I certainly defend any woman’s right to stay home and support her children and spouse in places other than an outside workplace, the whole “tradwife” schtick (especially combined with the rollback of Roe) makes me itchy.

It also strikes me that tradwives are just another glitzy, social media-driven facet of a larger wave of backlash against a whole lot of un-trad trends in American society: Full-blown reproductive freedom. The continued shrinkage of mainline religions. Honoring personal sex/gender choices. Women running for office and corner offices–and winning. And so on.

I also see lots of pushback against untraditional teaching, curriculum and school organization models. The whole “Science of Reading” battle rings very familiar to those of us who started teaching in the 1970s, when teachers were pushing back against the “Why Johnny Can’t Read” –because teachers theoretically weren’t teaching phonics–crusade in the late 50s.

Nearly all of the folks who taught me were tradteachers, using trad methods, and when I entered the classroom, many of my teaching colleagues were 100% traditional-minded as well: Straight rows, direct instruction, textbook-based, daily homework, and off to the principal should you disobey orders. And some of those folks were effective teachers.

But lots of the opinion writing I see from Moms4Liberty, NYT columnists, conservative politicians and ed-bloggers focuses on how different education looks and feels from the classrooms they remember, decades ago—classrooms that may have been racially and economically monolithic, and headed by a series of teachers who did things in the same way.

Peter Greene recently had a good piece about Gloria Jean Merriex, a Florida teacher who broke out of her traditional mold and had some great success. A couple of lines jumped out at me:

Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.

Then came No Child Left Behind, and with it, high stakes testing. In Florida, that meant the FCAT, used to give each school a grade, with rewards for A schools and punitive “interventions” for F schools. In 2002, Duval was rated F.

Merriex was troubled. She concluded that if the school was going to be transformed, she would have to transform herself. She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her.  Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were unconventional. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response, movement and arts in the math and reading classroom. If some of her techniques seem less radical twenty years later, that is in part because of her influence.

For many, perhaps most, teachers, their first years in the classroom might look very much like the way those newbies themselves were taught. It was certainly that way for me, wanting to be the World’s Greatest Band Director and following the exact procedures and ideas I had experienced in bands and at music camp in high school. For many years, I too was a competent-but-not-exceptional teacher, like Ms. Merriex.

I also broke out of the traditional mold, and while not all of the things I tried were big successes, I was able to redefine what I wanted students to take away, for the rest of their lives, from being in my classroom. I accomplished many of those goals. I read social media for music teachers now, and I see great changes in thinking about the Big Ideas—from competition to creativity—in music ed.

Traditional teaching—and like tradwives, the definitions are murky—is not always or even often the best bet. Especially if that teacher’s goal is to move every student under her watch forward.

Stanford Professor Jo Boaler is something of an iconoclast in non-traditional math education, and recently–no surprise–there’s been yet another dustup over Boaler’s ideas.

She advocates for ending tracking by ability in math classes, getting rid of timed tests and starting with conceptual understanding before introducing procedures. Most importantly, she wants to elevate the work that students tackle in math classes with more interesting questions that spark genuine curiosity and encourage students to think and wonder. Her goal is to expose students to the beauty of mathematical thinking.

Right there in the first sentence, there are three uber-traditional practices—tracking, timed tests, and doing a series of problems to iron in an algorithm, to get the right answers rather than seeking to understand the concepts underlying the calculation. And who’s out to get Boaler? Well, men who have been the beneficiaries of understanding and excelling at traditional mathematics.

It’s an enormously complex endeavor, teaching. Sticking to the habitual, and ignoring students who check out, only works for awhile. BUT—listen to legislators and parents talk about schooling, and a lot of what you’re hearing is somewhere between nostalgia and flat-out misinformation. The book-banning, faux CRT, Tik-tok blaming, skeptical-of-teachers crowd hasn’t got a clue about what it’s like to teach kids in 2024, beginning with some clarity about the purpose of public education.

As Jess Piper says, in a wonderful column called You Don’t Like It? Move!:

None of us is safe so long as there are folks living in states that are unsafe. They will roll over us first, and you next. The billionaires are using my state AG and other regressive state AGs to file suit to dismantle public schools. They sue to ban abortion and the medicine for self-managed abortions. They sue to stop college loan forgiveness. They sue to overturn civil rights and anti-discrimination policies.

As Piper says—hey, we can’t all move, or teach in a private school where we can craft our own processes, research and convictions. But returning to traditional methods isn’t the policy answer. You have to move forward. It’s the way of the world.  

by nflanagan

Ever Had a Student Like Taylor Swift?

Ever had a student like Taylor Swift?

The question I’m asking is not “Did you ever have a student who turned out like Taylor Swift after they were a full-grown adult—unbelievably well-known and well-off?”

It’s this: Did you ever have a student you felt was full of promise? A kid for whom you could foresee a big future—in any number of arenas, from business to politics to entertainment?

A kid who looked and acted like Taylor Swift in this video, when she was 16 and a sophomore at Hendersonville High School? You can see the talent, drive and ambition from a mile off, and you think the student will end up doing something remarkable with their one wild and precious life.

In the video, however, we see Taylor pledging allegiance, solving a math problem and sort-of mouthing off to her mom. Her comments on camera reveal an atypical mountain of 16-year-old self-confidence, something that can be annoying in a classroom. As it happens, the video was shot near the end of her time actually attending high school, as her career took off, and she finished high school via homeschooling. A practical solution. And, I have to say (quoting Paul Simon), her lack of education hasn’t hurt her none.

