A few weeks ago, I spoke at the annual conference of the New York State School Music Association in Rochester. As I was going through the lobby of the conference center, I saw many teenagers carrying their musical instruments, preparing to practice and play together. There was a spirit of happy anticipation in the air–at least, that’s what I sensed. It occurred to me that teaching music must be the most joyful of all teaching jobs. The students come to you with different skill levels. They want to learn to play. They understand that they can’t get better unless they practice, practice, practice. No one can do it for them. They can’t download it from the Internet. They can’t cheat or pretend. And if they work hard and practice faithfully, they can do it in a group.
The best is–and I say this with awe–no one can say or should say, what is this for? Why am I learning it?
It’s for the joy of performance.
Isn’t music joyful? Here is the answer to the question.
I posted this months ago when it first appeared on the Internet. It is still a joy to watch. I post it again to share the joy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Shhhh, Diane. A group of teachers happy? A group of students learning? Be quiet before someone drops a standardized Pearson bubble test on them.
Music IS joyful. Teaching and learning SHOULD be joyful. But NCLB and RttT and all the other acronyms that teachers and kids must deal with today have sucked much of the joy from teaching and learning. This is a national disgrace as much as any achievement gap that the corporate reformers like to talk about. Very sad.
Thank you! A joy to my ears, my senses, my spirit, my heart and mind. Uplifting
and a wonderful example of how human beings of all ages can come together
and enjoy what others have created for their pleasure and ours. The result of
teaching, training, passion, talent, pursuit of individual growth and happiness.
Thank you for sharing this and giving us some respite from the heartache of
past weeks and stressful events and politics.
Ode to Joy, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The eyes and smiles of the children say it all. Thank you Diane.
“…teaching music must be the most joyful of all teaching jobs.”
Why yes, it is! I’ve been a high school orchestra director for 16 years, and I absolutely LOVE my job. I don’t think I could be a teacher of any other subject, not only because I love what I do, but because of what NCLB/RttT and the like have done to the teachers and students on core subject areas. I am thankful that I teach in a district that still values the arts, and it saddens me that some districts push the arts out to make room for more testing. With the recent budget cuts many arts programs were cut, especially in districts that need the arts the most. Nothing can bring together a community like the arts (as you can see in this lovely video)!
I loved this. The video made me feel teary. So beautiful.
I feel a great deal of anxiety over the current learning=earning conversation being propagated at various policy levels, where certain modes and disciplines of education are only viewed as valuable when there can be a direct argument made for how they will translate into improved career prospects. Subjects in the humanities, arts and music programs, might all be eventually classified as expendable.
Yes it is. One of the few safe havens left. Yet, even though I can hide in the safety of my music room, I must join the fight against poor reforms which will hurt my children’s chance to get a good well rounded education without the testing madness.
I can’t help to smile.
It also reminds me of learning ballroom dancing around the age of 40. Whenever one is learning something new, a kind and patient teacher is probably the most important aspect of not giving up. Add a teacher’s expertise and joy, and the student will be engaged and eager to learn more. I think Arne Duncan should take up dancing or a new instrument, to humble him to remember how one learns.
He should start with the triangle and a very simple line dance. He doesn’t strike me as too swift.
In your lectures and book I, as a music teacher, am ever so pleased you include music’s place in education. My own child went to high school in Italy because he wanted to study architecture. It had no music or anything other than the academic classes. Fortunately he already had a good foundation in music and as an adult he uses it.
I am very concerned with the new business model of American education and what it will result in down the road. It is my understanding that entertainment is one of our country’s biggest export. Choking off the creative possibilities for students hardly seems like a good investment.
Then music teachers today are required to do more than teacher their subject area and in my state are forced to spend a lot of time on reading to boost academic test scores. I suppose that means that the schools with students who test better will end up with better music programs. I work in a exceptional student center school and have other concerns about student testing, VAM, and evaluation tools with expectations that are not in line with best practices for ESE students. For the lowest functioning students often times music is the only thing they respond to. I would hate to see that taken away from them because it doesn’t show up as valuable in data collection.
