We are approaching the end of the most unusual school year of the 29 years I've taught public school.
It sort of feels like part of the world of choral music educator's is imploding a bit, and it's completely understandable. I totally get it. I'm living it too, and this is not what we signed up for when we decided to become choral music educator's.
I started sharing my work on TpT a while ago, and I've shared my "live" work with children on YouTube in my public school classroom since 2013. It's always felt "vulnerable" to share my work this way, but I have always pretty much been an open book, so TpT, YouTube and my blog felt like the right places for me to share with the aim of helping teachers and their students with sight singing, classroom management, parent involvement, the middle school changing voice and more.
First let me say once again...singing in groups is not over. When people say that it is, it becomes clear they are unaware and short-sighted or just plain pessimistic. Singing in groups is part of the human spirit, and we could all use some about now...but it's not quite time yet. Singing will continue, and I can't wait to sing "live" without masks in groups without spacing when it is safe to do so.
Secondly, this isn't the first pandemic.
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The intuition of my middle school students...pandemic impact...and some of my history before
"Mr D"
My students chose this song to be our finale (No Day But Today from Rent) for our documentary musical revue. It is such a powerful song choice for this moment in time.
I don't know anyone who has lived through a global pandemic before 2020 that impacted everyone...
But...
I did live through a pandemic that heavily impacted the gay community and many died.
...and people weren't listening...
This was a defining moment in my life (Announcement by a President of the USA to create a Constitutional Amendment to Ban Same Sex Marriage).
My husband and I watched it together "live".
We were devastated.
So, I organized a national movement. I created a 501c3, and got the word out in order to try to fight for social justice.
I did it before the inter-webs (on purpose...we all need to lighten up a bit) became easy...It was 2004 for goodness sake. Facebook was in its first year, and only college students were using it. I emailed every major corporation listed on the Human Rights Campaign website and kept "knocking on their doors" until some folks listened.
Creating the movement of Boycott for Equality took enormous amounts of time, resources and energy...And I took a lot of heat for doing it. I wanted my voice heard.
After I finished that work (all while teaching full time), I had no money. While I got some support in donations to defer some of the costs, I ran up my credit cards to make it happen because it mattered.
So...I'm hoping that by knowing a little more history about my life's work, you'll understand why I'm not really interested in being lectured by people about social justice issues because I've fought for them all of my life and have been an out gay teacher for my entire career. I shared my coming out story right here a few years ago during the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. I've led by example, and I will continue to do so.
We are on the same team...
To the folks who harassed and bullied me online this past weekend...
Sit down.
Take notes.
And stop attacking your allies and colleagues.
Yup- Obama spoke about cancel culture on October 31, 2019, and in one minute, he pretty much summed it up. Shouting on social media at someone you don't know is not social activism.
When I decided to make our spring musical revue a musical/documentary film when it became apparent that a "live" musical wouldn't be possible this year, I wanted to create something my students and their parents could share with their children and grandchildren to document the impact of the pandemic on the lives of these 11-14 year old children. It's so interesting that "No Day But Today" resonates now with my students, but it is not surprising to me.
I was living in the NYC area when Rent made its debut in 1996....it captured the pain of a community dealing with a pandemic while no one was listening...and I knew it was going to be huge...1996 was the year HIV drugs started keeping my friends who had the disease alive...and I'd lost many friends before the successful treatment drugs came around.
"Rent" was cutting edge in the middle of the HIV pandemic when it was telling the stories that mattered about a disease that had been ravaging the LGBTQ+ community since 1982.
It's art at its best which is probably why it resonates with my students today.
A word about intention...
When I began sharing my work online, my first and only intent was to help middle school chorus music teachers and the teachers who teach them because I know how hard I struggled in the beginning of my career. I've shared hundreds of videos and blog posts.
90% of my work is free, and I'm proud of that.
Since 1989 when I began teaching in public schools, I've always followed the lead of my students and empowered them to use their voices and rarely have they led me astray. Most of the time, when they've had a crazy idea that I knew was not a good one, I've caught it and re-directed.
