It's that time of year that I most enjoy; reflecting on the achievements of the past ten months and looking ahead to the next school year. This year marked my 27th year as a teacher, in Chicago and Arizona school districts, and my 19th in the Sahuarita Unified School District.
There have been lots of changes, to be sure over those 27 years, and this one was looking to me to be a poor one, with funding cuts, wages reduced and in Arizona, loss of tenure. Yes that's right. Our legislature approved the passage of a law allowing concealed weapons and even permitting them in bars, and in the same session wiped out teacher tenure. It's now much simpler to fire a teacher, but on the other hand the reductions in salaries and lack of job security makes it much harder to attract and hold good teachers. Totally backward thinking by AZ politicians, in my opinion.
But there is nothing really that I could do about this except to be a professional and do the job I was trained for and love. That I did! I had a number of special students in my program coming into the fall that I wanted to make sure had a meaningful senior year. There were eight in my choir and six in my jazz band who had been with me all four years so it was important that we engage them as best we could.
And there were other events coming up this year that I knew our whole department was going to be busy with. First I was now the permanent chair of the Arizona Jazz Educators Association clinic in Tucson. That event was in November at Foothills High School, but I would be involving many of my students in helping me to coordinate the things that needed to be done to ensure a smooth festival.
And we also knew that our high school would be host this year to the AMEA All-Region Festival following auditions in January. All of this was of course in addition to the normal number of concerts, fund raising events and extracurricular activities that we have on our docket. And oh yes, there was this idea of actually teaching classes too! How could I forget that!
I don't do marching band here anymore, but I do assist the director in the summer, coming in during the marching season to help with the brass lines. I can't say I've missed the hot band camps but I do love working with the brass students and seeing them deal with new music while at the same time learn their sets. Camp went well.
The first big fall event was the Youth In Harmony Barbershop Quartet Festival at Flowing Wells high school. I take my advanced vocal students each year to this large event, where 250 kids rehearse all day and perform a late afternoon concert of the music that has been carefully prepared all day.
This year I had a class for Chorale, and small chamber choir of my top 12 singers who could do Broadway, barbershop, madrigals and other music throughout the year. I was mostly made up of seniors, but I also had talented younger students in this class too.
The festival was on the first Saturday of September and went very well; but the numbers were down I noticed because many schools had cut transportation and could not participate. I saw that again later in the year with my jazz festival.
About this time I began to feel this this group was indeed special and could go far. We began to make preparations for an overnight California festival trip. But we still had much work ahead of us there.
My jazz band was young, except for those six seniors. I felt it was going to be slow going with this group because the rhythm section was new and so inexperienced. I'd graduated three seniors the previous year who were terrific, if troublesome because of substance abuse issues. They had to be watched constantly.
This band in fact took began to take giant strides early on and surprised me with it's desire to improve. I was very short trumpets and moved a senior tenor sax student to second trumpet. She handled it with aplomb! You get a student like this and you prize them! Switching from sax to trumpet is no easy task, and playing jazz is especially hard. She made it seem easy!
In fact this whole band loved the challenges, as did my advanced vocalists. I started giving them harder music and they seemed to develop an appetite for it. It made teaching a whole lot of fun, knowing that I didn't have to constantly re-teach ideas. That is what wears down teachers, trying to improve retention. At least in these groups that was no problem. My beginning choir and guitar classes - another story!
I had originally planned to take the band to my AAJE Clinic, which took place a few days before Thanksgiving. But our transportation fell through. This was occurring across the state. The story was that the Arizona Interscholastic Association, which monitors athletic competition and student eligibility matters, had allowed the Arizona Music Education Association to operate under it's umbrella, permitting school athletic departments, with their much larger operating funds, to pay for transportation and festival entry fee costs, as long as music directors made sure all of their participating students had passing grades.
It's a complicated matter, but the bottom line was that AIA and AMEA split this past summer and transportation and festival fees were either cut off to music departments or curtailed, depending on the school. Our Athletic Director agreed for this year to continue to pay as long as eligibility was monitored and enforced and the event resulted in a rating or ranking. The early jazz and choir clinics, like my AAJE clinic and the barbershop festival do not have a ratings feature, which cut off our funding. Other schools couldn't participate even if they did rate the performances. Still, twelve bands performed in my festival and it went extremely well.
I opted to hold the funds that I did have available for the Chandler-Gilbert CC Jazz Festival later in the the year, so our band did not play a Foothills. The barbershop festival came out of choir funds.
The sad thing about this AIA-AMEA business is that the marching bands, which support these endless Friday Night Madness affairs are such an important part of the whole atmosphere. What would happen if the bands went away? And of course there are marching band competitions throughout the fall designed to improve the bands as they prepare for their football obligations. Most schools are no longer providing athletic department money to support them. It makes no sense to me. And next year we'll feel the crunch even in competitions, because our AD won't fund anymore. However late word I had on this matter from my principal (who is a great musician) is that there will be no changes. We'll see who wins that battle because it is in no way settled.
My inexperienced choir, called the Mixed Choir, struggled all semester long with pitch, tone quality and projection, but by mid-November, they were performing the limited SAB literature that I had given them consistently well. They began to show some very strong signs of improvement, so I scheduled them on our Winter concert along with a staging of music from Guys and Dolls by our Chorale and the jazz band.
That concert was long, but the top groups performed incredibly well; the younger choir had its share if issues, including some attendance problems, but it was a good experience for them, which would pay off later in the spring. The Chorale, by now planning A Night of Broadway in January as it's chief fundraiser for an Anaheim music festival, used the fifteen minute Guys and Dolls piece as an advertisement for the January 6 two hour show, with tickets now already on sale. That night was not optimum but more on that later in Part 2.
The jazz band was on top of it's game immediately; it usually is at this time of year because the Concert Band, with only a three weeks to prepare coming off marching season, understandably has a weaker performance. Even though I share 90% of my band kids with the marching band, I of course do not work on marching band stuff during my class period.
The semester ended with all of our performing groups poised for bigger and better things to come. The kids in the Chorale all made plans not to take Christmas vacations this year in order to work over the holiday break on it's Broadway show, coming up the week we were back at school. Of course, their director didn't go anywhere either.
I always seem to have the most motivated students in my vocal ensemble classes. They work hard, take great pride in their performances and are generally excellent self-starters. Take this week, for example. We developed a concept for a show featuring music from screen and stage mostly from the 1970's forward called "Showtime! - Memories Past and Present". Naturally we had to include music from Grease, the Disney shows, Rent and Glee.
