The Music Teacher's First Year: Tales of Challenge, Joy and Triumph

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Preface

Every year around April, during the public schools’ spring break week, many graduates return to our college halls as first-year teachers. They’ve made it through almost eight months of teaching and they are eager to share their stories, triumphs, and challenges with their music education professors and the current students in the program. New teachers have so much to share, and as a professor of music education methods, I have observed repeatedly that current undergraduates eagerly want to listen. It struck me that music education students could benefit greatly from the stories of those new to the field, because their lessons learned are most fresh.

This book is a collection of those stories, from real people who teach music to children every day. In researching this book, I spoke with more than fifty young teachers, via a New Teacher Story Booth that I set up at two different music education conventions. There, I actively recruited young teachers to talk to me. Most of the featured participants have taught for less than six years and all of the participants vividly recalled aspects of their first year of teaching. I interviewed each teacher for about thirty minutes, asking questions pertaining to the new teacher experience.

Before this project began, my research indicated that new music teachers struggle most with curriculum or music selection, classroom management, and relationships with other older adults (parents, guardians, other teachers, and administrators). Those topics made up the core questions asked at each interview, but I also asked teachers to share their most memorable moment, provide advice to future new teachers, and describe the first concert and the first day of teaching.

Each story or chapter in the book is told in the voice of the new teacher. As a result, the narrative is informal. My hope is that the reader will get to know each teacher’s personality, hear each voice, and learn from each challenge, struggle, and triumph. I did change names and did not provide specific school locations, however, as I wanted each teacher to feel free to share their stories openly and with candor.

Interestingly, most of the teachers in this collection did not struggle with musical or pedagogical aspects of their teaching. They unanimously reported that they were well prepared to teach music. They did struggle with organization, scheduling, support, personal stress, self doubt, music selection, and musical culture. Many of the young teachers said that college taught them how to be musical and how to teach in a best situation, but college course work did not prepare them for how to build a music program.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the teachers who were willing to share their thoughts and experiences with me. They have contributed to our profession by offering their advice to both future teachers and music education professors who might not have taught in the public schools for many years. The teachers who willingly spent a half hour with me sharing their stories were sometimes sad and sometimes frustrated about their teaching, but they were all very fulfilled professionally. Many of the teachers did feel challenged, but they could see the positive aspects of their jobs. As one young teacher said, I love going to work every day. At the time of publication, to my knowledge, all but one of the teachers in this collection are still teaching music.

While I teach at a college that encourages me to actively engage with public school musicians by teaching and collaborating with the public schools, it has been many years since I was a high school band director. The opportunity to record the experiences of these young teachers has given me new perspective and a better appreciation for what it is really like to be a music teacher in a variety of settings. Several of these first-year teachers wished they had had more opportunities to discuss the many different school settings and challenges they have encountered. Several teachers said that time for reflection and peer discussion during pre-service teaching would have helped them to be successful sooner. While certain topics about teaching are site specific, the purpose of this book is to better prepare young teachers for the situations that they might face in the real world.

At the end of each chapter or interview, I have included a few discussion questions. These questions can be used in a methods course format, but they can also be food for thought for individual teachers who may read this book. One undergraduate student who participated in a discussion using an early draft of this book said,

This discussion could go on for half an hour or more. Things like this could spark a class discussion lasting the whole class period. This was a great exercise. Having information from a real first-year teacher directly applies to me, so I’m interested and I’ll actually use it. Thank you.

Another pre-service teacher wrote, It’s nice to read stories like this, without textbook-type synthesis provided. It’s something we don’t get to do in other classes and it really adds humanity to the experience of teaching.

So much of the first year depends on one’s ability to solve problems, be proactive, and remain positive while not making huge changes immediately. As the teachers in this book tell us, the first year is a challenge, but overall, it is worth all the struggle to see a young person find success in music.

1.

That Is Not What They Told Me at the Interview!

John currently teaches band at a high school in Brooklyn, and he has been very successful. He started his interview by describing his first-year teaching experience, which was in the North Bronx, where he taught sixth- through eighth-grade general music in a difficult school setting. About the North Bronx school community, he said,

The students are almost entirely from the projects—very, very low income neighborhood. The school is the second to the last stop on the 5 train, adjacent to New York City’s largest housing project—a very impoverished school community, and I was there for one year.

John described the position as very different from his initial expectations. I was brought in under the assumption that I was going to be starting a band, but that was not really the case. John said he was given an overwhelming number of sixth-grade general music sections, along with several sections of Academic Intervention Services (or AIS students). When John started, he did not know what AIS even stood for, let alone how to teach it.

