Use A Journal To Remember Forward (3/1/2022)

Use A Journal To Remember Forward

Ed Dumas

When I entered university to prepare for becoming a music teacher, the intake interviewer asked me why I thought I would make a good music teacher. That was something that I had not thought about up to that point and I needed a moment to think. After pondering it briefly, I tried to put together some kind of coherent answer. I knew that I did not have superior musical skills, so I settled on saying that I believed I had superior organizational skills, and I felt that this would serve me well for many years down the road.

I watched quietly for a few moments as the interviewer jotted down some notes about my response. Still feeling insecure in my youth, and needing some kind of feedback, I asked if my answer was adequate. The response I have never forgotten. The interviewer stated that organization is the guts of teaching, and very few people get that as the most important answer for a music teacher. Looking backwards now, I can tell you from experience that everything else in music education can be learned IF you are organized in your teaching and learning world. Without organization skills, it will always be kind of hit and miss.

Now I have met some truly remarkable music teachers across our province over the years. I have recognized and borrowed great ideas from most of them, which is a good indication of how great these teachers were and are. But here is an idea that I found valuable that I have not seen others use, or at least did not share with me. You may find this useful in your career.

I found that I needed to be able to “organize” my past as a music teacher, to change the future. There were often just too many changes required all at once that I was unable to remember all that happened when the annual cycle repeated itself.

Early in my career, I was doing an Itinerant Elementary Band job in my school district. I was the only one in the district doing this job, and I was servicing 10 different elementary schools across the district. It required great organization skills to make this happen which was all fine and good. Yet, I quickly recognized that there were just far too many challenges and things that needed changing for each successive year. I felt I could not depend on a fallible memory to keep them in mind when the annual cycle began once again.

A sidebar here on the annual cycle of being a music teacher. June is the month when the cycle begins anew, as the planning for next year MUST begin well before the current year is completed. As music teachers are in the process of winding up the current year with June concerts and grad ceremonies, the organizational requirements for next year impose themselves and cannot be delayed. These requirements include, among many others, things like creating next years’ weekly teaching schedule in multiple schools and the year-long calendar of events in the music program.

I found then, that my fallible human memory was not serving me well in planning forward through the next cycle. The human memory has a trick of remembering the good better than the bad. This is a natural human way of surviving bad times but would not serve well in planning to avoid a repetition of unwanted events. So, I had to find a way to remember all the many events and ideas as they were happening, to bring them up again in the planning for the following year.

The solution was a journal to record all of the events and happenings of a busy schedule, and I offer this to you as something that can improve your teaching practice as well. Use a journal to record the events of your program in real-time as they happen. Make a note of how outcomes either met your goals, or did not meet your goals, and how you can change your practice for future years to better meet those outcomes. What worked, what didn’t work, and why it didn’t work is basically what you are trying to record.

Now when I mention journaling, I think many folks think about something more akin to what is often used in language arts studies. These are often an exploration of personal feelings and responses to others’ actions, and that is again all well and good. Here, though, I am not suggesting writing an inner exploration for a journal, but you are welcome to do that if you choose.

I am suggesting that one should record necessary changes in your program as you see them occurring, to remember them later when the planning cycle begins anew. When you see a better way of handling how something is organized, it needs to be written down before it is forgotten. Handwriting is fine for this journal, too, but you might want to consider a computer for this task.

For example, one of the big changes I developed in my program came from the annual frustration of the startup of the elementary band classes I was teaching. This startup frustration I would experience approximately 5 times per day in the first weeks of September. The frustration felt by me and all of my students at the time was that they needed WAY more information to get started on their band instrument than what I, or anyone, could provide in that first 45-minute lesson on their instrument.

At the time, there were usually at least 25 students in every beginning band class, on about 7 wildly different instruments including flute, clarinet, sax, trumpet, trombone, euphonium, and percussion. In the first lesson, all of the students needed to know how to safely take the instrument out of the case, assemble & prep it, learn how to hold it, how to form the embouchure, how to breathe, make the first sound, disassemble it, clean it, and put it back in the case.

All of these tasks were to be completed on 7 different instruments in 45 minutes! This is a chore that just seemed designed to push music teachers into driving a truck for a living, and I was doing it at least 5 times per day for what seemed like an eternity. I am sure it was only a week or two each year, but it was something that needed to change for my longevity.

The journal helped me realize that the task of the first lessons on the instrument MUST come out of the timetable, if only very briefly. When the annual cycle had me re-reading my journal in June and remembering the challenges of beginning students in September, I began to formulate a solution that served me well for many years.

That solution came in the last week of August when I ran a summer music camp just for beginners. We rented community facilities and had interested students attend for 2 ½ hours per day for 5 days in the last week of August. These students paid a small fee for the camp, which was used to pay for instrumental clinicians to come out on the first day and the fourth day. Now the instrument specialists each had only 1 group of instrumentalists and were given 2 ½ hours to show the students all the same first lesson tasks - how to safely take the instrument out of the case, assemble & prep it, learn how to hold it, how to form the embouchure, how to breathe, make the first sound, disassemble it, clean it, and put it back in the case.

On the next two days, I would take all of the students together again to teach them the common things of beginning in the band, such as reading music, following the conductor and so on. On the fourth day, the clinicians would return to reinforce more instrument-specific learning. On the fifth day, the parents would come in about 20 minutes early before the end of the class so that we could show them what we have accomplished this week, and what parents can do to help at home.

Now I am sure you are thinking that I could not get all of the beginners from every one of my elementary band classes to attend because it was in the summer. That is true! But, I also knew that I did not need to. I could now use those experienced students to teach any students who could not make it to the summer camp all of the first lesson tasks. This quick “catch-up” lesson for those who could not make the camp was certainly not as good as actually being at the camp, but it was better than what I could give them on my own in the normal crazy startup lesson of 25+ students on 6+ instruments in 45 minutes!

The program worked so well, that it developed another problem for my journaling to solve. That is, it became too successful with too many students! When the last week of August camp began pushing the numbers well above 50, I found I needed to provide another option, and that turned out to be the first week of June. Students now could choose either one, and this added a layer of flexibility that allowed even more students to attend.

Now you might think that adding these two weeks in the summer would lead to teacher burnout. I found that since my stress over the startup was so much lower the benefit of lower stress balanced out the added weeks. The bonus was that all of the clinicians were paid equally for a session’s work, including me. The retention amongst the band students was also much higher year upon year, as these students were also far less stressed in their learning of the new instrument. By the second week of school, we were well into the normal routines of playing in a band class, and the students were more able to have fun playing.

Now I am not trying to encourage you to create a summer music camp, though feel free to use this idea if you like it. Rather, I am trying to illustrate that forward journaling can help find solutions to problems at the critical time, which is the planning stage of the next annual cycle. In May or June, take out that journal that you have been making comments into all year long, and read through all of the entries for the last year. Make another shortlist of all the changes that you must do when you are planning the following years’ events for your music program.

Did you remember to book a PA system rental in advance this time for that outdoor concert you do each year? Or, did you remember to consult with all of the stakeholders this time when planning your school concerts for next year? Or, did you remember to consult the bus company in June for the trip to the music festival next spring so that there would be no surprises with lack of availability?

When these events are happening in real-time, stress can be a significant issue for music teachers. When things go wrong simply because you did not know, stress can be quite harmful. But when it happens again in the same way because you forgot what happened last time, you can feel double the stress. You feel the stress once because the event is not happening smoothly, and twice because you did not learn from the last cycle! Use a journal to remember forward, and reduce your stress by controlling the variables as much as possible and making your students’ and parents’ lives better at the same time.