My follow-up question: What happened to your student like Taylor Swift—the ultimate prize-winning science geek, the creative senior whose novel you expected to buy in the future, the talented trumpeter headed off to Julliard? Did they rise to greatness? Fizzle? Run into a roadblock and blow all that talent and potential?

Speaking only for myself, I would say that of course some students show enormous promise, but nobody’s future is guaranteed—or even predictable. I have had many former students end up in positions of leadership and acclaim, even fame, in varying fields—just as their teachers expected. And others who made a wrong turn someplace, sometimes disastrously.

What’s more interesting to me is those students of whom little was predicted, who leapfrogged over a lackluster secondary school presence into a successful adulthood. I had a student in my 7th grade math class whose homework was perennially missing, and whose test scores were abysmal. We had tons of meetings around this kid with his beleaguered parents—how to get him to focus on schoolwork, benefit from extra tutoring, knuckle down and pass the seventh grade, etc. etc.

You know what’s next, right? By the time he was 21, Mr. Anti-math was a million-dollar real estate salesman, back when selling a million dollars’ worth of real estate meant something. His little headshot, with its cool haircut, appeared in every edition of the local news. Presumably, he had someone else doing his taxes, and drawing up contracts.

I also know that many of my middle school students’ future goals were centered on riches and fame. You don’t often meet a pre-teen who hopes to live their life humbly, in service to others. Self-effacement and altruism are difficult when you’re not really sure of who you are, to begin with. Besides, aiming high will please your parents and your teachers.

Celebrity, however, is not all that it’s cracked up to be:

When a celebrity is that prominent, they are always in danger of becoming the figurehead of cultural and societal frustrations. Which is one of the many reasons celebrities periodically recede from the public eye: no matter how many people love you, there comes a point when the structure of a star image cannot shoulder the weight of the star’s meaning and import. The history of celebrity is filled with examples of people who did not or could not protect themselves from this scenario — because of their youth, because of addiction, because of others’ greed, including our own as consumers and fans — and careers and lives that imploded because of it.

Taylor Swift’s ‘meaning and import,’ in 2024, have made her the target of a whole segment of American society:

She’s doing too much, except when she’s not doing enough, and she’s always doing it wrong… a pretty blonde dating a handsome football player should, at least for white people of a certain age, evoke all the simpler bygone vibes (Friday-night lights, milkshakes with two straws, letterman jackets) that conservatives could want. Except — oops! — the pretty blonde endorses Democrats. And Travis Kelce, the football hero, appears in commercials for vaccines (bad) and Bud Light (somehow worse).

And why does she hog the spotlight at his games? She’s Yoko Ono-ing him and jinxing his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, except when she misses a game — and is still, somehow, jinxing the team, which made it to the Super Bowl anyway, proof right there, somehow, of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Taylor even gets people like the execrable Jesse Waters claiming she is a left-wing asset.  And worse.

Here’s the thing about Taylor Swift: she is a genuine talent, who writes her own material. As a life-long musician and music teacher, that fact alone elevates her above many, if not most, popular music superstars, to me. Of all the amazing things she’s accomplished, I most admire her reclaiming her own music by re-recording albums released when she was younger, and under the thumbs of record producers whose goals centered on promotion more than artistry and message.

That makes her a role model for all girls who want to speak with their own, authentic voice.

And that’s a goal that teachers can get behind, with all their students. Wealth and glory are often fleeting, but knowing who you are and what you stand for can be accomplished by all students.

The picture below was shot at the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale, AZ, one of my favorite places on the planet, eight years ago this month. If you go on a weekday, you are likely to run into a field trip in progress. And even though there were Chinese drums to pound, and John Lennon’s Steinway (on which he composed “Imagine”) to reverently view, where were the students clustered? In front of Taylor Swift’s sparkly dress and banjo, mouthing the words to her songs.

Those kids are probably 20-something now. Let’s hope they’re claiming their own voices.

by nflanagan

The Mental Energy of Teaching

Interesting tweet from @EdFuller_PSU:

The one thing non-teachers simply do not and cannot grasp is how MENTALLY EXHAUSTING IT IS TO TEACH ALL DAY. There are very, very few jobs that require the constant mental attention that teaching does. I’d love to see all the people criticizing teachers to teach for a week. (Caps are Fuller’s.)

There are over 750 responses, running about 30 to one some form of confirmation, most of which are from teachers or parents. The odd pushback (i.e., @Angrydocsx: Surgery, nursing, working on an oil rig, construction, being a lineman, etc… Teachers are great but get over yourself.) are either from people who feel their jobs are equally taxing, or your garden-variety anti-teacher/anti-union/you-suck-so-shut-up tweets.

Side note: I think surgery and nursing are also incredibly demanding and find @Angrydoc’s immediate shift to oil rigs and linemen in cherry pickers—dangerous, outdoor male-dominated jobs—telling.

Fuller (who, not coincidentally, was a HS teacher before moving into higher education) puts his finger on the thing that makes teaching exhausting—you’re on all the time, making decisions on the fly and—if you’re doing the job right—taking sincere responsibility for teaching…something, to students who may not particularly want to be taught.

He did not say teaching was the most mentally exhausting job in the world—there are others where you can’t take a break or turn your back—only that the need to constantly pay attention and adapt were factors that many folks did not perceive, when they thought about teaching. A number of the tweeted responses, in fact, were from people who thought they’d give teaching a try, but concluded that it wasn’t the job they thought it would be.