Teaching music totally rocks. I’ve been teaching students from baby through adulthood for over 20 years in a number of different settings: general music classroom, band, chorus orchestra, marching band, private lessons, and “Mommy and Me” classes. Formally evaluating and grading the “musical behaviors” of children as young as 5 isn’t as much fun, though, nor is evaluating the individual musical behaviors of students in larger musical ensembles. That’s a task that is getting progressively more onerous. 😦
I’m back in the classroom as a part-time long-term substitute in music in a position where my classes include 4 kindergarten classes and 8 special needs preschool classes. Since I’ve taught Early Childhood music for a few years now, I’m able to plan some pretty fun and educational lessons for these kids, so one would think that kindergarten music (I don’t have to follow a curriculum for the special needs preschoolers) would be lots of fun and easy enough to do. Well, one would think. Being back in a formal general music classroom now after a break to be at home with my own kids (and then coming back to find that nobody’s hiring music teachers these days), I was quite disappointed to discover that not only am I expected to cover certain materials and concepts in this or that marking period – which would leave me a fair amount of freedom to plan – but now I’m expected to cover specific musical behaviors and concepts WEEK. BY. WEEK. The schedule makes no allowances for snow days, for holidays, for half-days: one Week 5 of Marking Period 2, you’re supposed to be teaching, among other things, objectives which may or may not have anything to do with each other (high and low pitches, for example, juxtaposed on folk songs) – and evaluating students’ understanding of whatever concepts are being covered. Each musical behavior is now listed in outline form; I can’t yet access the curriculum page from my home computer, but in school I’m expected to access it regularly and make sure I’m following it. The week before the Winter holidays, I spent 45 minutes entering grades for each student in the online gradebook. Yup, grading 5YO’s on how well they keep a beat, which I’m supposed to be able to teach and reinforce in 40 minutes a week, assuming they HAVE class that week. (We had 3 Tuesday afternoons off IN A ROW this past Fall, which is when I see 3 of my 4 kindergarten classes.)
When school starts up again in January, with only 2 weeks left to finish grading for the 2nd marking period, I’ll have to figure out a way to fairly evaluate nearly 100 students’ understanding of high and low pitches while still TEACHING the class. I know teachers who spend 1 or 2 class periods testing their students one at a time to accomplish this, showing a video to the class while calling students over one at a time. How the HECK is this “music education”?!?!? Yes, of course we want to know what our students are doing, and while I admit that I do find students’ shortcomings during those tests, if they occur at the end of a marking period and my curriculum says I have to move on regardless, how can I go back and fix the shortcomings in 35-50 minutes per week (which is what elementary classes get for art and music and PE in my system, which is a highly-regarded one)? NINE classes in a marking period, assuming the kids HAVE them all, and up to TWO of them set aside for testing?
Yes, music teaching is a ton of fun, but for me it’s become a lot less fun in the classroom. I’m hoping another position in elementary instrumental music opens up; so far there is still enough latitude there that I can go at my own pace, which often is faster than many other teachers, but which is also dependent on my students, on the availability of a classroom in the first place – SO much fun to teach on a stage with lunchtime going on on the other side of a curtain 😛 – and on whether they get to see me during their 30 minutes per week. There are a lot more variables, but I find that I get more done simply because I *can* move at my own pace. The other place I’ve found I love teaching music is early childhood music; the “Mommy and Me” (which is more accurately “Caregiver and Me” because the adults in those classes also include fathers and the odd nanny) format is truly a joyful place. We have a rotating set of musical materials and many many options for getting the most out of them, AND for helping the caregivers engage in musical behaviors themselves. It’s nothing short of awesome to see tiny children becoming musical, and very gratifying to see caregivers coming out of their own shells musically, with adults and kids just having FUN. (I’m teaching Music Together; other early childhood music experiences like KinderMusik and Music Garden also allow small children and parents/caregivers to experience music in a similar fashion.) The arts make us HUMAN, and this setting gives me the freedom and the flexibility to truly optimize that experience. But the longer I’m in the public school classroom music position, the less I’m enjoying the overall experience. I prefer using my planning time to plan fun lessons, not to set up my online gradebook – and I don’t know a single teacher of any other subject who doesn’t feel the same. It’s not easy striking out on my own so I can still make a living doing private music lessons and the early childhood classes, and I’m not making the money I was in the public school classroom, but wow, it’s fulfilling, and the business *is* growing bit by bit. I really don’t want to be dependent on the public school machine for situations where I get to teach music any more.
