![Music Teacher Coffee Talk Part 2 Music Teacher Coffee Talk](https://crescendo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/TinyCrescendo-Podcast-ep-5-title-picture-1.png)
Podcast Highlights
Tanya LeJeune lives in Denver, Colorado, USA and is in her 26th year of music education. She has taught K to 8th grade general music in Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado and is a Kodaly instructor of pedagogy and folk song analysis at the Colorado Kodaly Institute at Colorado State University. Tanya serves on the Elementary Music Curriculum Advisory Committee and is the music teacher mentor for Jefferson County Public Schools. She is know for her podcast, Music Teacher Coffee Talk.
- For what are you most grateful? (0:32)
- This question is where you get to give some little ‘Nuggets of Fabulous’ to all of the listeners. What are 3 of your all time favourite resources, activities, songs or games? (8:01)
- At a time when Music Educators seem to have to fight even harder for the existence of their profession, what advice would you give us around advocacy? (21:16)
- Get on your soap box! To finish this interview, you get to tell the world something that is the most important thing for you to say. Ready, set, GO… (30:30)
Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Click HERE to listen to the Music Teacher Coffee Talk Podcast
Where to find me:
- Crescendo Community Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crescendocommunity
- Official Crescendo Page: https://www.facebook.com/CrescendoMusicEd/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CrescendoMusicEd
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/crescendomusic
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-o-shea-62a3741b/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CrescendoDebbie/
- Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com.au/crescendodebbie/
Ep 5: Chat with Tonya LeJeune Part 2: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Ep 5: Chat with Tonya LeJeune Part 2: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Debbie:
Here is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast Episode 5. In this episode you’ll hear the second half of the chat that I had with Tanya LeJeune. We cover things like gratitude, we hear some of her nuggets of fabulous and so much more. Enjoy the second half of my chat with Tanya LeJeune.
Debbie:
What are you most grateful?
Tanya:
I love that I get to teach music. Debbie, don’t you ever have those moments where you look around, kids are singing, moving, reading, or notating and you go, ‘This is my job’.
Debbie:
Yeah, I get to do this, dude!
Tanya:
You’re going to send me to a coal mine because this isn’t right, I shouldn’t get paid for this. When I say ‘this’, I don’t mean that I don’t work hard. I think we all work hard, but I’ve chosen to work hard at teaching children music. Wow. Who gets to do that? Right. And so, yeah, I’m very, very grateful that I found my place. Just like most music education people I know, I thought I was going to be the next greatest choir director, right? Everyone coming out of their undergrad experience, ‘well I’m going to teach high school band or I’m going to teach high school choir, I’m going to teach high school orchestra’, but there’s not that many positions so a lot of us end up teaching elementary music. I kind of just was like, I just got to find a job so, okay, here’s one. It turned out to be a perfect fit because I’m a very good generalist, right? I am not a fantastic choir director by any means, but I can do some. I am not wonderful at all these different, I can boom chuck on the piano. I can keep you going on the guitar. I can play a little ukulele, I can do hand drums. I mean, as far as bringing in all of these skills on the instruments, I’m okay at many different things. And now I get to fulfill those passions just through teaching. When I get to sit down and play my dulcimer while first graders are singing, Oh, that’s a beautiful thing. Otherwise I’d just be sitting in my living room. I love that I can take these things that could be hobbies, like playing the dulcimer, like playing hand drums and I can bring that knowledge into my classroom and really go somewhere with it. I feel so lucky that the things that I love to do, there’s several of them, and they fall under the umbrella of music. I get to share my love with these children who are loving it for the most part, right? We’re very lucky.
Debbie:
Yep. Yes. Who else gets to sing songs, play games, help lead children to music literacy? It’s a joy, isn’t it? I have always loved it, but I did not fully realize the absolute joy I have until fairly recent years, because I think I felt a little overwhelmed with the work of the job, the admin side, the number of children, the other pressures of the job, not the pressures of what you do in the classroom, everything else about the job. I think it’s only really been the last few years, I’ve always loved it which is how I ended up doing it, Kodaly levels and doing various things because I wanted to help people love it too, but truly to just be present and enjoy and love what you’re doing and appreciate it for what it is. We’re so lucky and I really think I feel a bit like you. I’m a jack of all trades and I feel sometimes going well. Jack of all trades, master of none.
Tanya:
I say that all the time, Debbie.