Larry Cuban recently compared teachers’ decision-making to playing jazz and rebounding in basketball—two complex skills that depend on prior learning and practice for automaticity. He includes two footnotes about the number of decisions teachers typically make:

*Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that reported .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.

*Researcher Philip Jackson said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.

Cuban notes that those studies are older, and invites readers to share any newer research—but those figures ring absolutely true to me. Interactions, decisions, re-direction, pop-up questions, wait time, modeling, judgments. On and on and on. Teaching is all about an on-your-feet response to whatever crops up. It’s the essence of unpredictability, and every day is exhausting.

What Fuller’s tweet and the plethora of responses clearly illustrates: There is no such thing as successful scripted teaching or “effective” fidelity to pre-constructed lessons. Also: the more you teach, if you’re paying attention, the more fluid the decision-making becomes, and the more tools in your mental (and emotional) tool bag. Experience matters. Perception matters. Judgment matters.

When I had been teaching for more than 25 years, I took a two-year sabbatical to work at a national education non-profit. There was an opportunity to pursue an alternate career in our contract language, but even though I knew I could return to teaching, I was certain that this new job was my off-ramp.

At first, it was great. I had my own cubicle, with a computer and a phone and–get this–a secretary. We took an hour for lunch, occasionally going out to a restaurant (and, also occasionally, having a glass of wine). We could use the bathroom as often as we liked. I could pop into someone else’s office and have a long chat about some issue that had arisen. I could leave early to go to the dentist. We were doing a lot of conferences and workshops—on weekends, because our clients were educators—and if we were in another city for the weekend, we didn’t return to work until Wednesday or Thursday: comp time!

I found the workload easy and the pace relaxed. I liked the people I worked with. But after the first year, I started thinking about going back to teaching. It took a long time to work through the reasons. Teaching offered less money, less prestige and way more what might be called mandatory time on task.

What I finally concluded was this: When I left the school building at night, and walked across the parking lot, I could describe the good I had done that day, things students had learned, progress made. I didn’t get that daily confirmation at the non-profit (which was much-admired). Lots of days were focused on strengthening the business end of the non-profit’s work. I didn’t get to hang out with kids, either.

I taught a lot of subjects and varied grade levels during my career, speaking of mental exhaustion. I taught large middle school and high school band classes (65+ students), and 7th grade math in the first year of a new, “connected” curriculum that the old math teachers loathed. I taught vocal and instrumental music in every grade from pre-K to 12. By far the most mentally challenging class I ever taught was general music to a group of 12 Pre-K children, mostly four years old, in my last year in the classroom.

These kiddos were all over the place, maturity-wise. My biggest challenge at first was getting them all to sit, not sprawl or run around, on the circular rug in my classroom. I had them for 50 minutes, twice a week (yup—too long, I know, but that’s the way the schedule was set up), so the first time they came to my room, I prepared a lesson plan with seven different activities, from listening to marching. Seven!

They ran through that plan in about 20 minutes. I remember thinking: I’m supposed to be good at this! I hope nobody makes an unscheduled visit to my room.

Although I got much better at teaching very young children, thanks to the generous suggestions of my colleagues, it was a mental attention marathon, day in and day out. Did they understand that word? Why aren’t his hands coming together when he claps? How much time is left? Wait— is she actually spitting?

When we speak of teacher professionalism, we think of content knowledge, instructional expertise, being a respected contributor to a school learning community. But a big part of professionalism is accepting responsibility for what happens in your worksite, for expending the continuous mental energy to create a successful and skilled practice.

The last word about the way the public sees teacher professionalism, from Jose Vilson:

Over the last few decades, pundits and policymakers have derided the professionalism of teachers because “accountability” or whatever. No matter how many degrees and certificates they get, how many years of experience they accumulate, or student commendations they collect, American society looks at teachers and says “Oh, that’s nice!” but also, “How do you do it? Couldn’t be me!” “You and your union make the job easy, right?” and my personal favorite, “I couldn’t stand me when I was a child. How does that work out with 30 of them?!” In other words, even though many people think only a special set of people can do the job, they also think anyone can do it.

by nflanagan

My Twelve Best Blogs of 2023

Every December, sites and services that spend the year hoovering up personal information spit out a summary of users’ activity. Call it the year-end quantification-industrial complex. The trend isn’t new. But especially since Spotify hit word-of-mouth marketing gold with its shareable Spotify Wrapped feature, companies of all kinds have been delivering year-end nuggets of data to their users, whether personalized or in aggregate.                                                             Atlantic, December 23, 2023

The year-end quantification-industrial complex. I like that phrase. I really do like Ten Best columns and Biggest Stories and even the Time Person of the Year. There’s something gratifying about a year’s worth of anything, be it books, movies or (my personal favorite), Most Important Trends in Education.

It’s nice to think: Well, that was then, but now we have a clean slate, a fresh start. Even when we know, deep in our brains, that next year will be largely composed of the same old sh*t, plus some disconcerting new sh*t and perhaps the occasional good news. Which means that columns about education policy and practice are, if not evergreen, enduring.

Here are what I think are the best dozen education-related blogs I wrote in 2023. Not necessarily the most popular or most-read—but the ones deserving another look:

I Had a Dream about the First Day of School    actually was one of my most-read blogs. I was wading around in teachers’ August complaints about bad professional development, endless and pointless staff meetings and all the unpaid work involved in classroom re-organization and wrote the blog in about 20 minutes. It struck a nerve.