If they are wrong, and I don't catch that something we are doing is harmful to someone, I'll take the hit and learn the lesson as I've done each time in my life when I've made mistakes.
Being chased out of my home at age 11 by a close family member who was carrying a gun aimed at me because he was mad that I'd hidden all of the alcohol makes me personally familiar with addiction ....the multiple suicide attempts by family members...The numerous bipolar people in my family bloodline...I could go on and on. So, I should have caught why the post that created the anger hurt people who are mentally ill or who live with people who are struggling with those issues, and I didn't. I took down the post within two hours or so of posting when I realized I had been insensitive. I would have done it sooner, but I have a full-time job teaching public school and was teaching my students. Once, I took it down, I played a game of "whack a mole" as the bullies/harassers/inciters went to work popping up on all sorts of Facebook pages and Twitter, etc. trying to incite our colleagues against me and attempting to defame me for the next 48 hours...most of whom were bandwagon folks who know nothing about my work.
I've been here for a minute...
I am very quick to recognize the intent of people...especially the intent of bullies, inciters and people who defame...people who want to harass for the sake of harassing...
And our intents, mine and theirs, were definitely not the same in this moment in time of the weekend of 2/26/21.
I've been bullied for being gay since middle school, so being bullied by others isn't new for me...but I have to admit...it's a little extra and quite shocking when so many of the people doing the bullying and harassing are adults and colleagues who have the "she/her" or "he/him" or "queer" or "ableist" label as a part of their Twitter/Facebook profiles and who say they are advocates for social justice. The intent of most people who came for me that day was to destroy, defame, harass, bully and incite...and that is dangerous for me and my family.
The bullying and harassment that I endured this past weekend is the same as all the bullying ever is/was and will be.
Same as January 6, 2021.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then awesome...you had a restful weekend!
For those of you who did the bullying/harassing...fortunately, you were a very small minority of people...because people who truly know my record and my work defended me vigorously without any push from me.
And whether you believe in your heart that you didn't really say anything online to incite or defame....or that you were only there to educate and "call out"...Think again. If you continued to call me out in public for hours after I'd recognized and acknowledged and apologized and removed the post, you are the same as the ones who told people to stop buying my work and drew clown faces on my photos and called me all sorts of names.
Do you like it when your administrators publicly defame your work in front of your faculty colleagues for a mistake you've made? Do you enjoy it when your students publicly challenge and gang up on you over a decision you've made? Is that your preferred way of being corrected? After all, you are the leader of your choirs/bands/orchestras, right?
Of course the answer is obvious...
I am and always have been a private message away. I've listened to the teachers who have followed my work from the beginning, and they have shaped me every step of the way in all sorts of positive ways.
Your reactions and re-posting over and over closed the largest Middle School Choir Facebook page because of how you handled this. It was a resource for 5800 middle school chorus teachers, and the admin has hidden it...all because of this. The admin of the group was abused and harassed as badly as I was and perhaps even more so.
Harassing and bullying me or anyone else on social media is so easy. It has heightened since the pandemic began a year ago.
I've watched in horror as choir directors have attacked each other like never before.
And it isn't productive.
It's like road rage.
It's simple.
It's not artistic...not interesting...
It's cowardly.
The people who do it as well as the people who encourage the mob mentality that occurred during this episode are really angry at their husbands or wives or children or how their life turned out, and they find it easy to yell at, condemn, and try to harm someone they don't know from behind a keyboard.
In my humble opinion, the methods used last weekend by the angry mob are not the way to win hearts and minds. In fact, I believe that it does the opposite.
We are all humans first...before all of the other labels that we use for ourselves or others to place them or ourselves into a single one-dimensional character of some sort. We human beings have many dimensions that make up our spirits and the moment we lose sight of that, we are all at war.
Humans make errors.
Here is the apology that I posted just hours after the post- Click here.
