Moments of Wonder in the Tenor Bass Choir.
I had an experience yesterday with my Tenor Bass group (Helios Chorum) that left me in tears (and resulted to two phone calls to teacher friends because I JUST had to share).
We’re doing a really cool collaboration concert with our friends over at South High School in Minneapolis and while Helios is doing the mass piece and two Justice Choir pieces, they aren’t doing the treble choir collab piece and have some extra time. Soo….I called up my friend Michael Jeffrey and he helped me develop a solo voice unit for the singers. I explored vocal health, vocal production and it culminated in the singers learning a verse of a folk song.
Here’s what happened - I assigned the kids to a specific song based on their ability level, voice type and text difficulty. I told them they could sing by themselves in front of the class, with a buddy in front of the class or for me in my office without an audience. I split up the students with a college student (thank you, St. Olaf!) and we worked on the songs for about a week.
Before the performances, I told them I had three rules - 1. If someone makes a mistake or looks nervous, we cheer and encourage them. 2. Phones are AWAY. 3. At the end of each performance, we clap no matter what.
Here’s where the magic started: every single student sang alone in front of the class.
Here’s where it got even better:
One of my EL students sang alone (!) in English (!!) and sang all of the notes and rhythms correctly and in tune the entire time (!!!!!!). Context: when I met this student’s parent at conferences the parent told me point blank that their child was a terrible singer. The student agreed. I was totally shocked at how matter of fact they both were and talked about how the whole point of choir is to improve and learn how to sing. This student has been monotone pretty much the school year and somehow in the past few weeks everything has clicked. They have such a lovely voice and have become one of the leaders in the class. To see them sing ALONE in ENGLISH in front of a CLASSROOM!!!!!!!!! IN TUNE!!!!!! I was in tears.
Another student sang and was trying to be memorized and got very nervous and struggled to remember the words. He kept starting and stopping and the whole class started cheering him on (unprompted by me). He finally closed his eyes and sang memorized to the whole room.
Lastly: I have a student who has refused to do any of our voice checks or voice tests because he’s so self conscious about his voice. He wouldn’t sing for me in November, didn’t come to the concert and has been very on the fence about choir. He FINALLY sang for me at our last voice test and his voice has changed into this lovely light baritone voice. I was so excited when he sung for me and I couldn’t stop telling him how great he sounded and how I knew he could do it. He was mortified (but maybe pleased?). He was the last one to perform and I leaned over and asked if he wanted to sing alone or in my office. He decided to sing in front of the class.
I won’t lie - I was pretty anxious. Y’all… He started to sing and he sang with a beautiful, light sound. He came in at the right time. He sang all the right notes and rhythms. He sang out loud in front of the whole class and I had tears streaming down my face.
This is it. This is success. This is exactly what makes the work worth it. I got to see two young people (who came in with 0 knowledge of singing and lacked the ability to match pitch) step up to perform in front of their peers. I struggle so much with feeling like I’m not a good teacher or that my choirs aren’t “good.” I constantly hear this inner critic telling me that things are out of tune or the vowels are wonky or shouldn’t I be shaping this music or something. I don’t know who this inner critic is or who gave them the OK to tell me what my choirs should sound like, but it’s so challenging to turn it off.
It felt SO GOOD to look out to my students and see them thrive and succeed like this. I said to a friend “this is better than getting an All Stater”. I got to see two kids start at Step 0 and get to a point where they got to perform…. and smile at the end!
How lucky we are to have moments like this!! This makes all the work worth it.
