I was told that I would be able to have a classroom when I moved to the Intermediate School. It was a new building and they had built a beautiful new music room with ledger lines on the white board, a built in sound system, and shelving large enough to hold musical instruments. As the summer went along and class sizes grew, the music room was moved to a different classroom. Finally, the week before school started, I got a call from my new principal stating that I would have music on the stage. No one was allowed into the new building until four days before school started due to the new construction. I walked into the building with low expectations but when I saw my “room”, even those were not met. There were building materials everywhere. They had, evidently, been using the stage as a “catch all” for books and other lost items. I had no shelving for any of my instruments or books. It was a mess. I spent most of that first day walking around the stage like a zombie. I couldn’t figure out how to create a music room out of the rubble. I was pretty useless that day.
I came in the next day and the mess was still there but I knew that I had to somehow get it set up. My principal had found me a mobile white board. I unpacked the box that housed the white board markers and wrote on the board—“Make it work!” After a few hours, I began to see a glimmer of a music room forming. It could have been so easy to get stuck in the unfairness of the situation. However, that wouldn’t have changed anything and I would not have been ready for the start of school. Was I happy with the situation? No, but I didn’t let myself become crippled by it, either.
Kelly,
ReplyDeleteI really admire how you can take a horrible situation and turn it into a positive one. To have such high expectations of what you would be getting and then to have it all of sudden yanked away, would be bad enough. But then to have things crippled further would be devastating to anyone. But you are right giving up or complaining how unfortunate the situation would have not accomplished anything. You thought of your students and made the situation work to your advantage. Not many people would have been able to think positively in this situation. Honestly, I do not know how I would have handled it. This turned out to be a lesson for you and one that you could share with your students. As teachers we constantly tell our students to make lemonade out of lemons, but do we ever show them. This is a great example of your lemonade. Sure it’s not the ideal music classroom, but I’m sure there are people who have it a lot worse. At least you are still teaching music and there is music in your school. Too often in life we get so weighted down with the things that we can’t control that we do not work on all the things we can control. Life isn’t fair, that’s what everyone says, but why complain about it when we all know it’s true. As you said “Make it work!”
Is that the stage in the picture? Are you still on the stage or did they find you a new home? At least it looks like you have a fairly large space available to you.
Alicia,
ReplyDeleteI am still on the stage. There was a moment, though brief, where I was told that I would have the music room back next year. I've since been told that I will be back on the stage. Who knows what will happen? Things are changing daily in my district.
The main problem that I have right now with the room is that, although there is a partition, the stage opens up to the cafeteria. Two of my classes are forced to listen to the cafeteria noise as we have class. The stage is also the home for the band instrument cages. Kids come in during the last ten minutes of my class to get their instruments. Most of them are pretty good about coming in quietly, though.
To quote "The Art of Possibility" that is just "the way things are."