"Are you ready?" someone asked me the other day.
They are referring to the next stage of my professional journey. I have been hired as Music Director at a high performing New York City high school. I will be conducting two levels of band, guitar classes and ensembles, jazz band, a chamber music society, and initiating a music technology class they are calling "Audio Science." Two days of professional development start tomorrow, and students arrive on Thursday.
The thing is, despite having spent the last year doing an intensive teacher training program at
Brooklyn College, no one could ever be "ready" for what I'm about to do. My mentor at Brooklyn College said, "Teaching is messy," and it's true. Regardless of how thorough your backwards-designed lesson plans are, and even if you have your
Bruner,
Vygotsky, and
Howard Gardner theories intact and the
Depth-of-Knowledge chart tattooed on your forehead, effectively engaging in a teaching/learning process in front of a group of 9th-graders who need you to communicate to them how to put their flute together is something that can only be learned by doing.
While I have the naivety of first-year teacher (I'm going to change these kids lives from day one), I am going in with an open mind - solidly rooted in the knowledge that teaching is a
learning process. And I will learn something new everyday. I will succeed and I will fail. I will convey to my students that while they are on a path of learning and I am their teacher, I am also on a path of learning - we're in this together. I will remain open to feedback and new ideas. I will write and reflect in personal journals and on this blog on a regular basis.
In fact, I have a history of written reflections for this gig. This is the high school where I completed my secondary education student teaching placement. As a part of that process I had to reflect daily in a journal. I wrote over 8000 words on the process and challenges of teaching music. Here is an excerpt from the work I did at the school at which I'm now employed:
"Unrelated to how prepared or not I was, there was a discussion today on whether or not it's ok to leave students confused. I taught a lesson on musical texture, and there was a question about whether a melody over a drone was monophony or not. Some students said yes, some said it was homophonic. They wanted an answer and I didn't give it to them. I said we would keep listening to examples and maybe the answer would reveal itself to us. One girl actually said, 'this is killing me.' These students are so attached to always having 'the answer' that they freak out if there is anything unknown. My cooperating teacher says it has been her goal to try to get them to take initiative and do things for themselves, and I think this can be taken a step in a similar direction by getting them to become familiar with what Alan Watts called the wisdom of insecurity. It's ok to not know the answer. It's ok to leave a class after being introduced to a new concept and have your head swim a little bit. Life is not black and white. It doesn't matter what you got on your SAT, sometimes you have to deal with things that don't make a bit of sense."
While confident in my abilities as an educator after 20-plus years of teaching music, I have some insecurities. And there is wisdom in knowing that and being ok with that. No one could ever be fully ready for a job like this, but I am ready to continue learning.
Are you a teacher? Please leave feedback on the teaching/learning dynamic in the comments. Thanks for reading!