Debbie:
I can bash out a few things on piano and I can do a few chords. I can play the recorder and the kids think I’m great. I’m not. I had this conversation earlier but I think what I am ‘at heart’ and I’m going to just put a little potential judgment on you. I think that we are educators at heart. I think that’s the core. We are educators in the music field. We are music educators. If you were a coral director and that was your thing, you would become the best coral director you could. You would hone your skills, you would focus on that, and you would be an awesome coral director. It’s not that you couldn’t be, you could be if that’s what you chose to do but because we are in a job where we literally have to be a jack of all trades, we don’t have time to be specifically excellent in just one area because we have too many areas. I just think we’re music educators and that’s what we’re good at.
Tanya:
I’m fine with that. I think being older now, I am less apt to get frustrated by my lack of skills in any one instrument. I think in my twenties, probably a good decade of like, ‘Oh, I’m not a good enough singer, I’m not a good enough for this, and oh, I’m playing bass in this rock band and I’m not good enough’. It was always this not good enough, not good enough in music. I always was, ‘Oh, I love music. I need to be awesome’ but the message that I want to pass on to the children I teach and my own children is that it’s not about being the best. It’s about enjoying music at whatever level that is. It’s not about the judgment. It’s not about be the best bass player, be the best singer. It’s about enjoying music, playing because it feels good, because you’re building community, because you love it, be engulfed in music because it’s worth that, doesn’t matter if you’re not the best. It took me a really long time and I still have my moments, but oh, that is just such a burden to just always trying to be the best or worry about, Am I good enough? We’re all good enough. We are all musical. We all are worthy of being musical no matter our skill.
Debbie:
Absolutely. Even the little one who is not matching pitch and keeping in time, they are all worthy. I have a little favorite that I actually have in my classroom every year. I make up these little workbooks and the front cover has been drawn by me. I really love drawing when I get time to do it. Am I good? No, I am not at all but I say to the kids, I drew that. I drew that front cover and they are beautiful, they go, ‘oh, that’s good’. I go, well, thank you for saying so, it’s not really good but you know what? I loved drawing it and I loved drawing that to share with you. It doesn’t matter if I’m really good at drawing and being good at art. I love doing it and I want to share that with you. It’s just like what we do in music. That’s a relevant one since your husband’s an art teacher.
Tanya:
Yes, I always joke that I married him so that he would do my programs for the concert and make them all lovely and artistic. He did our Music Teacher Coffee Talk logo. He’s done the Western Division of Oake, that’s him. Also one of our rocky illustrations for the Colorado Kodaly chapter, that’s him too. His artwork is sprinkled all over the Kodaly world now.
Debbie:
Oh, well, good. Thank him on behalf of all of the Kodaly people. Okay, now, because I want our listeners to come away with something that they can actually go and try tomorrow in the classroom or something to think about to apply to their practice. I’m going to ask you to give something that I’ve decided to call “Nuggets of Fabulous” to all of the listeners. Now I’ve picked three, but really I don’t care, could be just one. Your nugget might be really golden. It could be five but a little group of your all time favorite resources, activities, songs, games, behavior management, trick, organizational idea, absolutely anything nugget or to have fabulous from Tanya LeJeune to the listeners. Okay, no pressure.
Tanya:
Oh, my goodness. This is where I should have done my homework, Debbie, because I didn’t write things down. You see, I’m looking up and all around. I’ve got shelves and shelves and then I’m also thinking, ‘Oh no, this is an international audience, so I can’t say something that’s purely American’.
Debbie:
It could be my chat with Aileen, she talked about a music education resource that I’d not heard of that she loved, it had America in the title.
Tanya:
Oh, I know what it is and I would have said the same thing, I think. It’s called An American Methodology.
Debbie:
That’s probably it. I have to look it up and check that out. So it’s okay if it’s American, we can translate or check it out.
