We’re at that time of year where heaven is the intersection of several sports.  At my house, the TV regularly switches between football, basketball and baseball, with the occasional volleyball game thrown in for good measure.  I watch these grown men and women essentially playing “games” where the competition is fierce and every move or play seems like it’s life or death.  There are winners and losers, heroes and villains.  There are amazing physical feats and sometimes the most awkward of errors.  But what gets me every time is how grown people, men in particular, can be turned into children playing these games.

Baseball for instance.  I watch these guys do their little ritual fist and chest bumps, their tandem celebratory moves when they run around some bases.  I watch them pile on each other when they win, spit on the ground, scratch wherever and whenever they need to, much like my kindergartners.  Jumping up and down, cheering when they win, crying when they lose, covering their heads with a towel or hoodie so others can’t see their moment of weakness, much like my 4th or 5th grade boys.

But it’s not only the boys.  Women’s volleyball is very confusing to me because they hug each other whether they score or not.  Just like my little girls in class who are always hugging each other or holding hands or doing each others hair.  It’s a girl thing I suppose.

I’ve watched basketball teams on the bench choreograph entire sections of movement for certain players or plays and everyone thinks they’re cool.  Imagine a group of accountants at the end of tax season doing the same thing.  We would think they had lost their minds.  Slam dunks are merely a stronger attempt at jumping up and touching the top of the door for guys.  Have you noticed that?  It’s a rite of passage and a time for high fives when you can finally reach the top of the door as you walk under.  The next step is a slam dunk.

Football is the ultimate however.  In no other sport do we pad people more than this sport and these are the biggest people usually playing the game.  They don’t need padding, they ARE padding.  What gets me though, in an environment where we’re trying to avoid concussions and kick players out for targeting is that a player makes a touchdown and everyone on his team pounds on his helmet in celebration.  These are people who CHOOSE to get run into and run into each other.  While it’s important to keep them as safe as possible, just like kids, these guys aren’t taking the future into account.  They’re playing a game.  Think about it, a job that’s really just a game.

Maybe that’s where we’re missing out.  Maybe if teaching were just a big game where we could have raucous celebrations and parents were the fan base cheering on their students and teachers, learning could be fun again.  I know a lot of teachers who say “I GET to play music all day”.  Truth is, yes, we do get to, based on essential learning outcomes, and assessments and behavior management.  Maybe if I got to participate in the ritual movement, spitting and patting each other on the behind, I could consider what I do a game as well.  I TOO could be a big kid and stop trying to act like an adult.

Maybe what we do could be televised with our fans spending hours watching us teach using Kagan or Anita Archer, oohing and ahhing every time a light bulb goes off in a student’s brain.  Buying merchandise  that says “I LOVE PUBLIC SCHOOLS”, creating entire man caves with our images.  But no, they would rather watch a close up of some catcher’s crotch while he uses some type of finger symbols to speak to his pitcher.  You know, I have kids that occasionally like to use finger symbols in my class.  Hmmm….

Don’t get me wrong.  Watching sports is fun and is a great way to pass the time with family and friends.  But just imagine if we could get people as excited about some things like education for instance, or voting instead of watching a bunch of big kids play with a ball.  Maybe if we paid more attention to the little kids than the big kids, some great things could be accomplished.

As I look at the clock, I have 23 minutes before I want to be in bed.  This means I have 23 minutes to finish writing this, get stuff together for school and hop into bed.  Can she do it?  Pretty sure I’m one of those people who works best with a hard deadline or a lot of stress – or maybe both.  Anyway, here goes.

I’m officially on vacation, now for another 21 minutes.  When Saturday morning began, I immediately worked to stop thinking about anything school or NAfME related as both have been taking over my life for a while now.  Four whole days to do what I wanted; sleep in, eat good food, spend time with my best friend in a great town, miss the snow that fell here while I was gone.  Nothing was going to take away my break.  And now, after spending what I admit was a lot of time on NAfME and other things today, I finally sat down to write.  But what to write about?  How about writing about what I’m writing about?

