Midlife Meditation

A note from a fourth grader. It's my favorite moment in one of my favorite movies: her work completed, the Banks family restored, Mary Poppins is just about to take off when the parrot head on her magic umbrella calls her out, chiding her for not acknowledging her own feelings, particularly jealousy of the father the children love more than their nanny. She responds that that's as it should be, and that "practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking." I don't consider myself perfect, or even practically perfect. The most Methodist thing about me is my fundamental awareness of just how flawed I am. I've spent the last year having this driven home to me again and again as I've struggled to hang onto a job that was rejecting me. This was most true in my work with an especially recalcitrant bunch of fifth grade boys whose collective goal in music class was to get me to explode. I tried strategy after strategy, and none of ...

Not counting weekends or holidays, I have fifty-one more days. That's how much time I have left at Scott Elementary School. On June 15, I will say goodbye to these children for the last time. Where I will go after that to practice my vocation has yet to be determined, but I can be certain of this one thing: it will not be this school. Fifty-one days of school might seem like a lot to you. If you're not a teacher, or even if you are and you teach in a classroom, seeing the same children every school day, fifty-one days is a significant chunk of time: ten weeks! Two and a half months! More than a quarter! To most musical specialists, those 51 days equate to 20 semi-weekly classes, typically 30-35 minutes long. That's time for several units, time to learn two or three pieces and prepare them for a final concert. I say "most" because things are different at Scott. Starting next week, I will see students for music once a week. At Scott, I get them...

"Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking."--Mary Poppins, moments before, her work with the Banks family complete, she takes flight, never to see them again. There's a poignant rightness to that scene, something I recognized from an early age. I've seen Disney's Mary Poppins  more times than I can count; I may even have seen it when it was first released in 1964, though since I was three, I don't have any memory of it. There's plenty of meat here for both children and adults: magic that turns chores into play, adventures on rooftops and inside a chalk painting, lessons in the relative worth of money, work, and family, how to recognize a horrible Cockney accent, catchy songs and invigorating dance routines, and on and on it goes. Almost all of it can be brushed away as a feel-good fantasy about a magical visitor helping a broken family come together, with the requisite happy ending one expects from a Disney movie--almo...

  Coda, outro, final cadence, fermata, cut-off: I'm out.   Last days with students always have a bittersweet quality. Students are children on loan, young people I have the privilege (usually), responsibility (always), or obligation (rarely) to work with, nurturing their development into musically literate human beings. I take this responsibility very seriously, and I never take the privilege for granted. Two years of layoff, followed by two years of only half-time employment, have taught me just how fragile is my hold on this vocation.   I came to Banks hoping it would be the final stop on my vocational pilgrimage. It was a promising setting: an elementary school with a dedicated music room that had been designed by a music teacher, separated from the classroom wing, connected to the stage; and then a PTO that jumped at the chance to purchase, in just two years, enough Orff instruments for a class of 30. Add to that a rapidly growing children's choir, and I ...