I started in my current district in a small school where I was teaching both vocal and instrumental music at the elementary level. It was ideal since I could integrate both programs which lent much support to the instrumental program– one year, we had 60% of eligible students enrolled in the optional instrumental program.
When the school expanded to a new building, I was told that I would be teaching vocal music full-time and a colleague would be adding our school onto her instrumental schedule. The year that the school was being built, the middle school band job opened up, and I asked to be transferred. Long story short, I eventually ended up in the middle school program where my students thrived for six years. Then due to budget cuts, the district eliminated an instrumental music position, and I was transferred back to my original job.
Since returning, I have found little joy in this job. I refuse to craft lessons from a Pearson teaching manual, so I am constantly looking for and organizing resources. I spend much more than just prep time keeping records of my 600 students and every single class. The schedule is all over the place, so I cannot get into a groove when switching classes from grade level to another. Teachers drop off classes early or send them down the hallway while waiting for me to open my door and let out the previous class. I cannot even catch my breath in between classes–it’s like an assembly line. My favorite is switching from 5th grade to Kindergarten with no time to prepare the classroom between each. It would be great if the same grade level was first in the schedule. Every day, I have either 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade to start my day after standing outside in the rain, wind, and sometimes snow at bus duty. So a different set up every morning is required. I walk in from duty, and there is a class waiting for me as I take off my coat and get settled. There is very little continuity. I feel like my class exists because it is the homeroom teacher’s prep. My other function is entertainment. And I actually have a principal who values music–I can’t imagine how under-appreciated my colleauges in other schools feel teaching on the stage, scheduled to have five classes in a row, assigned every single duty in the school, etc. We are often made to feel like second-class citizens by our colleagues and administrators because we are not important enough for the students to see every day. And as easy as it is to cut a music teacher position for administrators, it’s five times as difficult for us to pick up the slack by taking on more students and more schools because “we should be lucky we have music jobs” when they aren’t mandated by the state– yes, an administrator told me that.
Outside of teaching pre-school, Kindergarten or even 1st grade, you would be hard-pressed to find a job more exhausting than teaching music. The teacher is on stage every second the students are there. There is no quiet reading time, and independent work requires constant vigilance. We don’t often have teacher assistants there to help the children with special needs, so forget expecting children with visual processing issues to read music or have the coordination to play a recorder. We can give them the attention they need and ignore the class or leave them out. If you try to do both, you get very little accomplished and bore the heck out of the quick learners. Then when you finally get something going, the class period has ended and you have a colleague waiting at the door to get back to the “real business of school” while the Kindergarten teacher is launching herself down the hallway to have her prep, and the cycle just repeats.
Pulling music out of children who are often tired or unfocused is the most exhausting job I’ve ever had and among the most under-appreciated. And now I have to support the skills tested in the standardized tests which include writing prompts despite the fact that music supports just about every other subject already. Students should be making music every time they come to music class, but instead we have to write and with no support from teacher assistants or special needs teachers. I spend hours after school preparing lessons, and I “only teach music,” as some of my colleagues say. Happy? Somewhat. Worn out? Yes.
So sorry, LG….. there are still schools where administrators leave music teachers alone – one of the advantages of being “not a real subject.” 😛 Sadly, there are more and more schools and school systems where not only are administrators “interested” in what goes on in arts classes, but who think they know better than the specialists. And oh, yeah, God forbid we get actual CLASSES! ::rolleyes::
So very very sorry. *cry*
I think too many if us know this double edged-sword where we are expected to entertain and “cover” prep time while the “real teachers” are under a microscope, yet we aren’t being watched so severely so we have a bit more academic freedom. I expect my students to take my class seriously, and they do, but not every colleague in the school does. Some think we just “sing and have fun” all day. I’ve even had a parent remark “how much fun we must have during all that down time.” Maybe music teachers make it look easy? Or maybe it’s that others think they know what we do and how to do it, so they’ve resigned themselves to devalue our work? I’ve dialogued with teachers who hate unions because they feel that math and science teachers should be paid more than music teachers since math and science are “important” subjects. (The ancient Greeks didn’t think so, although they approached music from a scientific point-of-view.)