Sometimes this stream of consciousness stuff is scary.  I thought about writing about labels again because this whole dividing people up by generations is silly and like most labels intended to help us understand each other, they do nothing but divide us further.  Then I thought about writing about being a Mama Bear, a person who feels righteous anger when someone they care about has been mistreated and all I want to do is fix it and put the person or persons responsible in their place.

Then I thought about writing about how listening to my husband eat ice cream when it’s silent in the room makes me slightly crazed.  I can hear every slurp, every swallow and even the scraping on the bowl makes me want to throw it.  But these are obviously my issues, not his.  So again, what to write about?  I only have 15 minutes now and I’m still struggling with what to write!

I found an article the other day which had five rules to writing a book.  The first rule was to give yourself permission to write a bad book.  Well ladies and gentlemen, I think this qualifies as a bad blog.  I just find myself looking at the clock and know I only have a few more minutes and I have to write SOMETHING.  This need to write has proven to be pretty powerful but the urge to curb what I’m really thinking has really thrown a wrench into it.  I have already upset a couple of people with what I write and so I feel like I have to be careful, analyzing every word I say to decide if it can be honest and yet not too honest, or something that can’t possibly be misconstrued.  I begin to understand the struggle of writers, to be honest and not worry about what others think, to write from your own perspective.  My fear gets in the way of me being honest right now, but one day it will all come out.  I can’t guarantee it will be pretty, but it will be honest.

Ten minutes left.  My husband has gotten up from his chair and headed down the hall.  He obviously doesn’t feel the need to stay with me while I frantically write something, anything to get these thoughts out of my head.  Thoughts like a friend who told me one if you don’t ruffle a few feathers, you’re not doing your job.  I may have ruffled a few today.  We’ll see.  I don’t ever see me getting to an age where I don’t care what I say – I’m just not that kind of person really.  I hope I become that person who says what they have to say despite the fear.  That’s a person I could be proud of.

Seven minutes and I think I’ll have time to re-read and edit before I find a picture to go with this.  For those of you who feel like they’ve take a trip through my mind and want to know where to get off, I apologize.  Sometimes I would like to get out of my mind as well. But I have six minutes left of break and I have a picture to find.

I look at the man who sits beside me in the car or in the restaurant or sleeps beside me and I can hardly remember a time when he wasn’t there.  We were such babies when we met, full of fun, the same bad jokes, the rampant hormones.  All I knew was when he held my hand for the first time, it felt as though we had always held hands.

I look at this man today and yes, 40 years have passed.  He’s more handsome than ever and we have experienced many things together.  There’s such a difference between the 19 year and the 59 year old.  The wisdom, the steadfastness, with the same bad jokes that still make me laugh.  Some people might call us soulmates.  I call it a God thing.

I asked him the other day if he had ever thought about what we would look like in 40 years when we first met and he said he hadn’t.  Sure the hair has some gray and the wrinkles are pronounced, but there’s still that same twinkle in his eye, the eyes that still look like that 19 year old I met so long ago.

Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be….  I would not have believed that as a young woman, but now as an older (not old!) woman it is so very true.  There is an appreciation for this person who has seen me at my best and at my worst who still loves me.  This person I can read like a book, whose sentences I can finish, whose hand still feels the same when it hold mine.  This is real love, not the infatuation at the beginning.  Love is something that grows with time and there is the promise that the best is yet to be.

We decided to take a few days and get away from our crazy schedules, just to spend time together.  You would think after this long it wouldn’t be that big a deal but it is.  You see, as time passes you realize that at some point, one of you will be gone.  I don’t mean for this to be maudlin but it is reality.  And although I believe we will see each other again, I have seen others enough to know that one of us losing the other will be devastating.  And so, time spent doing even the most mundane things, like sitting in the same room together watching a favorite show, or having a mini-date at the grocery store or grabbing a burger before one of us has a rehearsal or performance is important.

I think it’s why we have trouble deciding what we want to do sometimes because it really doesn’t matter as long as we’re together.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone felt that way?  Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be….

My room today was filled with students.  This is not unusual for me obviously, but they were a little older than my usual bunch.  These were potential future teachers, sophomores testing the waters of what teaching music is all about.  My purpose was to guide and answer questions for them but it was also to make sure I was honest with them, because what they want to embark upon is not the easiest of professions, to say the least.

