Here is the transcription of my most recent video blog:
(And here’s the audio on AnchorFM)
Hey friends, it’s Queen Mab, and I guess I get a “C” in video blogging, because I made it to 74 out of 100 days before I needed to stop. But that’s okay. A “C” is passing, and I will take it. So anyway, I just tried to make two different videos. I’m having a little bit of trouble coming up with a coherent topic tonight. However, it’s important to me to finish this, because I know that if I don’t post another video, I’m gonna go into my all or nothing thinking about how “I failed, because I didn’t make it to 100 days,” so I will finish this, dang it!
Anyways, so part of the reason I decided to stop this week was because my students had a concert, and that is a very stressful thing for me. I don’t know if I can really adequately put it into words for someone who is not a teacher. It’s kind of like trying to conduct multiple symphonies at the same time, because on the one hand, I have to deal with the students and making sure that the students are prepared. And of course, they never are…up until, like the last minute. There’s something about just being in front of an audience that really finally gets them to focus and draws the music out of them, in a sense. So there’s that. There’s the students.
Okay, then there’s all of the various logistics, okay? And in my case, that has to do with coordinating with other classes, because we don’t have any access to melodic percussion instruments, so I have to find like, a guitarist, and a singer, and some different people to accompany us so that we’re playing an actual song. And then I have to deal with facilities and the administration and all of those kinds of things. And I don’t want to go into too much detail about that, but I’m just gonna say that none of that is particularly friendly to me or to my students, okay?
So I was dealing with all of that this week, and I knew that trying to make videos on top of that was just going to be too much. So I wanted to say that I wish that we treated teachers the way that we treat rock stars. There’s a lot of stuff out there about like, “Oh, thank you teachers! Oh my God, you’re superheroes! Oh my God!” And that is a bunch of junk. We are not superheroes. We are human beings who are earning a living through educating young people. And some people are doing that because they really feel the call to educate, and it’s really what moves their soul, and some people are doing that because for whatever reason, that is where they have found themselves in their lives. I’m somewhere in the middle – I’ll be honest about that. I don’t really identify with either camp. There’s a lot about teaching that I love. There’s a lot about teaching that…well, I probably have to use some four letter words to talk about it, okay?
But the fact of the matter is that doing a concert with students is so much more challenging for me than doing a concert on my own. However, if I do a concert on my own, that earns me musician points. That earns me street cred. But if I’m doing a concert with my middle school students, well then, I’m just a teacher. And I really think that’s nonsense, and I wish that we as a culture would take teachers a little bit more seriously and understand that it is a huge amount of work.
So I think that’s all I have to say. I have a lot more to say, but I’m tired. What else is new? So I hope you liked what I had to say. You can visit queenmabmusic.com for more of my content. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe, and I’ll see you next time. Bye!