Sometimes, you know, going in, that a blog will sink like a stone. But you write it anyway. In the case of Girls. Period., the trigger was being asked by a friend, a school social worker, to donate pads and tampons for the middle school girls she served. Bad policy in Florida makes an appearance in this blog, as well. I’m sure some readers found it distasteful. But it applies to girls, half our population. Just saying.

Almost every edu-blogger wrote about book-banning this year, some with photos of empty shelves. My personal take explores the use of the word ‘pornography’ to describe books that have changed students’ lives, and my own first encounter with actual porn.  I Know It when I See It.

The Absolute Folly of Standardization:  ‘The trouble arises when we use the tools of school—instruction, curriculum, assessment—to compare the students in our care, to label them, to sort them into standardized categories when they are very young. To essentially assign their potential. To show contempt for the wide range of human talents.’

Here’s one about the school where I used to teach, after a student filed a lawsuit against school leaders for not protecting her from overtly racist speech and acts. Are Schools Responsible for the Racist Behaviors of Students? What do you think?

Speaking of racism, and charges of “CRT”—Who is Indoctrinating Whom? A reflection on the impact of teachers on our lives and beliefs, for better and worse.

How many times have we heard teachers grumble about education policy that should have been run by teachers—who could have disabused legislators of the notion that they knew something about the way schools work? This ‘teacher at the table’ idea isn’t new: Thinking about Teachers at the Table.

Where the Boys Aren’t: Why is Teaching Still a Female-Dominated Profession? A question that is endlessly fascinating to me, as a woman who embarked on a largely male sub-profession: band director. Blogs about women in education don’t usually draw lots of readers, but this one has statistics and receipts.

Most of the blogging I’ve seen on the (faux) Science of Reading feels like it was created by SOR bots, claiming that they never learned anything about phonics in their teacher training. (Seriously?) Some thoughts about media baloney re: reading instruction. Learning to Read in Middle School.  

I spent most of my career teaching middle school. And I have some thoughts about the rather amazing capabilities of middle school students: Middle Schoolers—the Myth and the Reality.

In a year when unions appear to be making a comeback, teacher unions are still straw-men bad-guys in the war on public ed: Teachers or Teacher Unions? Or Maybe Neither?  Some clear-eyed observations on why we still need teacher unions.

Here’s another heartfelt reflection that went nowhere, but that I think summarizes the heart of successful teaching: being committed to your students, and even fond of them. Almost All You Need is Love.

It’s my sincere hope that you’ll take a look at one or two of these. And if you really want to make my day, subscribe—it’s totally free and easy—to Teacher in a Strange Land.

Happy New Year!

by nflanagan

The Problem with Jingle Bells

If you follow various chat groups and Facebook pages of music educators, this time of year is rife with the Great Christmas Literature Discussion, centered around whether to schedule a concert in December and, if so, what songs to play, while avoiding stepping on anyone’s cultural traditions.

I have written, often, about this conundrum—honoring the festive spirit of seasonal holidays (which is evident absolutely everywhere, in December, from the grocery store to TV ads) vs. avoiding any mention of Christmas at school, because it’s inappropriate to preference one religious celebration over others, in a public institution filled with diverse children.

From a professional education perspective, it’s thorny. You can play a Christmas-heavy concert, sending parents home in a rosy glow—some parents, anyway. You can try to recognize every winter/light holiday with a tune—or rely on “classical” pieces like Messiah transcriptions. You can try to take Jesus out of the equation, and end up with a lot of junk literature. Or you can avoid the whole thing and schedule your concert in January.

Increasingly, I’ve seen elementary music teachers bowing out of anything directly related to Christmas. They can articulate good reasons for this, distinguishing between music students are fortunate enough to experience at home and with their families, and what belongs in a solid music education curriculum. For teachers who are under pressure from administrators or parents to put on a holiday show, there are winter weather songs. Enter Jingle Bells.

A couple of weeks ago, Peter Greene reprinted his blog entitled The Jingle Bells Effect and the Canon. It’s a bit of brilliance comparing 30 different versions of Jingle Bells, 30 ways of taking a small collection of notes and rhythms and turning them into something unique and different.

It’s like literature, Greene says—there are multiple ways to teach a concept, theme or historical era through the same medium: the printed word. He makes the point that teachers should always be able to offer a cogent answer to the question: Why are we learning this? I agree.

And for many years, I found Jingle Bells a handy instructional tool. The chorus uses only five notes, so the tune appears in virtually every beginning band method book, just about the time kids are eager to play real songs. The lyrics are thoroughly secular—no mention of Christmas—so when kids are singing about a one-horse open sleigh, it’s kind of like the Little Deuce Coupe of its day.

It’s also one of those three-chord songs, simple to harmonize. Add some sleighbells and voila! First concert magic. For years, my middle school band (some 200 7th and 8th graders) played Jingle Bells in a local Fantasy of Lights parade. Because when you’re trying to get 200 young musicians to march and play at the same time, you need something easy.

As awareness of the racist roots and language in some of our most beloved folk and composed songs began to grow, in recent decades, elementary and secondary music teachers rightfully started pulling certain songs out of their teaching repertoire. Scarcely a week goes by without an argument about this trend, on music-ed social media sites. Do songs that sprang from minstrelsy, performed in a different era, for example, have a racially negative impact today? Or are they just tunes? A valid and important question.