I had four periods a week of AIS. I was just told to do it on the first day—that’s it. They never told me what it was. So I just taught the AIS students the same music curriculum that I was teaching everyone else, which, needless to say, was nonexistent.

While John’s administration knew that his area of expertise was as a band director (he was a trombone major in college), he felt that his interviewers were so eager to fill the position that they may have misrepresented the job. I was brought into the interview and I was shown a room full of instruments, he said. It was a little messy, but they made it sound like they wanted me to start a band. John was excited that the school already owned many instruments and that they seemed interested in instrumental music. When school began in the fall, however, he discovered that he was really a full-time general music teacher, and he was also dismayed to learn about the future of his band program. On my first day of teaching I went to that music room to start cleaning the instruments, taking inventory, and every single case was empty, he said. There was not a single thing left; they all had been stolen over the years by God knows who. John began the year without a single instrument, but he was persistent and creative in his programming, not willing to give up on the band he thought he was employed to initiate. He started a drumming program and found funding through an After-School Beacon Grant program. He never did get enough instruments to start a real band, but he made a positive contribution to the program. John said, I did get about eight trumpets and a couple of trombones and a few saxophones, but that was not enough to meet the needs of something like 300 students a week.

John learned about flexibility, creativity, and adaptability during his first year. He also learned a little about himself and his true interests as a teacher. He was trained to be a band director and wanted a job where he could gain experience instrumentally. He said,

I learned that I wasn’t ready to start a band in the first year. There are some situations that you get put in that may actually be unwinnable. As much as we like to believe with the right education and the right training and the right drive and effort you can do anything, it is not always true—and not right away. I mean, maybe if I stayed there for six years, I might have had a band by now, but it just wasn’t something that I was willing to do at that point in my career.

John wasn’t entirely convinced after this first year that urban teaching was right for him; he looked for a new position and found a job in Brooklyn, where he continues to teach and is very happy. I walked into a program that at the time had two bands, and the support was much greater. John has been able to develop this program by adding a beginning band for high school students. He is able to do much more as a band director now, and he has confirmed a solid philosophy of teaching music.

I’m all about aesthetic education, literature selection, and teaching the students to have an aesthetic experience in every rehearsal, rather than drilling notes and scales. I want each student to be able to enjoy and express themselves through their instrument.

He indicated that teaching students in an urban setting is not a lot different than teaching students anywhere. He talked about setting high expectations and teaching music for music’s sake—an aesthetic approach. He also discussed his experimentation with different rehearsal techniques:

I thought I would go down the line and hear them play individually. It completely backfired. The ensemble shut down. It didn’t work. I found that the only way you achieve discipline in a setting with students from an urban background is through the musical and aesthetic experience.

Sometimes people will say you can’t do that and that doesn’t work in the real world, but so many teachers are not actually in the real world and they’re only able to get away with their bad teaching because they’re in such good districts. I find that you don’t get away with that in the urban schools. The kids will shut down. They won’t respond to it. It’s not worth their time. They have enough other drama in their lives that they are dealing with. If you’re willing to go in and you’re willing to work and just have the same high standards for them that you would have for the kids in the suburbs, you will be successful. A good director from the city is the same as a good director from the suburbs. You have to be willing to be flexible for a couple of years and maybe teach a couple periods of gym when you first get there, and you have to be able to advocate. It’s not so much advocating to parents in the community; you have to be able to work with administrators. Often, you have to know how to work with incompetent administrators; you have to show them how you can make their life easier, and then you get what you want.

In John’s limited experience, he felt that some administrators were so overwhelmed with the amount of responsibilities in their own job that creating or maintaining a viable band was relatively low on their list of priorities.

The most important thing is that you just go do it, John said. The reason a lot of the city band programs fail is that they have crappy directors. The city doesn’t really make a distinction of who they hire. They see that you are certified eighth-twelfth music and they’ll hire you. John believed that his current school administration was very supportive and involved. Administrative support was necessary in order for him to raise money and receive grants for instrument purchases, but that support meant that they were sometimes very hands-on. The administration’s hands-on approach is at times negative, but at the same time I would much rather have that than the apathetic administration that I had with my first program, he said.