The data tells us that 50% of new teachers will leave the profession within five years.  How does that compare with other professions?  According to some research, the attrition rate for police is 28%, Architects, 23%, Lawyers, 19%, Engineers, 16% and Pharmacists 14%.   Several different studies state that attrition rates for music teachers range anywhere from 40-50%.  11% leave within the first year.  Why would a person spend 4-5 years earning a degree only to leave their chosen profession within a year?  I tend to believe it may be because we don’t honestly prepare them for what’s to come.

I have just started my 28th year and I’ll be honest, I think more about leaving the profession than staying.  It is not the same as it used to be.  My education prepared me to sing arias in many languages, analyze scores, and compare music from a historical perspective, but the national standards had not been created yet and I think I took one class in elementary methods with an adjunct professor, and an additional class on special education.  Other than an intro to education class, that was it.  As a new teacher, I made plenty of mistakes but I loved what I was doing enough to figure out the classroom management thing.  My administrative background, something I did before getting my teaching degree, has been a godsend when it comes to all of the administrative duties I find myself doing now.

Not much has changed in terms of teacher training. These students spend a great deal of time in specific lessons, participating in ensembles, learning how to play secondary instruments, theory and history, but methods classes are unrealistic as students are teaching their peers who never behave the same way their students will.  Yes, they discuss standards, but how do they relate to the students?  Are they more than just a way to write a lesson plan and choose activities?  What we tend to say is that no degree really prepares you to teach, but I believe that we train music teachers to be musicians rather than teachers.  It’s almost as if the music gets in the way of the teaching.  I believe it’s one reason music teachers are leaving in droves.  Yes, we need to be experts in our discipline, but teaching is it’s own art form, a difficult, intricate art form, and we do students a disservice if we are not honest with them and prepare them for the difficulty to come and solutions to help them through the process.

When I mentioned the percentage of attrition, the practicum students’ eyes widened.  None of them believe they will become disenchanted in such a short time and leave the profession.  I don’t want to discourage them, but I want them to enter the profession with eyes open.  Most of my time is not spent in actual teaching.  It is spent doing paper work, planning and professional development in things that many times are unrelated to teaching music.  Paper work that will make me accountable, professional development that sometimes has very little to do with my teaching but deals with things that should be handled by professional health professionals.  I spend time in meetings that take time away from preparing for teaching in the name of communication and accountability.  This is just the nature of the beast.

This is one reason why I insist that my student teachers attend every meeting and be a part of most of the paperwork.  I want them to fully understand what they are getting into.  I was so impressed with the thoughtful questions from these practicum students, the enthusiasm to learn.  I want them to love what they do and to love and take care of children through music.  But I also want them to stick with it for a while to make a lasting impact.  That’s why I’m trying to be truthful to our future teachers.

They swarmed around me like bees in a hive.  “We missed you Mrs. Bush!””.  “Where were you Mrs. Bush?”.  I explained that I had been to New York at a conference.  “Were you learning things for us?”  Well, yes I was.  “Did you see the Eiffel Tower while you were there?” ” No silly, that’s in France”.  “Did you see the statue of Liberty?”  No not this time.  “My grandma lives in New York”.  Yes, eventually, we did start to learn some music.

With Kindergarten, it’s all about hugs and snuggles.  One little boy in particular, who calls me over every morning while he’s waiting in the gym to go to class, insists on a morning hug and one when he comes to my classroom.  Today he wanted several hugs.  I’m in the middle of playing a song for them on the piano and he walks up and asks, “can I have a hug?”  Not right now.  Later on, he pops up again and says “you smell good.  You smell like Froot Loops”.  A little girl who hugged me on the way out of my class said with a big smile, “you feel warm and fuzzy”.  I hope she was talking about my sweater and not me personally.

This is the joy of teaching children.  You never know what they’re going to say or do.  For instance, we were sitting on the floor the other day and I asked the kids to get up so we could do some movement.  One of the little boys didn’t get up so I asked him again, and he looked up at me with a slight panic on his face and said, “my finger is stuck”.  Stuck on what?  He was sitting on the floor.  So I walked over and part of his fingernail was caught in the carpet and he couldn’t move his hand without pulling the fingernail.  I asked one of the kids to get my scissors for me (one I could trust) and I got down on the floor to snip the carpet.  The little boy now looked frightened, like I was going to cut off his finger until I explained what I was doing.  With a quick snip, the panic turned to relief and I had saved the day.  It doesn’t take much to be a kid’s hero.