One of the most important lessons I learned early in my teaching career was that my middle school students respond best when they are praised in public and corrected in private.
As colleagues, I believe that we should all do that for each other.
Thank you to every single person who has sent me private messages of support on Facebook, Twitter and via email and to the throngs of people who have come to join me and my colleagues as new members of the I Teach Middle School! Facebook page...where we collaborate...where we are kind...where we help each other be better for the children respectfully...always.
Let's all be kinder to each other.
Humankind.
Be both.
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Update- On 3/3/21, I voluntarily met on Zoom with 11 members of the "Music Educator's for Social Justice" Facebook page. We had a respectful face to face dialogue about everything mentioned above, and I think we all felt "heard".
Facts about the meeting-
They allowed me to set some of parameters for the meeting because I didn't want a mob of angry people.
I wanted a dialogue.
Of the 11 people who were in attendance, there was one man among them, and there were no African-Americans or Asian-Americans. Everyone else appeared to be of European descent, but after taking note of this and asking the moderator directly after the meeting was over about why there were no people of color in the meeting, I learned that the moderator was Indigenous.
The format the organizers chose for the meeting was "Progressive Stack". What this means according to Wikipedia is-
The progressive stack is a technique used to give marginalized groups a greater chance to speak. It is sometimes an introduction to, or stepping stone to, consensus decision-making in which simple majorities have less power.
The ages of the people in the group appeared to be between 28 and 45 with one exception. One of the participants appeared to be in her 50's or early 60's.
I am 57 years old. Realizing that most people do not believe that I appear to be 57 years old myself, I could have guessed these ages incorrectly, although at one point during the meeting, the moderator did acknowledge that most, if not all, of the people in the meeting had been teaching fewer years than I and were likely younger than I am.
In the meeting minutes, as the cisgender male, I was identified as last to speak.
After the harassment I had experienced for those previous five days at the hands of these people and the people in their Facebook group, those statistics and those choices were not lost on me...Especially as someone who has always valued diversity and has taught in inner city public schools with students from all racial and socio-economic backgrounds since 1989.
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I have numerous personal takeaways from this entire experience that helped to teach me about thinking a bit more about how my posts can help and harm, intentionally or unintentionally.
One of the members of the group who attended the meeting mentioned that she often speaks about "intention versus impact" and seemed to imply that my intention was irrelevant in this moment because the impact of my post was greater. And to that I say, the impact of destroying each other is far bigger.
So, let's stop.
Ironically and thankfully for me, she was also the only person who apologized for the defamation and incitement that ensued once people who know little about me or my work jumped on board.
I thanked her then...and I thank her here now.
I believe that the people in the Zoom meeting heard me as well...that attacking our colleagues online in faceless public forums is not brave. It is not educational. It is not social activism. It can incite harm on those who are attacked.
Just 8 weeks ago, on January 6, we saw the results of years of incitement on the capital lawn, and people died.
We are better than that.
We have got to ratchet down our hateful rhetoric on all social media platforms and stop criticizing our colleagues whom we don't know personally who are really doing the best they can.
Fear of public ridicule and rebuke is at least one of the reasons our own middle school students don't want to answer questions and speak up in class. This meeting was important for me because after experiencing the bullying, harassment and incitement of the people in the group, I was taken back to my own 8th grade locker room where I was incessantly bullied.
I needed to face the bullies.
And I did.
That was a long time ago, and now, what is most important is that we get up today and protect our own children from the bullying and harassment and teach them love and acceptance...and of course...music!
"When we know better, we do better." Maya Angelou
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I posted this quick and easy lesson idea on my YouTube Channel, on Monday morning after dealing with this all weekend. It's working great for me virtually, and I think it will help ease my upcoming transition to concurrent teaching as well.
Looking forward to the art that is created out of this pain as we process what has happened over this last year. ...and to singing "live" together again when it is safe.
Have a great week!
I've got students to teach and who need me...and you do too...especially now.
Let's get on with it.
There is No Day But Today.
