We had a wonderful staff development day at Burks - maybe one of the best I have been to yet. Our brilliant principals started off the day tugging on our heart-strings (and especially mine) by showing a couple of clips from Mr. Holland's Opus. It's only my favorite inspirational movie of all time (runners up include Sister Act 1 and 2, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins). I have never watched that movie without crying, and now that I'm in my fourth year of teaching music and have watched dear friends get cut due to budgets it just hits me even harder. Thanks for the sob fest, Pam and Garry! You definitely know how to get my attention! :)
Gets me every time.
We also revisited and reaffirmed our belief statements and mission statement that we wrote for our school two years ago. It is very nice to see that those statements are still true and speak to what we believe as a staff, and what I personally believe as a teacher. Afterwards, we discussed what it looks like to live out those beliefs in our classrooms with our students. We were challenged to create our own set of "I will . . ." statements and post them outside our doors. These will serve as reminders to us and allow students, parents, and staff to hold us accountable. I wanted to share mine here.
Music is mathematical. It is rhythmically based of the subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.
Music is a foreign language. Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not English, but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.
Music is history. Music usually reflects the environment and times of its creation, often even the country and/or racial feeling.
Music is physical education. It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, cheek and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of diaphragmatic, back, stomach, and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.
Music is all of these things, but most of all, music is art. It allows a human being to take all of these dry, technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing science cannot duplicate; humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.
That is why we teach music. Not because we expect our students to major in music, Not because we expect them to play or sing all their life, Not so they can relax, Not so they can have fun, But so they will be human, So they will recognize beauty, So they will be sensitive, So they will be closer to an infinite beyond this world, So they will have something to cling to, So they will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good, in short, more life. Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live? That is why we teach music.
Hi there! I'm Melanie Stewart and I am an elementary music and Kindermusik teacher in Denton, Texas. I absolutely love my work and cannot think of a better job for me than sharing the joy that music can bring with young students. My husband, Brandon, is a musician too, and is the Adjunct Professor of Horn at Southeastern Oklahoma State and Austin College. We live in Providence Village, Texas with our beautiful little girl, Ella Elizabeth and a big fuzzy shitzhu puppy named Gizmo.