Even my big kids stopped me today and said they felt they hadn’t seen me in a long time. Yes, I’ve been doing some traveling lately, but I always assume they’ll enjoy my sub more than me because at the very least, it’s something new and chances are they’ll have the opportunity to hear and do something different.   And yes, so far they LOVE my sub, but I think they really missed me too.  Kind of nice actually.  Even if their behavior doesn’t always show it.

That’s the great thing about kids.  You always know where you stand.  If they miss you or are mad at you or are scared you know right away.  They share everything from lost teeth to their latest boo boo to the fact that mom is expecting a baby.  They have no problem telling you what they think of you – I was once told I looked like a big green muffin.  Still not sure how to take that one.  They ask me about my hair when I color it, ask me why, how old I am and if my husband and I kiss.  I usually answer things honestly because if they’re old enough to ask it, they’re old enough for an answer.  Of course there are those discussions they need to have with mom and dad, and I’ll send them in that direction if needed.

That’s why teaching will never really be routine because the unknown factor is the kids.  That’s also why it’s impossible to treat education like a company with our kids being a product.  Most products on an assembly line won’t tell you you smell like Froot Loops and feel soft and fuzzy.

 

It’s happened, the thing I’ve dreaded most.  I have turned into my parents.  I’ve worked so hard not to be like them and here I find myself doing those things that made me slightly crazed about them while I was growing up.  Sure, things have adjusted somewhat for the times and my personality but it’s definitely them barging into my life.

For instance, every morning of her life, at least while I lived in her house, my mother would go straight for her coffee and cigarettes.  I remember her holding her cup in one hand and the pack in the other and she would head to the couch, set her stuff on the coffee table and watch TV while she began her day.  Now, I am not the coffee and cigarette type, the reason I think it took me a while to realize I was mirroring this behavior, until I had a vivid sense memory.  Instead of the coffee and cigs, it was Diet Coke and my cell phone.  I sit on the couch and either flip on the TV or open up the laptop and begin my day.  At school it’s the same thing – Diet Coke, cell phone on the desk and laptop opened.  Even in the summer, I just switch some days to the table on the balcony.  At least it’s a change of venue.

The thought of giving up this habit causes me great consternation.  I certainly don’t want to be stuck in a habit reminiscent of my mother, but it’s Diet Coke after all.  Pretty sure I’m addicted, just like she was addicted.  Oh, the irony.  The other thing I do that makes me equally as crazed is that I make a mean dump cake.  Just like she did.  And I take it to gatherings.  Just like she did.  It’s my youngest son’s favorite dessert.  How in the world did this happen?  She took great pride in the fact that people asked her to bring this dessert to functions and I thought it was just about the silliest thing in the world to be proud about.  And yet, there I was, proud that my son asked for a dump cake for his birthday.  Arrggg!!!

Now, my dad was an interesting guy, very much a routine kind of man.  Came home from work at a certain time, sat and read the paper before dinner, ate and then headed for his favorite chair to read and or play his records.  Well let’s see here.  I’m writing this while sitting in my own special chair surrounded by my books and with my record player playing one of dad’s old records.  Of course, it’s not exactly like my dad – I have a bluetooth connection between the record player and my little Bose speaker.  But it’s my place to be by myself and regroup just like he used to.  It wasn’t until recently that I realized how much I was like him in this way.  I’ve often compared my middle son to my dad, the same temperament, the same love of books and music.  I just thought it had skipped a generation, but I’m realizing it didn’t.

Of course, these are pretty mundane behaviors and certainly not much to worry about.  I have spent years trying to eliminate, or at the very least, ignore other tendencies I’ve picked up from them.  My tendencies towards depression from my mom, my tendency to run away from conflict from my dad.  Despite my efforts, occasionally they still rear their ugly heads, just not as often.  By purposefully seeking help for the depression and stepping outside of my comfort zone to confront my fears whenever I can.  They are both struggles that I continue to deal with, but the good thing is that I recognize them and am working to better myself.

