Coming Home Happy
All-staff selfie, taken by Principal Matt. I'm not sure where I'm sitting. For the first time in my life, I'm coming home happy every day. At 55, I've had many jobs. Some I liked, a few I even loved. And some were miserable. Looking back on four decades of work, I'm sure of this: none of those jobs even approached being as consistently satisfying as this one. What makes teaching music at Byrom so wonderful? It's hard to pin down. It's not that my fellow staff members are exceptional: like every other school I've worked in, they're mostly enthusiastic dedicated educators, most of whom are on time to drop off and pick up their classes. Nor is it that my teaching space is spectacular: it's just the right size, and mostly well-equipped, but the Orff instrumentarium needs some major investment and the room is both windowless and chronically dusty. The building is a relic of the 1970s open classroom philosophy and, like most schools built...