I really should be practicing Aura Lee right now—or Merrily We Roll Along.
I will soon be marching on stage, balancing my sheet music on the stand, wetting my reed, and playing the clarinet in front of parents, school board members, students, even the superintendent.
How exactly did I get myself into this mess?
It all started with a simple email.
Pull out your instruments, Teachers, and join our Beginning Band students in their October concert….
I once played some seriously uncoordinated piano for a few long years back in elementary school. My musical career never exactly blossomed; I retired young.
I do not exactly have umpteen hours of free time, but I emailed back:
I’d like to learn the clarinet and play along with the students.
I’d like to do what?!
My fifth-grade son, Max, began playing clarinet in August at his school. I envisioned the ideal mom-son bonding moments, tooting our horns together before bedtime, playing Mary Had a Little Lamb duets. It all seemed so idyllic.
The next morning, I knocked on the band teacher’s door. She handed me a clarinet and some music and wished me luck.
There have been many bumps in the four-week transformation from Regular Me into Soon-to-Be Concert Clarinetist Me.
Max proudly showed me the ropes. This is how you arrange your fingers for a C. Forget that it’s not part of your required song list, this is how you play a really cool one—Another One Bites the Dust. (“Have you heard of that one, Mommy?”) This is what you do at the concert. (“If you squeak, just look to your left and to your right at the other clarinet players, and everyone will think it was someone else.”)
In a particular I-just-don’t-have-enough-time-at-night-to-practice frenzy, I even brought the horn to class one day, practicing scales while students revised their writing. They smiled at Crazy Ms. Baker disturbing their work time.
“Ms. Baker. I didn’t know you played the clarinet!”
Umm, I don’t?
“I’m a beginner,” I smiled, stating the obvious.
This past month has reminded me that it has been far too long since I have struggled, really struggled to learn something new.
When was the last time I fretted about stumbling through a test or a performance? Or the last time that I worried about forgetting everything that I had studied, everything that I believed I knew?
More than ever, I have been thinking about students who struggle to write or to speak, who dread being called on to read because they are not fluent, and because their peers are right there, listening to their “squeaks.”
I have been thinking about how students cannot just pull out their “clarinet” in the middle of another class and start practicing. But what if their week has, in fact, been too busy, or too loud, or too something, to carve out homework time?
I have been thinking about ways to help students see the power and beauty in “learning a new instrument,” in giggling at their mess-ups, in not giving up.
I have been thinking about how imperative it is for students to see their teachers as learners, for us to be brave enough to let them hear our “squeaks,” even, at times, to evaluate our performance.
And I have been thinking about the importance of having patient teachers, teachers like my Max, who offer individualized attention and who encourage learning “songs” that may not be part of the menu.
But right now I am thinking mostly about my rusty rendition of French Folk Song. And I am off to give a stern lecture to my ten fingers, to urge them to please quit fighting, to remind them that I am trying to create something beautiful and sweet here. I pray that they will listen.
Wish me luck.
Baker is a language arts teacher at Wydown Middle School in St. Louis, Mo.
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