I suppose it’s a given that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but perhaps you can make a good apple pie out of it rather than let it rot on the ground.  Or maybe a good dump cake instead.

The beautifully dressed, confident, petite woman sat at the table with the interviewer, smiling and poised as she was presented with questions concerning her career.  She had wanted to have a career in the arts, but was encouraged by her mother to pursue the sciences, and so she went to college, earned a degree in Psychology and began her pre-med degree.  Realizing that she just wasn’t passionate about the direction she had chosen, she went to graduate school for theater, focusing on costume design.

Some people might think that this alone was a waste of time, but she believes it’s important to try a lot of things to see what “sticks”.  For her, it was in the arts.  At one point in her story, she talks about taking a break and being a fitness instructor for awhile.  Another odd move, but as she explains, it worked for her at that time.  How refreshing to have someone who just does what they want to do depending on what they need at the time.

I was reading that Millennials tend to change jobs often, working their way up the ladder in a more “dog-legged” manner than Baby Boomers who tended to stay in one place for a long time “paying their dues”.  Or maybe not.  I was reading another article that said if you really research baby boomers, you’ll find they moved around as much as the millennials.  In my own life I’ve done everything from fast food to clerical work before getting into teaching.  I also worked at a t-shirt screening company and attempted to sell insurance.  I was pitiful.  But after earning my degree, I felt like I should be locked in to teaching music – I had found my career.  The problem is, I’m beginning to feel that Millennial feeling again.

How many times do we let common sense get in the way of what our hearts tell us we want to do?  Sometimes our gut tells us that it’s time to try something else or take a break, but our head begins the argument, with “common sense” winning out in the end.  Well, what if the woman at the beginning of our story had stayed in med school?  What if she hadn’t obtained a grad degree in theater?  Well, we wouldn’t have had a Tony award winning costume designer for Anastasia then, would we?  I’m sure it didn’t seem very practical at the time, but look what following your passion can get you!  I’m sure if she had continued to follow her original path, she would have been a fine doctor, but would she would have been as happy?

I’ve often said that I’m more of a hummingbird – I don’t settle on just one flower but go from flower to flower.  This had been the story of my working life, up until I began teaching.  So I  abandoned my usual instincts to follow my common sense and become more mature and practical.  The problem with practicality sometimes is that you can age yourself out of doing something else later.  Personally, I’m hoping that is not the case in my life.

So, I’m trying to think like a millennial and perhaps it’s time to look for the next flower for me to land on.  I’ve been practical for far too long.  Maybe my friends and colleagues will question my sanity,  but life it too short not to pursue MORE life.

 

 

The Trinity.  The Rule of Thirds in art.  A three legged stool.  We think of life in three parts; the past, the present and the future.  It is considered the number of perfection or completion.  Strength is sometimes described as a three braided cord.  It would seem that  perhaps one is not only the loneliest number, but the weakest as well.  Then why do so many of us work so hard to be that loneliest number?

This past week I had the opportunity to attend a wonderful conference and work in several groups on different projects and activities.  While I think the world of these people, this in not always in my comfort zone as I tend to want to do things alone.  However, there were times during the week where I needed help with some of the tasks being required.  This is where collaboration came into play.  I started to see where individuals within groups would begin to share their own strengths, or shall we call them “legs”, to prop up the stool for the group to be successful.  It truly became a team effort and there was a real feeling of accomplishment at the end.  Not an ego thing, but a celebration of what we can accomplish if we work together.  There were some “Ah Ha” moments that came with this discovery.

First, I’ve professed to being a fan of collaboration for a long time.  After all, what is an ensemble if not a group of people collaborating?  But are we really?  If we have a “director” standing in the front of the room telling everyone what to do, are the members of the ensemble actually collaborating?  Collaborating is, of course, working together, but is specifically to produce or create something.  If a director is telling the players what to do, where is the creation?