I will say that music teachers do have an advantage of seeing a kid’s face light up with delight when he or she has accomplished something musical. As you say, the arts are what make us human. Engaging in artistic activity speaks to the whole mind, yet I refuse to believe that other subjects cannot be approached creatively. As many of our mentors say, the key to good teaching is finding a way for learning to be meaningful to the student. Sometimes the objective isn’t obvious to the student, but if the student is engaged the meaning will come eventually as experiences grow for the student. Positive and successful experiences gratify a student. This keeps the student interested–a disposition of an engaged learner. No matter what the age, everyone is interested in the novel or the creative mode of activity.
While routine does create a sense of stability, making a task too mundane squelches the joy of learning. To understand the psychology surrounding the learning environment and the process of each activity is to always teach with the understanding that experiences can build a human or break one. Monitoring the learning environment and adjusting teaching through changes in speech patterns, word usage/paraphrasing, inflection, depth of content, etc. is one of the most important “good teaching” activities and a very good reason why teachers should never be replaced with electronic screens. This human interaction is part of how we as humans thrive in any environment. Engaging the student in meaningful learning is the responsibility of every teacher, whether music or language arts. Isn’t that the way it should be?
I absolutely love that video. Thank you for sharing it Diane. My mother was a music teacher for 30 years. I attended so many amazing performances at her elementary school and I was always in awe of the stamina required to teach music. She was teaching dance, history, music, reading, writing, math, art all at once. She spent her own money every year to attend Orff Schulwerk conferences and she is a wealth of knowledge as a result of reflecting and working with her other colleagues. As soon as she retired they moved her music room out to the trailer – the beginning of the end of valuing music. I remember in grade school I had music every other week. The students at my school now get music for only 40 minutes a week and they are also in the trailer – the time spent getting to the music class and leaving the class means you really only have 30 minutes. My son who enrolled in our public middle school this year signed up for orchestra. I was so excited that the school had a full orchestra program. I attended the holiday concert a few weeks ago and discovered that orchestra is really only 30 minutes twice a week! So, even though Sam is enrolled in orchestra as one of his main classes, the rest of that time is spent in study hall or various other classes meant to enrich and or allow for reteaching. I don’t really understand it, but my guess is that budget cuts and/or the need to reteach for the purpose of high test scores may be the reason behind the shortened orchestra class. Everywhere we turn music instruction is disappearing.
Don’t worry, there will be VAM testing, student portfolios, etc, for all music teachers in the near future. (Same for art, physical education, dance, woodshop) According to the reform movement EVERYTHING will be tested.
My favorite part of that video are the joyful faces of the children, as they listen and dance. That is what we need to bring into the classroom.
Reblogged this on YouOnlyDoThisOnce.
Diane,
It is, indeed, the best job. If we can only only decide once and for all that music may be one of the most important core subjects, we can begin to turn around our education system.
Thanks for all you do!
Clark County, Nevada is working on music and p.e. testing for teacher evaluation. They should be ashamed. They should also have to demonstrate the skills they want imparted. They are like the dementors in Harry Potter, they suck the joy out of everything.
Yes, and theatre teachers and dance teachers and visual arts and media arts teachers. All happy. And their students. Happy. And LEARNING. Any message in this?
As the music teacher at my small school states, “I have the best job here. I do what I think is the best way for children to learn and no one hovers over or second-guesses me.”
Give it time…..
And shouldn’t that be all of us?
As a music teacher I would like to harmoniously chime in with my colleagues who have commented so far. It is a joy to work with my emotionally challenged students in the Special Ed district of NYC. The problem comes when the joy of making music eventually and inevitably hits on a cognitive deficiency area in symbol decoding or sequencing while coordinating fine motor skills. Now we run into challenges of impulse control, learned helplessness, and low frustration tolerance. Music education is wonderful but it does not exist in a vacuum separate from other learning areas. Gardner did outline musical intelligence among his multiple intelligence, but that is yet to be valued by test makers, therefore it is not valued by the purse-holders in education, and as a result, no matter how well intentioned the administrator, it forces cash strapped schools and districts to make choices about offering music education to all children; a losing proposition that should not even be entertained at all.