I find these skirmishes encouraging, an example of teachers discussing–with some conviction–the beliefs that shape their own professional work. And sometimes, seeing things in a new light. As Maya Angelou said: ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.’

I’ve read dozens of these “is this racist?” discussions on-line. And music teachers, given the chance to re-think the cultural value–or lack therof—in certain pieces of music, often are willing to choose something else, or share the origins of the work, the outmoded and biased thinking reflected in the lyrics, as an opportunity to teach cultural history associated with music. People will adapt.

Except when it comes to Jingle Bells.

Back in 2017, a professor at Boston University , Kyna Hamill, published a research paper, suggesting that Jingle Bells was first sung in minstrel shows. Research papers are not generally the subject of teachers’ lounge chat, but this one caught fire, and pretty soon, there were teachers arguing that the composer of the piece, James Lord Pierpont, was a fervent Confederate, and therefore a supporter of slavery. Out with Jingle Bells!

Pierpont was not a household name, in his own time. He was a struggling composer, organist and teacher. His father was an ardent abolitionist and Unitarian minister, as were his two brothers, all in Massachusetts. But Pierpont took a position as organist in a Unitarian church in Georgia and was there when the Civil War broke out. He wrote music and sold it to support his family—including songs that supported the Southern war effort.

He also enlisted in the Confederate Army and served as a clerk. His father, the Reverend John Pierpont, was a Chaplain in the Union Army—one of those families split by a tragic war. There are plenty of families in the same situation right now, in this country—split by politics, influenced by cultural context. Something to think about, as we evaluate and banish Pierpont, 150 years after he wrote his most famous sleighing ditty.

Even Kyna Hamill, arguably the genesis of the anti-Jingle Bells movement now says this:
My article tried to tell the story of the first performance of the song. I do not connect this to the popular Christmas tradition of singing the song now. “The very fact of (“Jingle Bells’”) popularity has to do with the very catchy melody of the song, and not to be only understood in terms of its origins in the minstrel tradition. … I would say it should very much be sung and enjoyed, and perhaps discussed.”

There are teachers and schools that have taken Jingle Bells out of the curricular mix—and good on them for having that thoughtful discussion in the first place. And there are teachers who have decided they have bigger curricular fish to fry than banishing the bells on bobtails—they’ll save their firepower for songs with overtly racist lyrics and intentions.

Again– these are valid and important questions. The trick is to keep the conversation going, and refrain from condemnation of well-meaning peers.

Are those sleighbells I hear?

by nflanagan

Teaching Music in the Digital Age

Story from my band room, a couple of decades ago:

I am discussing auto-tune, a relatively new invention, with one of my students, an uber-smart trombone player. I have serious doubts about whether auto-tune is a good thing for recorded music, as a concept. It means, I tell him, that the focus on all kinds of music will shift from genuine musical talent to production values. Singers who have limited range and vocal appeal, but look hot, can be made to sound hot, too, even when a raw recording of their voice reveals pitch problems and dubious vocal quality.

But, he says—aren’t you always pushing us toward perfection, in band rehearsal? We use machines to improve our tuning. We use machines to regulate tempos. And our entire goal is to sound flawless—the pursuit of excellence and so on. (That’s actually a thing I say, pretty often, in rehearsal.) Why wouldn’t it be OK for record producers to use technology to achieve the same ends?

I told you he was smart.

There are other reasons to make music, I reply. What about the joy of playing with others, like our community of kids here, who find great satisfaction in playing Russian Christmas Music, even spending lots of time tuning the unison brass opening, because nobody can fail to be moved by the solemnity and glory of the music? Even the beginners who can only play six notes experience immense pleasure in playing that first concert, despite being out of tune and rhythmically inaccurate. And their parents love it, too.

He wrinkles his nose. Maybe they’re just pretending to like it, he says.

My career as a music teacher was varied. I taught secondary band and choir, and elementary music. I taught some other stuff, too—seventh grade math, and a dumping ground class that gave me kids who didn’t speak English well enough to know how to do their homework—but I taught music across the K-12 spectrum, vocal and instrumental, in five different decades.

Although the world of recorded music, available to everyone on the planet, pretty much, changed radically in that span from the 1970s to the 2020s, music education looked much the same: elementary schoolchildren singing and moving to the beat, and selected secondary students peeling off into performance ensembles—bands, orchestras and choral groups. Competition remains popular with secondary teachers. The tyrannical band director is still a thing—and often admired.

Now, and perennially since the rise of musical performing groups in schools early in the last century, music programs are often considered expendable, subject to funding vagaries. There are lots of school band programs that depend on fund-raising and Boosters organizations. I myself was a poster child for funding your own program. Which means that parents and teachers believe so strongly in the power of school music programs they’re not willing to let them go.

There’s even talk about the ability of music and other arts to bring divergent perspectives together. There’s research about how music develops executive function, the “CEO” of the brain.  Music builds communities—in schools, and after formal education is over.

So why would any school think that music is an add-on, nice but not central to their mission of (here it comes) creating 21st century citizens? The New York Times takes a stab at this with an article entitled We’re Teaching Music to Kids All Wrong.

Not a promising headline but the author, Sammy Miller, a Grammy-nominated drummer who started a music education company, actually gets this mostly right:

We need to start by rethinking how we teach music from the ground up, both at home and in the classroom. The onus is on parents and educators to raise the next generation of lifelong musicians — not just for music’s sake but to build richer, more vibrant inner personal lives for our children and a more beautiful and expressive world.