Tanya:
All right. Well, I’m going to talk about a series of books as one of mine. Doctor Susan Brumfield, who is in Texas, she has some books called First We Sing, they all have this lovely tree and bird cover. You really have to look at the titles to see what it is you’re getting. She has three song books called First We Sing. First we sing Songbook one, Songbook two, Songbook three is up there, these are just excellent resources for anyone who doesn’t have resources because Dr. Brumfield, she includes the songs, she includes the games and CD but I think now they have a digital audio component. She has had children record these so that you can hear them and she gives you the notation, of course, the game directions but then the pedagogy of here’s how we are going to sing and move with this song. This is (singing) “As I sat on the sunny bank”, right? This lovely tune that’s been used with many different lyrics sets. Then she says, read, write, listen. She gives you ideas of how you could bring this into a melodic and a harmonic context, then she gives a cultural context blurb. These are just brilliant books, everybody should have them. They’re not purely American, Dr. Susan Brumfield, she did a wonderful collection called Over the Garden Wall of English Folksongs. That is lovely, then she has a Scottish collection called Hot Peas and Barley-O. She took a sabbatical, went and collected these songs. She went door to door, I’ve heard her talk many times about how she was in, I think, Scotland, I believe, and she was going door to door and she was trying to find like original recordings of children from many years past singing these specific songs. She happened upon, I think it was a pastor who had been there and had recordings. Anyway, I’m getting off topic, but she’s just done some wonderful research in not just American folk songs, but she always talks about she’s got an Italian book that’s supposed to be next and they’re just wonderfully notated, wonderful pedagogy. She also has pedagogy books that ties into these songs. These Hal Leonard songs is the publication so I would say pretty much anything that Dr. Susan Brumfield has published is wonderful things to dig into, great songs, things that I’ve used in my classroom. I feel like I’m being too vague because when you say a song or a game, I don’t know if I can put my finger on just one.
Debbie:
It’s hard to pick one. The good resources is wonderful. That’s wonderful. People can go and find them and have a little dig themselves. Which is good to see what grabs them.
Tanya:
Yeah. As far as favorite nuggets of wisdom or whatever to pass it on is student voice and choice is really important, right? Well, it’s really important all the time but I’ve noticed right now giving the students even the smallest choices is so good for them. It really includes them and it makes a huge difference on their buy in. In my music class today, I had a drum circle with fourth graders, and this was simplest little thing. I said, okay, we’re going to go around the circle, everyone’s going to answer. I’m going to ask “What’s for dinner?” and you play your answer and say it like “chicken nuggets”. And I said, okay, who wants to start? And one boy wanted to start. I said, Which direction do you want to go, clockwise or counterclockwise? I mean, these are the tiniest little things, right? Whereas I know early on in my teaching because I was so anxious to be taken seriously and not have the kids run all over me, I was like, ‘This is what we’re doing, you start’. Maybe I would say, Who wants to start? You start, let’s go. So now I really make an effort to say, Okay, which would you like? Would you like to write this on whiteboards? Or should we use pencil and paper? The tiniest choices make the biggest difference. They have agency, they have buy in, right? Even to the point of if we’re planning a concert, I’ll say, okay, we need to have this many songs. I’ve chosen these two and what shall we do for the rest of them? Like, here are some things that we’ve done in the classroom this year. Let’s vote. These days it’s so great with the technology because I can give out a Google form and have kids click their answer. I get this beautiful spreadsheet that shows overwhelmingly they want to do this song and that’s just a wonderful thing to be able to quickly have kids get those choices. So as far as like nuggets of, I don’t know, advice or wisdom, student choice.
Debbie:
Yes and it’s something I think that it’s easy to overlook when you’re trying to get through your seven or eight things in a lesson. I’ve got to get my practice, this particular rhythmic element, and I’ve got to prepare this melodic element. We haven’t done this game, you can lose sight a little bit of the actual child and what they’re thinking and feeling and that student choice. Yes, I think that’s an easy one to lose sight of. That certainly is a Nugget of Fabulous.
Speaker2:
I’ll give a shout out to chase games because chase games are always a big favorite.
Debbie:
Oh, they are so good. I do the fast walk in the music room though but always a winner, chase games. Yeah.
Tanya:
Yes. I’ll reel off a few. Ida red, ida blue. Do you know this one?
Debbie:
Yes, but I’ve never done it as a chase game, just as a song.
Tanya:
Oh, okay. Carrie and I just finished a couple of presentations here in Colorado, and one of the things that we did was Ida red, Ida blue. Both of us do it the same way, where you have a circle of children and one person is in the middle with an envelope that says Ida red and an envelope that says Ida Blue. Everybody sings “Down the road and across the creek. Can’t get a letter but once a week? Ida Red. Ida Blue I got stuck on Ida too”. And on “Ida Red. Ida Blue”. You hand those two envelopes to two students who are next to each other. They take off around the outside of the circle. And you, the person who gave out the letters, you put out your hand in that empty space where they have left, put at your hand and whoever comes and puts the letter in your hand first wins. Now, there’s lots of variations of this so that people do not run into each other because I do have them run in my music room. One of the things that I do for Ida Red and Ida Blue and I know Carrie does this, too, is that when they meet halfway, they have to change letters.
Debbie:
Oh.
