CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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My Elementary School Music Teacher

Thursday, November 16, 2006

this entry brought to you by infadels, "can't get enough"


When I was in elementary school, we had the same music teacher from the 4th to 6th grade, and her name was Mrs. Boyd. She was about 45 I'd venture to guess, but she didn't seem to know anything about culture for the previous 30 years-- I imagine she was one of those girls who grew up without a TV, because she didn't have one in the 80's when she was my teacher. She knew nothing about anything anyone young would have any interest in. She had been a professional opera singer before she'd become a teacher, so she had an encyclopedic knowledge of that, but knew nothing of rock n' roll, current or otherwise, and she didn't even know the term "hip-hop" until a student explained it to her. She hadn't seen any movies that weren't musicals (another topic she knew excesses of information of) for at least a decade; the last movie she'd seen was A Chorus Line, and she said she couldn't even remember what she went to see before that.

We all hated her, of course, and you couldn't blame us. At the time all we cared about was Bobby Brown, Madonna, and New Kids on the Block; some old opera singer who didn't even know about hip-hop music to know she should hate it wasn't exactly the kind of teacher we wanted to have for hours a week for three years in a row. It's true that elementary aged kids don't have a very refined palette for "cool", but Mrs. Boyd wasn't just uncool-- all teachers, in the elementary aged mind, are old-fashioned and uncool. Mrs. Boyd on the other hand, her whole existence was so tragically uncool being in a room with her was painful. Even the other teachers, when we complained about how out-of-touch she was, would pause and say, "Mrs. Boyd is uhm.... unique. But you guys should still give her a chance." I've had teachers so old they'd died within two or three years of my graduating their class, and all of them were more in touch, despite Mrs. Boyd being middle aged at the oldest.

Thinking back on her now, though, I realize that, much as I loathed her at the time, Mrs. Boyd was a great teacher. She taught us how to read sheet music, something I assumed everyone learned in elementary school, and only recently I've found this not to be true. I don't remember any of it now, it all looks like Greek to me, but I remember as late as the 8th grade looking at sheet music at a friend's house and slowly pecking a song out on piano, an instrument she taught us how to play. And this wasn't an elective or anything, this wasn't extracurricular, this was mandatory elementary school music class.

What's interesting about her in retrospect is exactly what we hated about her 18 years ago. The woman didn't own a TV, knew nothing about popular culture or current events whatsoever, and while I'm sure she had her hobbies, this woman's entire existence was music, albeit music that hasn't been popular for 100 years. Now that I think of her explosive, operatic singing voice-- we hated it at the time. Here we are, a group of fifth graders, trying to sing "Consider Yourself" from Oliver!, or "The Eyes of Texas", and she joins in with her booming opera voice, which would overpower and annoy us all. But really, we were extremely lucky to have been privileged with an honest-to-God professional opera singer that was our teacher. Now that I'm older, I wonder why Mrs. Boyd wasted her generous talents and knowledge on a bunch of bratty, atonal elementary school kids, when she would have been much more appreciated at the high school level, where kids would specifically choose music and would be mature enough to understand the importance of what she was teaching and not be turned off by something as inconsequential as being obliviously uncool.
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with love from CRS @ 11:11 PM 

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