Miller notes that about 80% of all kids quit singing and playing in formal ensembles before they graduate. He points to the way we currently teach music—as a fully definable skill with pre-organized, grade-able steps to learning—as the reason for that:

A class that by definition is meant to be a creative endeavor winds up emphasizing rigid reading and rote memorization, in service of a single performance. We need to abandon that approach and bring play back into the classroom by instructing students how to hear a melody on the radio and learn to play it back by ear. Start with just one chord, a funky beat and let it rip — and, voilà, you’re making music.

I fully agree with Miller here—many music programs give up on creativity somewhere around the 5th grade–but I can see large ensemble teachers across the country wincing. Those of us who are teaching music are dependent on uniformity because when there are 50 students holding noisemakers in front of you, the last thing you want is experimentation, especially with a funky beat.

Besides, we’re always under the gun to develop programs that the “community can be proud of” and showcase continuous skill-building in our students. In doing so, we stick to the tried-and-true instruments, techniques and literature. The world of popular and commercial music, in which our students are marinating every day, is ignored, unless the band plays a Top Ten tune in a football show. And the pursuit of excellence in all aspects of performance is the core value. 

But Miller says:

We need to let kids be terrible. In fact, we should encourage it. They’ll be plenty terrible on their own — at first. But too often kids associate music in school with a difficult undertaking they can’t hope to master, which leads them to give up. Music does not have to be, and in fact, shouldn’t be, about the pursuit of perfection. Great musicians have plenty of lessons to teach students about the usefulness of failure.

Like every curricular/instructional issue in K-12 education in 2023, talk of failure, learning from our mistakes, is somewhere between frightening and verboten. All of us are judged, stacked up against auto-tuned perfection, when perfection can be achieved digitally if you have the money and the tools.

Motivating children and teenagers is something else entirely.

by nflanagan

Veterans Day, 2023

On Veterans Day, I usually put up a Facebook photo of my Dad while he was serving in the Army Air Corps, WW II. I have a handful of them–in front of planes, in his radio gunner seat on the plane, in his flight suit and helmet, and so on. In each of them, he looks young and handsome, and determined– a man I didn’t know, just starting what would become his imperfect adult life.

My dad enlisted in the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor, early in 1942. He was 20 years old, and had been knocking around in Muskegon after dropping out of high school at 16. He did the usual entrance screening and tests, and was pulled out of the pack and offered a chance to be part of the Air Corps, which would involve special training to fly combat missions. The Air Corps was transitioning at the time, to what would become the Air Force, and my dad was thrilled to be going off into the wild blue yonder. In this case, the Pacific theater.

His leaving school at 16 to go to work wasn’t a function of academic failure, by the way. My father was one of the smartest people I know, a quick and canny intellect. He was also belligerent and impulsive and emphatically did not like being told what to do. He told me many times that the only teacher he respected and the only class he loved was his band director and playing in the Muskegon HS Band. He quit school because, other than music, he wasn’t learning anything. (Yes, I see the irony.)

His four years in the military were tumultuous. His plane was shot down and floated for days in the Sea of Japan, eventually rescued by an Australian submarine. All crew members survived. His brother Don (pictured, below) was killed in the first wave of Marines on Iwo Jima, in February, 1945, at the age of 19, after which my dad went AWOL, hitching rides to Iwo Jima to ‘see for himself.’ Returning to his unit, he was busted down to Private, although he was honorably discharged as a PFC.

The picture of my dad, with his younger brother, Burt, was taken on my grandparents’ back stoop after he returned home: the admiring younger brother and the Man Who Has Seen Too Much. The photo says it all.

Today, on Veterans Day, I want to honor all the men and women who came home, bringing all the trauma of war with them. The folks who tried to forget, but couldn’t. The ones whose wives warned their children: Don’t ask Dad about the war.

Our country was built on sacrifice. It would serve us all well to remember that, every day.

by nflanagan

Band Director Quits and Other Evidence of Pandemic Aftermath

It’s a sad but kind of sweet story: a little rural school (282 students, total, K-12) in West Virginia has a small but mighty high school band, enthusiastically supporting the home team on Friday nights. Over the summer the band director leaves the district. First day of school, the principal shows up in the band room, offering the 38 band members the option of dropping out and taking another class. Ten of the students, however, decide to stay and teach themselves (with the principal’s permission, noting that he had already set money aside in the budget for a band program).

The rest of the story, in the Washington Post, praises the students for making their own rules, playing the fight song and chants at games, and generally keeping the ball rolling, with two bona fide teachers serving as advisors.

The story dedicates half a sentence– West Virginia is experiencing a certified teacher shortage like many states nationwide—to the real, underlying problem. The headline is particularly annoying: A high school band teacher quit. Now, the students teach, direct themselves.

Imagine a first-grade classroom, with a dozen adorable, willing children. Their teacher quits, in August. So the principal decides that a couple of adult wranglers can manage them, because she’s set aside money for new reading books and computers, and because they all learned their letters in kindergarten. Maybe a new teacher will turn up. In the meantime, they can be kept busy doing what they did last year.

Perhaps you’re thinking that the national shortage of teachers is limited to certain sub-specialties, or geographic regions, that no responsible school leader would leave a group of six-year-olds to “teach themselves.” If so, you ought to take a look at the percentages of students, especially in charter schools, with unqualified substitutes. There are uncertified subs everywhere, in all subjects, k-12, and unfilled jobs in prestigious private and suburban schools, two months after the start of the school year.