Tanya:
You started with blue Letter, then you have to come back with the red letter. Then you can also level up by having choice cards inside the envelopes. So after they’ve played it a couple of times where they are racing around the circle trading letters, you can have them. Once they get their letters, they have to pick a card out of the envelope. You’ve put inside the envelope different ways to move, it might say, stop, crab, walk, walk backwards, skip gallop. Right? So one child pulls out gallop and the other child pulls out crab walk, nnow they have to go around the circle and they have to be doing their motion but when they meet halfway and they switch letters, they also have to switch motions.
Debbie:
Oh, that’s so fun. I am going to try that.
Tanya:
The child galloping, right. We would say, Oh, no, they’re going to automatically win. It’s going to be faster. Well, if you only can do that halfway, because then you have to switch motions. Now, the switching motions I have to attribute to Carrie, because I was always having them pull out motions and then they would have to I would have both of them do one motion but that was Carrie’s way, is that they each pull out a motion and then they have to switch motions. It really keeps them guessing. With your older children, even though we’re not doing music literacy things, we want them to have like a heightened, like, ooh, I got to really be paying attention because there’s this added element that I have to do so.
Debbie:
Do you have a blue envelope and a red envelope?
Tanya:
I do.
Debbie:
Yeah. It’s so exciting. Oh, I so wanted to do this. I really do like the song. I get them to innovate text too and create a new color and a new rhyme, even the older ones like doing that.
Tanya:
Oh, yeah.
Debbie:
I’ve done all sorts of things with it, obviously melodic ostinato and all, but I’ve never done an actual game and I am so doing that. That is awesome. Thank you. It’s worth it just for me. Hopefully someone else will think it’s a great idea too.
Speaker2:
This past week with kindergarten, we’ve been doing (singing) “Come back home my little chicks. We Won’t Come, why not?” It’s a Hungarian folk song that’s been translated to English and it’s honestly a little clunky in English so the children have to hear it many times. It’s a song between the little chicks and the mama. There’s a wolf, right? And at the end, the wolf escapes the circle and tries to catch the mama. And a lot of these chase games, sometimes there’s just no winner. I don’t care and the kids, there’s nothing you get for winning. Just the loveliness of winning. Right? And sometimes if chasing goes on too long, I’ll put up ten fingers and I’ll silently count down. There are children who are not chasing, they get the clue and they start counting down. And they know that once we get to zero, we’re done. It doesn’t matter if no one was caught and we move on. I understand with the chase games, I have had students BAM into each other and have a mouthful of blood. Yeah. That that has happened. They laughed all the way to the clinic. It was hilarious, apparently, but no permanent damage. It has happened just the one time. I try to keep doing things like trading the leathers that helps in chase games. Another thing Mrs. Joker taught me, is that when kids meet on the other side of a circle for any chase game, they have to shake hands and say, “good morning, good afternoon, good night”, and then go on their way. It is another thing to slow down.
Debbie:
Fabulous, great ideas. I love it and I’m sure we could go on for lots and lots unless there’s another one. You’re desperate.
Tanya:
Oh, I’m not desperate. I’m just, you know, there’s just so many.
Debbie:
No, no, that’s the problem. There’s so many.
Tanya:
Okay, here’s a big piece of advice. Go get your training. If you don’t have your good Kodaly training and you are intrigued, you should go get your training.
Debbie:
Yes, yes. Kodaly Queensland has just started part face to face part virtual in Queensland to help remote members so they can do level one, Kodaly level one. It just started with a couple of fabulous lectures. So, so that’s very exciting to have that hybrid thing happening here in Queensland. I really do think that’s life changing for me. Yep, you need that sequence and then you can vary slightly and add things, but you’re doing it from a position of knowledge and understanding instead of that, like you said, the scattergun of when you’re new and not sure what’s happening. I’ll try this, I’ll try this. I don’t know why but it’s fun. I’ll try it because even when we play games, there’s reasons, you know, that all have some sort of pedagogical reason behind.
Tanya:
Oh yes, definitely.
Debbie:
As we were talking about earlier, it really seems to be a time when music educators have to fight for our existence, which is ridiculous, because I think we’re one of the most important jobs in the world. Slightly biased, of course. Do you have any quick advice for music educators to help them with their advocacy. At the moment we’re quite involved in a campaign here in Queensland. We’re losing some of our amazing music programs in our government schools, our state schools. We’re involved in an official campaign so basically any advice around advocacy, convincing people like we don’t have to convince the people listening to us now that they’re important and that music education is important. How could we get our audience to help spread the word about the importance of music education for our children?
