The spring brings many new things to us in the teaching profession. It is an end to hallways that smell like winter boots and the request of help from the students in our class who have lost their mittens for the tenth time this year. Spring also brings the new teaching assignment. As is practice for many schools, teachers wait for their principal to meet with them at this time of year to assign the new package for the upcoming school year.

Four years ago when I was teaching a grade 2/3 split my principal came to me with what seemed like a crazy idea for me to team teach music with the other music teacher in the school. I understood why she asked, I had done some extracurricular work co-leading some students in drumming so it seemed like a good fit. Although I was very cheery when I responded to my principal and told her that this assignment “sounded great” when I got home I freaked out. I had no formal music training and I was going to be team teaching with someone who was a professional oboe player before she became a teacher. I didn’t know how to read music. I knew how to find a good groove on the drums but that was it. I literally went ahhhhhhhhh every time I thought about this assignment for the next few days.

After I calmed myself, I met with my new co-teaching partner. She was very keen and nice to me in that initial meeting but I am positive she knew I had very little formal training in music. I grew up in a maritime house where kitchen parties and dancing around the house was the norm. I heard Patsy Cline at 6:00 AM every Saturday morning throughout my entire childhood as my parents sang and cleaned the house. I love music but I had never taken any kind of formal music lesson. However, I wanted to do well at this assignment so after some reflection, I signed up for piano lessons. Yes, it felt funny to be sitting in the waiting room with a bunch of children but the teacher that I had was great and in no time at all I was reading music and playing the piano.

I continued with piano lessons and then theory lessons and every single music workshop that I could get me hands on until I had improved my knowledge base significantly. What initially drove me to go to these lessons was that I felt my students really deserved a teacher who was knowledgeable and committed to doing the best that they could to facilitate learning. What I didn’t expect was how much I ended up loving the piano and the music it creates and will probably continue to study it for a very long time. I also discovered that I love spending a good chuck of every summer ‘geeking out’ studying music theory.

So as you get your assignment this spring, and it may feel unexpected and like a strange fit. You never know, it might be the best thing that ever happened. I have no intention of leaving the arts department at my school anytime soon. Who would have thought it four years ago that when my principal gave me this crazy assignment that it possibly would be a long term career path.

However, if this spring you get the worst teaching assignment you could have ever imagined, then there is always hope for next spring when the new assignment will come again.

 

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