Ramblings of a 30-Something Voice Teacher
Long post coming atcha!
Wellllll it’s been a pretty crazy busy couple of weeks over here (hence the slight dip in posting). I came back from vacation and pretty much jumped headlong into scheduling my Fall studio schedule— and that might not seem like much of a task, but trust me, it is. In a weird, nerdy way, I low-key enjoy it— the same way I enjoy the feeling of sucking up large dust bunnies with the vacuum. It’s just oddly satisfying to start with 40-some-odd lesson requests, sift through dozens of emails, and then end up with a highly organized (for now) schedule. You just know it’s gonna get messed up in like .5 seconds, but right now it looks realllly good.
This time of year always excites me— it’s like that quote from You’ve Got Mail about Fall where Tom Hanks’ character (Joe Fox) says he would send Meg Ryan’s character (Kathleen Kelly) “bouquets of sharpened pencils” if he knew her name and address. I’m not saying I want people to start sending me bouquets of sharpened pencils, but the sentiment is pretty spot on. Fall is my favorite season— the cooler weather, the changing leaves (which of course won’t change here in SC for another 2 months), Halloween, pumpkin things, a fresh new class of kick-ass women at Converse, all ambitious and hopeful and ready to change the world. It’s inspiring. It’s this kind of flourishing academia that makes me love being a teacher— among many other things.
I’ve touched on this before, but, while teaching has always been something I wanted to do (and part of my family legacy), I never dreamed I’d love it quite this much. I work with 3rd-12th graders most of the time and, frankly, if you’d told me in high school that I’d be good at that, I wouldn’t have believed you. I kind of always saw myself teaching older students (college age, probably). And it’s not to say that I wouldn’t still enjoy that (I do have a few older students, and they’re delightful, too), but I really love working with kids. And that’s SO weird to me sometimes. I wasn’t popular. Like, ever. I was a very late bloomer. I was nerdy, naive, artsy, a stick-in-the-mud, a goody-two-shoes— hell, the first time I found out a boy wanted to ask me out (in 4th grade), my first response literally was, “but where would we go?” (facepalm) And truly, I’m still all of those things. I’m just more secure with who I am now. But maybe that’s why I work so well with kids. I really, truly remember what it was like to be picked on. Once, in middle school, these really popular girls in my class started wearing “skirt pants”— which, looking back, were a terrible fashion idea, but they were all the rage for a minute there. I asked where they’d gotten their pants from, and they legit wouldn’t tell me. They said it was a “secret.” Even then, I knew that was a load of crap. It was no secret; they just didn’t want to share their super-special-skirt-pants with me. And at the time, that felt pretty lousy. Looking back on it, it’s kind of funny, but back then it really hurt.
I think as adults it’s really easy to view kids’ problems as insignificant because they seem to pale in comparison to adult problems. But when you’re a kid going through that stuff for the first time, it is a big deal. Your first heartbreak, the first (or second, third, fourth, etc.) time the popular girls ditch or bully you, your first failing grade, a teacher who gets their jollies from lording his/her power over the class instead of actually teaching— those are all real problems. And as kids, we didn’t feel any more equipped to deal with those problems than we feel as adults filing taxes for the first time or facing job-loss or miscarriage or divorce or domestic violence or any of those “real issues” that now eclipse whatever we faced back then. When you’re 10 years old and being bullied, that’s a real issue. End of story. And as adults and teachers, I think it’s our job to listen to those kids, empathize with them, and try to help them make sense of it— not dismiss them, make their issue about us, or feed them some bogus and incorrect piece of garbage (i.e. “boys will be boys”) Nope. That’s not good enough. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the issues some kids face that are just as bad as what we deal with as adults— if not worse.
As I enter my eighth year of teaching (not counting student-teaching/training), I always find myself pondering these sorts of things a lot— and they come up in various ways throughout the year— but this year feels a little bit different. There’s lots of reasons for that, and maybe someday I’ll get into it more. Maybe not. At the risk of sounding too vague, let me just say that it’s always disheartening to see people mistreat their profession, whether it’s for personal gain, lack of respect, insecurity, or any number of other reasons. And it happens in pretty much every profession. People are people— we’re flawed at best and downright evil at worst. And somewhere in the middle of that will always be people who put on a really good show before ultimately taking care of themselves. And somewhere next to that are people who are still super flawed but who really, really try to take care of other people, even if it’s at their own expense. And there’s issues with that, too, and I swear I’m not on some rampage where I try to make myself look like a saint— I’m not. But I just don’t see how, as an educator/mentor/person-who-works-with-kids, you could be anything other than the flawed person who tries to help their students succeed and feel valued and respected no matter what. I just don’t. The further I get into this field, the more I see loads of other teachers with that same mentality. I work with a lot of those people. But it just makes it feel like that much more of a betrayal when you see folks who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk— especially when those people are close to you. It becomes personal. Again, to reference You’ve Got Mail, towards the end when Joe Fox tries to justify putting Kathleen Kelly out of business, he says “it wasn’t personal.” She responds, “What is that? I’m so sick of that. All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. It’s personal to a lot of people. And what is so wrong with being personal anyway? Because whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”
Maybe I’ve seen that movie too many times. But man does that resonate with me— both as an artist and as a teacher. What. We. Do. Is. Personal. Yes, it’s a business, and there are elements of it that we have to see as “business.” We have bills to pay; the institutions we work for have bills to pay. There’s always going to be a bottom line. But it’s SO much more than that, and if you treat the whole thing like it’s just a business transaction, you’re going to miss the mark big time. And beyond that, you can’t project your bottom line onto your clients and call it a motivational tool— especially when your “clients” are actually kids. I see it happen all the time, and let me tell you, that ish is messed up. So, let me say this loud and clear for the people in the back: it’s okay for it to be personal and business. Maybe I won’t become a mucky muck CEO dripping in furs made of money, but my students will know that I’m rooting for them. And in my experience, when you can build a relationship with a student that’s based on trust and mutual respect, that’s where the real magic happens.
Wowza, talking about teaching just gets me all kind of fired up. If you read all of that, thank you. And if something in there resonated with you, tell me about it. What gets you fired up? I’d love to know.
xoxo
Laura