Tanya:
Yeah, that’s very big. I think visibility is step one. If you’re an elementary music teacher, you need to make connections with community. The hard thing is a lot of this goes above and beyond what your job is, because when you take a job and you read the contract, it does not necessarily say make outreach to community and to make sure you have groups playing and singing that are visible. And so performance groups, if you have them performing in the community at nursing homes, my choir for years sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at our Colorado Rockies Stadium and they have a choir day where they invite choirs from all over. Those kinds of things are important, albeit time consuming but you can also do simple things like having a blurb if there’s a school newsletter or if you happen to have students on Google Classroom or in any kind of electronic thing, any of these things you can easily send home. Here’s what we’re doing in music class. It doesn’t have to be long. Second graders are learning half note and also how to sing from the staff, something that maybe parents will read, but sometimes they won’t. Another thing that I think is really powerful is to turn your concerts into not just performances, but a time for you to educate the community, the families. I really think that is part of our job, we’re not just educating the children. We’re educating the community about why they should have music in their lives. Right? So a performance of, say, second grade could include they perform. Maybe we have instruments added to a song and we say we are learning these things musically, but also these are the executive functioning skills that are included in what we’re doing. These are the social skills that the children have built as they went and learned this piece because they had to cooperate and they had to put this together and they had to make choices and decide who was going to be. You can pull in all of these tangential skills that the children are learning through music. This is not to say that music is not the number one reason we’re there. That’s the number one, music is worthy in its own right. But it is not harmful at all to say here’s one of the reasons why music is worthy is because we’re building community and relationships and skills. I mean, this is why I love music. I don’t love music just because I sat in my room and listen to that Fleetwood Mac album ten times in a row. I love music because of the people that it brought me to, right? So whenever you have the opportunity to educate parents and also in your program, your physical, like these are the songs that children are singing, there should be we are singing this song. We learned that it is from France and we learned where France is in relation to us. We even found out that some of us have some ancestors in France, like if you have any of that, to put in a program to say, Wow, look how this lets us learn about people of other places and other cultures. Look how it gives us those mirrors, windows and sliding doors into. Other countries into other cultures. So I think it’s really important to bring that up over and over again because they don’t know unless you tell them, right? And something I’ve been doing for years and I’ve done presentations on is if first grade singing games night or kindergarten singing tonight. I’ve done it with first grade and with kindergarten. Kindergarten is the youngest grade I teach and it’s where families come. And I have songs in games maybe six, seven or eight, and we do them together and the students help me teach them these games. We do London bridges, right? We do these things that maybe we kind of know, adults kind of know, but not really. They see the joy on their children’s faces and they experience the joy, too. So some of them might come in and go, Oh, I’m tired, I’ve worked all day and now I don’t even get to sit down. I thought this was going to be a performance, but I don’t put out many chairs and I say this is for us to participate. You can feel the joy that your child feels in music class and it also gives me a minute for me to say, by the way, parents, did you see how we have to choose partners? That’s a skill that we’re going to carry on through the rest of our lives, right? Having these kind of events where you’re inviting in families and if you’ve got them there, right, you’ve got to get on your soapbox and say, now that you’re here, by the way, here’s the importance of music. Look at all the things we’re doing. Oh, and hey, see the joy? Isn’t that worth a lot, too? So I think that you don’t have to go to huge efforts to sing in a baseball game or to bring your students out to sing at the school board meeting. You can infuse all of this just within their community at your school.
Debbie:
Love it. Love it. Thank you. That’s great. So very true and doable. Like you said, it’s a little bit more effort and it is a little above what we have to do but I think you reap the benefits, don’t you?
Tanya:
Oh and don’t forget the classroom teachers, it’s always good to mention to and not in a pushy way. You know, it’s a wonderful thing when students make connections from what they’re learning in their home room to what they’re learning in the music class. Then teachers come to you and go, ‘Oh, I had no idea you were talking about the science of sound’. And they said, Oh, yeah, we’ve already seen the tuning fork splash in the water with Miss LeJeune. You know, that’s wonderful to me.
Debbie:
And we know that the big boom wacker sounds lower because it vibrates slower. Yes. Yeah, exactly.
Tanya:
So don’t forget the teachers in your own building because they need to know too. They might unfortunately look at you as they’re planning time.