Another of John’s big lessons was in classroom management. When he taught in the Bronx, he had many students with undiagnosed severe behavioral disorders. He said,

My first year teaching, I was breaking up a fight— which was almost a daily occurrence— and I was punched in the face by a student. I was not given any support by the administration. In fact, I was told that if I wasn’t really hurt I did not need to file a report. Many city administrators are under pressure and receive pay bonuses based on whether or not they get their school’s incident rates to go down. So the easiest way to do that is to not report them.

When asked how he handled management in his own rehearsals, he said,

It was difficult. I used the point system. I would work with their classroom teacher, who would see them more. It was hard to have authority over students that you only saw once a week or twice a week, especially when my classroom was by the cafeteria and it was completely isolated from the assistant dean and the rest of the school. Students were basically allowed to run through my room on their way to a scheduled fight. I had a lot of issues with all of it. You had to roll with it, I realized, to avoid confrontation. I’m not saying avoid correcting bad behavior, but students were seeking confrontation. When I didn’t pick my battles, I learned I was providing them with attention that they were seeking and you don’t reward that. You give attention to positive behavior. Eventually, I learned to modify their behavior by keeping them busy. For instance, I would find a student who looked like he was about to give me a problem and I would ask him to take attendance or hand out the drums. I learned to give them responsibilities—so I found ways to give them attention for positive things that they could do.

John said things are easier now because he has established a reputation. His professionalism and consistency as a role model has helped:

I wear a tie every day. I stand in the hallway and every time I see a kid wearing a hat, I ask them to take it off. I enforce the school rules to the ‘T.’ I had to establish an atmosphere. For instance, rehearsals always start three minutes after the bell, allowing them time to get instruments and music. I walk to the podium and there’s silence. If you are not at your seat, you’re in trouble.

John said that he tried many different things to establish this atmosphere, including making students stand behind him for the entire rehearsal if they arrived late. He did not care why they were late and did not allow for any excuses. Sometimes he made them play their parts for the ensemble if they were late. He said, smiling, Then, there were some students who enjoyed standing behind me, so that was bad. Some trombone players liked it, for some reason, but for the most part they got the point.

John said that he tells students what the expectations are on day 1. He lets them know that he won’t tolerate negative attitudes or mediocrity. He knows some kids will quit and he almost apologized for that philosophy, but in his heart, he knows that his high expectations are best for those who want to make music and be part of this program. What’s nice with my program is that I have complete control over my enrollment, he said, but he added that some would disagree:

I told the students on the first day that if this is ever too hard for them or if they are unable to accept my policies, the door is right there. I know it is a little bit of tough love but at the same time, I started about one hundred ninth grade beginners this year and we are down to eighty-three right away because seventeen had to quit. The only requirement to be in my band is that they are expected to come five periods a week. I sit them all down and tell them this at the beginning. They have to give up their lunch to take it, plus two days a week after school. I don’t give aptitude tests. Students are expected to be at a minimum of five practice sessions a week with a journal entry for each one, and that is the basis for their grade. Every time they miss a practice session, it’s a minus two on their average. I basically explain to them how hard it’s going to be and if that doesn’t scare them away, if they want to do this, and if they can give me their word that they will keep trying even when it gets hard, then they can be in my program.

This tough love approach seems to work well for John. However, he also believes one of the main reasons his students stick with band is for the friendship:

This is the only disciplined environment many of them are in, in their entire lives. They enjoy the sense of camaraderie. There are two high schools in my building and it is interesting; one of the high schools has a very good reputation and one of the high schools is on the verge of being shut down. Students from both schools come together to be in the band. Most of the freshmen are from the school that is about to be closed, so for those students, band is the only disciplined, organized, coached environment in their entire lives. Their math class involves students throwing stuff at the teacher. Their home environment may consist of housing projects, where they are sharing a bedroom with four of five other siblings, or they might live in a group home. Band is a great experience for them. I told them and I promised myself that I would have the best band program in New York City.

John was asked if he could identify one aspect of his teaching style that has changed or evolved during his first few years of teaching in New York City. He said,

That’s hard to explain because it is sort of like watching a tree grow. You know it gets bigger, but it’s your tree so it is hard to notice. I’ve made many little changes, but one thing: I find I raise my voice less. I’m able to instill discipline more constructively. I’m more in control of myself and my program, and I think that affects the ensembles. I realize that most ensembles are actually a mirror of the director—a direct reflection of someone’s personality and attitude. Your students will behave the way you behave. Your students will value what you value . . .

John got quiet for a moment. Then he said, as he was still considering the question about his own evolution as a teacher, "That’s a tough question.