The loyal-to-band kids in West Virginia do not surprise me. Band students, in my thoroughly biased opinion, are THE BEST, and these kids appear to be like band kids everywhere—self-starters, and leaders. Good kids. There are, of course, good kids in all grades and disciplines, in every school, those who can be trusted to carry on when the chips are down.

But here’s the thing that doesn’t get mentioned in this feel-good story: the band kids in WV learned how to do the things they have done—writing rules, running rehearsals, playing tunes—from a teacher. By all indications, a pretty good teacher, someone who instilled a spirit of cooperation that led students to try to balance out the band sound by switching instruments.

Once football season is over, who will be moving their music education forward, teaching them the new skills and music they deserve? Who is preparing younger students there, who will become the high school musicians when these amazing kids graduate? There is no building process, no pipeline of activities that lead to cycles of growth. Without a teacher, this program is headed toward a dead end.

It would be like teaching kindergarteners the skill of letter-sound correspondence, then not providing them with books, discussions, stories, rhyming games, tools to make them better readers, developing an appreciation and desire for full adult literacy. All along the way, students need teachers. A good teacher is the launching pad for students’ “teaching themselves.”

Further—the headline suggests that the band teacher who “quit” caused this situation. I have no idea why the previous band teacher left—could be anything from lousy pay and working conditions to a much better school music job with a bigger band and budget. Or a different job, with regular hours and Friday nights at home, instead of the frozen bleachers. You might call this self-care for burned-out teachers.

The principal holds out hope that a band teacher can be found. But the changing labor force, kick-started by a global health emergency, has made many skilled workers, including teachers, re-consider their worth. The pay scale is only one bit of evidence that schools need to treat their teachers like the essential driver of quality public education.

In West Virginia, their flagship university has suffered a 10% drop in enrollment since 2015, revenue lost during the pandemic and an increasing debt load for new building projects. It’s a new world, and early indicators about the availability and use of resources to provide a world-class education for every child— which include actual music teachers—are alarming.

by nflanagan

About that Band Director Who Got Tased

I first got wind of this story on the BDG (Band Directors Group) Facebook page, early yesterday morning. You’ve probably seen it:

After a football game last week, at Jackson Olin HS in Birmingham, Alabama, Johnny Mims, band director for the visiting team, from Minor HS, let his band finish their post-game music after police directed them to stop playing. After the band finished playing (during which, the stadium lights were turned off), police physically grabbed and attempted to arrest Mims. There was some pushing and shoving on both sides. Then the police tased Mims, three times, as his students witnessed (and screamed). It was all captured on videotape.

Here’s a full description. After the incident, Mims was taken to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital and then to the Birmingham City Jail, where he was booked and later bonded out. Officers obtained arrest warrants for disorderly conduct, harassment and resisting arrest, police said.

I’ve watched the police body-cam footage a couple of times, and it’s pretty gnarly, although after the lights go off, it’s hard to see specifically what’s going on. There are band kids behind the director, on the track, and others in front of him—about 145 kids in the band, total—and they all had a ringside seat to witness their teacher twitching on the ground, shocked into submission for letting them finish about a minute’s worth of music.

There’s a lot of backfilling the story on both sides. There’s been violence after football games so police are needed to empty the stadium! But— the two band directors agreed to do a short post-game show in the stands so Mims thought he was OK to finish!  But—the other director stopped first! But police have ultimate authority!

The people I was interested in hearing from were the band directors. Unless you’ve (raising hand) been out there in front of the marching band on Friday night after Friday night, you might think that the rules for when to play and when not to play are crystal clear. They are absolutely not—and change from one venue to another. Also–everybody in the stands has an opinion on what the marching band should be doing and when. (I feel like I should repeat that last statement three times.)

The band directors on BDG first wondered if Mims actually heard the cops, over the noise—a large marching band makes a lot of decibels. (He seems to be telling them to give him a minute, at one point.) They wondered, as well, if playing after the game was planned. (Yes—both directors agreed to play, but the police had other ideas.)

Who turned off the stadium lights? (Unclear—but if the worry was public safety, turning off the lights is a far more dangerous move than letting the band play to the end of a song. If the lights were on a timer, that’s even worse, because who knows how long a game will last, and what might be happening in the parking lot afterward.)

Given the information presented by both sides, most band directors said— Hey. If the cops came over and gave me a throat-slitting motion, I’d stop the band. Just because they’re the cops and I’m a band director. I might be furious. But. They’re the cops, the ones with guns.

And—once again— who gets to play music, and when, at sporting events, is a matter of opinion.  I have seen bands chased off the field by their own teams as they’re marching to the sidelines. I have seen referees assess penalties for bands or individual tuba players being in an ‘illegal’ spot. I have heard bands reprimanded for not stopping the music when play resumes (sometimes, just a few seconds’ worth of Let’s Go Blue—very popular in my neck of the woods). And I have heard endless, countless discussions of what the “official” rules are.

One thing I can tell you: this incident will do nothing to encourage non-hostile behaviors and good sportsmanship at either of these schools. Nor will it increase respect for the police and the important work they do.

While I probably would have stopped—out of fear — when the policeman yelled at me to cease directing, it’s because I’m a nice, albeit cowardly lady and they have tasers.

But then— I have not been pushed around by the police. I have not been routinely stopped or experienced anxiety when a cop car appears in my rear view mirror. I once talked a cop wearing a knit beanie out of giving me a ticket for doing 34 mph in a 25 zone by telling him I was on my way to choir practice at church (the truth).