The problem with depending on only one director is that you’re having to depend on an imperfect person.  No one person is good at everything.  And while they have been trained in all of the intricacies of music, they may not have the necessary personal  experience to bring a certain emotion or meaning to the piece.  For so many directors, it becomes a misogynistic endeavor.  It’s MY group, it’s MY program.  You can live and die by that philosophy.  Having someone to collaborate with could eliminate the pressure of everyone’s success depending on you or their demise being all your fault.

How about those who isolate either by choice or circumstances?  They have no one to lean on because they are either the only musician in the building or maybe they are the entire music department in a small district or community.  I’ll be honest, I tend to isolate by choice, so yes, I try to be that one legged stool.  I like doing things my way in a control freak kind of way and I hate asking for help, but the consequence is that on occasion, I can’t keep the stool balanced and it falls over.

Of course, teaching is not the only one legged stool we try to balance.  Families are juggling kids and activities, spouses, jobs, emotions, stress, finances, and the list goes on.  Even if you are lucky enough to have a two legged stool with two parents, it is still not that strong three braided cord I related to earlier.  Asking for help from friends, neighbors, our church, and trained professionals  is seen as a sign of weakness and then we wonder why we see more and more kids and adults struggling with depression and other forms of mental illness.  The balance comes when we either add that third leg to the stool or stop chopping the legs off in an attempt to do everything ourselves.  The balance comes when we let people know we need help, that we need to collaborate, that we need to join our strengths in order to make things work.

This week, three people who are an integral part of hosting the conference I attended referred to themselves as that three legged stool.  It wasn’t as though the conference went off without a hitch – you could tell when something didn’t go just as planned, but because they had each other, they were able to join forces and figure it out together.  And as always, it was a marvelous, life infusing experience.

Even in my old age, I’m still learning.  Still learning to say no to doing too many things, admitting I don’t know everything and not trying to hide it, and that once in a while, I need to ask for help to balance the stool so that it doesn’t fall down.

Just spent the last four days at a whirlwind of a conference at the Metropolitan Opera.  Spent time listening to people from Yale and Juilliard , a Tony award winner, a broadway producer and learned to beat box.  When asked today, at the end of the conference, what was one thing that I was going to take away from the conference, it was very simple.  Move the trash can.

Think about those things in your life that are predictable, like where you keep your trash can.  Mine is under my kitchen sink.  It’s like always sitting in the same pew every Sunday or going the same route to work every day.  Things that eventually become mindless.  I do that in my classroom a lot; the room is arranged the same, I use the same posters on the walls from year to year, the routines are the same.  Organization is a great thing but when things get too safe and too predictable, creativity can disappear.

As this past week went on, I began to notice little habits that formed even during that short time at the conference.  Like always walking to the same stall and sink in the bathroom.  Eating at the same restaurant because I know what to expect.  There were activities that I stepped into comfortably, some that were similar to things I had done before in past years or tasks that were in my wheel house, like writing new lyrics to an aria based on a theme.  However, when something out of my comfort zone would pop up like sewing or helping to create artwork for a comic strip, I found myself stepping away and allowing others to take over.  My trash can had been moved and I found myself not knowing what to do, so I would avoid.

But how does this affect my students then?  If, for instance, I am afraid of improvisation because it’s not in my comfort zone, then how can I possibly help them to get over any trepidation they might have?  For a person like me, who always has to have everything prepared and in place, this type of exercise can be very frustrating.  I just want someone to tell me what to do rather than just experiment and figure it out myself.  How can I expect them to try if I’m not able to model it myself?

Making music is a collaborative effort of course.  Perhaps I need to step out of the teacher role and we all need to be students together.  Right now I have class of sophomore practicum students who come to join us for a class each week.  I have no problem getting those college students and 5th graders involved in activities together, but I tend to just stand around and facilitate.  I’ve been told that that is what good teachers do.  But it’s difficult to facilitate effectively if you’ve not at least tried the activity yourself.

So, what to do?  Move the trash cans in my life.  Look around me for the predictable and make a change.  It doesn’t need to be change just for change sake, but really being mindful and making decisions to change or adjust those things in my life that I perform mindlessly.  How much of my life do I miss because I just drift from one mindless activity to another?  The same foods, the same restaurants, the same place on the couch, the same place on the bed.  There is comfort knowing what to expect but life can also lose its zing that way.  Where is the line between comfort and escapism?  It’s a daily, sometimes hourly struggle.