Debbie:
And even worse than that, they may actually fear music. In fact, episode one I actually talk about this. Iff you are afraid of something they’re afraid of, they don’t have music knowledge. And so what you do is all mystical and I don’t want to play games. There’s all sorts of mindsets that we might be having to combat, as well as the fact that we’re just the babysitters while they do important work. So, yes, you’ve got to win them over, don’t you? And that takes time, effort and thought.
Tanya:
Yeah, yes, it does. But it can happen.
Debbie:
Yes and I think the longer that you’re in a place, too, it’s very difficult when you’re itinerant and you’re transferred a lot. But I think that should be one of your main aims and make sure you go to the staff room. It’s really very easy to keep yourself a little bit removed because there’s so much to do and you’ve probably got a rehearsal or you’re meeting with kids to catch up on that bit or whatever. You know, you just don’t have that time to sit in a staff room but carve out a bit of time, I think regularly so that you’re in touch with those people. Yeah.
Tanya:
And if they give you the opportunity to have your students, “Can your kindergarten class come see the fifth graders because they just are rehearsing the song and they’re really excited about to share those.”
Debbie:
That would be great if you could do that. I’m finding in today’s schools there’s less and less flexibility for that sort of thing to happen. You know, we used to be able to sing the the upper school, our grade fives and sixes. We could prepare a picture book that they would go and sing to our preschoolers and they would sit are being a picture book I mean how amazing but that would take the important learning time from the prep classes if it was done in your grade six music lesson, you know, like, you know what I’m saying? I think there has to be a time, even performances where people would come and visit just to carve out the time to have visiting performance of visiting small chamber group or drumming group or whatever. You’ve virtually got to fight to allow for that time to be lost from the important learning. They don’t use those words, but it’s sort of what it means, you know.
Tanya:
Oh, yes, I understand there is a push for that, but the pendulum’s got to swing the other way at some point. Right.
Debbie:
So yeah, we’ll be ready when it does. Before we wrap this up. It’s been really great talking to you, Tanya. It’s wonderful. I’d like to finish with a “Get on your soapbox”. This is your opportunity to tell everybody in the world, because they are all listening! You can tell the three people that are tuning into this episode. Okay. But the most important thing that you want to say to everybody, the most important thing. Okay, you’re thinking. You’re thinking.
Tanya:
I’m going to narrow it down to music education. How about that?
Debbie:
Okay. The most important thing about music education. Yes, gosh, actually, if you went really wide, you know, music education, the most important thing you’d like to tell everybody. Okay, ready, set, go.
Tanya:
Okay. I would say if you are teaching music, please hang in there. We need you and we appreciate you and you can do this. It’s the most fulfilling thing for you and for the students that you teach. If you are struggling, you should reach out to other music teachers, find people that you have similar philosophies with, find groups that you that spark your joy of teaching and just take from those groups and those people, whatever you can that helps stoke your fire to teach music because we need excellent music educators. As I said, everyone and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t have this memorized, but everyone’s concerned with who’s in the big opera house. We should be looking at who is teaching those kindergartners, those preschoolers, because that is where we are creating anyone who might appreciate that music later on. Right? And he’s also said a different quote, that I’m paraphrasing, that a bad conductor will only spoil the group that they are conducting. A bad music teacher in the early years can spoil generations of music lovers players. So that’s the negative way of putting it. But wow, you could inspire generations of musicians and music lovers and people who want to spend their time, their energy, their money on being musical. Because I think we all do this because we found something in music that fulfilled us, that became the most important thing for us to do and we want to spread that. We want to spread the love, and then we want to spread the joy. When I was 12, I thought I wanted to be a rock star, but now I’ve just convinced myself I’m a rock star anyway.
Debbie:
And the kids think you’re a rock star.
Tanya:
They do, right? If you want to be a rock star, keep teaching music. That is where it’s at. Find your people, find your philosophy and keep on going.
Debbie:
Oh, I love it. Thank you so much for talking with us, Tanya. It’s been a complete delight.
Tanya:
Oh, thank you, Debbie. I’m so excited to listen to your podcast.
Debbie:
I can’t wait. Okay, bye bye.
This podcast was brought to you by Crescendo Music Education. Connecting, supporting and inspiring music educators. In the show notes, you’ll find links to Crescendos social media platforms. Please connect with me and be part of the Crescendo Community. You might consider becoming a Crescendo member. For a low annual fee you can access hundreds of files, worksheets, printables, workbooks, repeat workshops, webinars, and receive great discounts on events. Come and connect with me, Debbie. Okay, see you in the socials.
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Introducing The Crescendo Music Education Podcast
You Are Important! A Reminder for Music Teachers | 001
Introduction to Batching | 002
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