I have no idea what was going through Mims’ mind when the cops started trying to handcuff him, but nobody deserves to be humiliated, ganged up on, pushed around or tased, for the non-crime of directing a HS band.

But the students who watched this will remember it all their lives. It will change the way they see the world.

by nflanagan

Middle Schoolers: The Myth and the Reality

Among the worst ideas I’ve ever heard, regarding young people and how to develop their knowledge and skills, is this one: Let’s let 14 year-olds serve alcohol in bars and restaurants!

Really? We’re going to let eighth graders wait on adults, bringing them booze, asking if they’d like another, assessing their levels of inebriation? Young, barely teenaged girls “handling” older men, massaging their inebriated egos in hopes of a bigger tip?

Would these be the same young teenagers we don’t trust to select their own pleasure reading, share their own observations about racism and sexism in the classroom, or choose how they want to be identified?

I taught full-time for 32 years, only one of which did not include teaching middle school. I love teaching middle school. Sometimes, I think—in terms of my cynical, low-brow sense of humor anyway—I never really left the seventh grade.

I repeat: I love teaching middle school, and I really love kids in those middle grades.

Tell people that you taught middle school band for more than 30 years, and the first comment you get back will be some variant on “OMG, God bless you” or commentary re: how dreadful it is to parent a person who’s 13 years old—The hormones! The backtalk! — and therefore, how epically horrible it must be to try to teach these kids something, in batches of 30.  

Or, in my case, in batches of 60+, where each student is holding a noisemaker.

Actually, while there were certainly days when I wondered whether I might not be better off selling real estate, teaching middle school music was mostly deeply rewarding and often fun. And in case you think this was because I was teaching an elective, I also taught seventh grade math for two years (once in the 1980s, the second time in 2005), as well as an ESL class and an academic support class where there were fewer than 10 students and classroom management was way more difficult than my 65-piece eighth grade band.

Here’s my honed theory of teaching middle school, in a nutshell: We don’t give middle schoolers enough real responsibilities or credit for their ongoing moral development. They are smart and curious enough to wrestle with big questions and read challenging texts (with some scaffolding). They are trying to figure out what kind of world they will inherit, and are often anxious about the job current adult leaders are doing. This anxiety has exponentially grown by watching adults navigate a global pandemic, stand by as states go up in flames, and try to get themselves elected through the use of lies, cheating and bullying.

Still, middle-grades kids will rise to do a credible job of almost any task we set before them, if they see a point in doing the work.  And when they complain of being treated like children, they’re usually right—every time I hear teachers recommend shutting down privileges we afford adults (using the bathroom when needed, for example, or being given some grace around a missing pencil), I cringe.

Treating young adolescents as if they can’t reasonably manage their own behavior almost always results in their doing precisely that: acting irresponsibly. A well-run classroom is not achieved by imposing a long list of rules, or threats of escalating punishments. It happens, over time, when students understand that you a) like them, b) respect them, and c) think they are capable of doing the work you have to do together, whether that’s single-variable equations or discussing core democratic values.

Over those three decades of teaching middle school, did I sometimes fail to achieve those goals? Absolutely. And did I have students who exhibited appalling behaviors, ranging from mean-girls cruelty to risking bodily harm? Sure.

But the longer I taught, the higher I raised the achievement hoops, and time after time, my pre-adolescent students came through. We have always underestimated the ability of middle-grades students to discuss, write, solve problems, explore issues and help their communities. We are always too quick to pigeonhole them, based on their immaturity. We have let middle school become a kind of punch line.

Which is why I find it interesting that some states, trying to solve ongoing post-pandemic labor shortages caused by adults who are unwilling to work for subsistence wages and are now demanding better job opportunities, are turning to young teenagers. Whether this is child labor or “developing workplace skills” depends on your point of view.

But there are better ways to incorporate the nascent adult skills that middle schoolers want to display than having them deliver alcoholic drinks to adults, or do other jobs that adults refuse to do for piddling money. I think about all the times I took the middle school jazz band, for example, to the nursing home or the school for developmentally disabled students—and how willing they were, with a little coaching, to make those lives better, to interact with people who were profoundly different.

Perhaps the best way to develop middle-grades students is to offer them opportunities to develop adult trust in their capacity.

Several years ago, my school had a pilot program in community service. Students earned points for shoveling neighbors’ walks, being “counselors” at elementary after-school gymnastics or basketball programs, or “student leadership” activities like planning and decorating for school dances. All students, over the course of a year, had to earn a set number of points, reported and signed off on by their parents.

One mother sent in a form awarding her daughter points for family babysitting. The 14 year-old daughter had four younger siblings, two who were not yet in school, and her mother depended on her to come home right after school, and watch the kids, so she could work outside the home.

This seemed like a no-brainer to me. Tending four children (and, by the way, completing your homework, something this girl always did) was a major responsibility for a girl in middle school. But the counselor argued that it wasn’t “community service,” just a family expectation.

The point of having a community service program was to build students’ skills and awareness of their place in—duh—the community, to emphasize that healthy communities depend on volunteering and interdependency. To show middle schoolers that their work and skills were already valued, even though they were, say, 12 years old.

The program was eventually scrapped over issues like defining “community service.” Which I would call an adult failure to understand the considerable capacities of middle school students.

Middle schoolers can be trusted to do lots of things; my 30 years in their company gave me ample proof of that. It’s the adults who can’t be trusted in the proposal that they serve drinks.