So, of all the intellectual discussions and activities I experienced this week, the thing I remember is to move the trash can.  Pretty sure this simple message can be the impetus  for big changes in my life, and maybe for others as well.  We’ll see how many trash cans I can move in the days to come.

 

Day two of the Metropolitan Opera Conference experience began with a bang.  Literally.  But before that, as I tend to check my email when I wake up, I received an email from one of my practicum students who was presenting today at school with a request to project something for her lesson.  I’m obviously not there, so I attempt to open the document on my phone which looks like some kind of secret code for James Bond.  I try again with the same result.  This means starting up the laptop, which was NOT part of the schedule this morning, and of course, I can’t connect to the WiFi because, well, it’s me and it’s going to be one of those mornings.  After discovering that New York has a free WiFi you can connect to (since the hotel’s wasn’t working), I successfully sent her document to both my sub and her supervisor.  I’m running a bit behind now, but I’ll just kick into overdrive and get ready faster.

Except for the shower.  The shower is one of those wonderful rain showers with a detachable hand sprayer, which is where all the water was coming from.  So, a few minutes to figure out how to shift the water into my now shortened time frame and off we go.  Everything was set out the night before, so I’m cooking now.  Until I plug in the hair dryer.  It had been left “on” so when I plugged it in, it started immediately.  That was ok until the CRACK, CRACK, POP, POP  and the lovely burning smell that emanated from the now dead hair dryer.  Now we’re improvising.  I’m not going to work at the Met this morning with wet hair, so what to do?  Call housekeeping, telling them you’re supposed to leave to go to the Met in 15 minutes and you need a new hair dryer now – please.  I then proceeded to do anything I needed to do while waiting for it to arrive.  Thirteen minutes later, I text my colleague and tell her the dilemma and ask can I use your hair dryer?  She arrived a few minutes before housekeeping, so now I had two hairdryers.  I did learn that curling irons don’t do much good drying your hair by the way.

We dash over the Met just in time to get through security and now I can relax. It’s the same routine I’ve seen now for years, we walk through the golden gates, down to breakfast, past the man vacuuming the red carpet, which is also up the walls, so does he vacuum that too I wonder, and watch through the door leading to the house where workmen are changing out the sets for tonight’s opera. All relaxing and familiar until we begin to talk about improv and beat boxing.  Yes, you heard that right, we were beat boxing at the Met.  Crazy stuff.  Oh, and did I mention the speaker we had this morning went to school with Lin-Manuel Miranda and just happened to produce In the  Heights – a little show on Broadway a few years ago.  Improv and rap seem to be one of his things and although scary, it was fun.  AND we’re going to learn how to do stop animation AND we got to play games, rewrite lyrics to an aria and perform them in a group, cut and paste and all kinds of things. All in the name of getting kids excited about opera.  All to help us understand how our kids might feel when we ask them to do some of these things in our classrooms.  Learning to have empathy.  It’s powerful stuff.

Lunch arrived at 1:45 (I’m used to eating at 11:45) and we scarfed it down before walking across the street to Juilliard.  Sure, like just anyone gets to go to Juilliard and study anything.  Yes, I know how lucky I am.  And here I got to learn about La Traviata and hear an interview with the woman who is the executive stage director at the Met.  Fascinating work this woman does.  Everyday stuff.

So, nine hours after we began our day, we were “released into the wild” where we grabbed dinner at a VERY loud restaurant with great food and then took the subway to Times Square to see the show Dear Evan Hansen.  Sometimes when life gets busy, you forget just how good music and theater can be.  I’m still processing what I saw and heard.  Nothing better than sharing an experience like that with a good friend and colleague as well.  We opted to take a brisk walk back to the hotel on a beautiful evening, where the smell of garbage and pot wafted through the air (it IS New York after all) and where we were surrounded by a kaleidoscope of people speaking different languages, dressed in different ways, of every ethnicity, culture – you name it – all of them dodging cars and each others on the streets of New York.  I’ve said it before – it’s an amazing place.

And now it’s time to crash for another day in the life tomorrow – more learning, more new experiences, more great music.  Can it get any better than this?