First Full Week at New Job Starting - Much Excite!

This is just a quick note to let the world know about this feeling.

Partly because I'm in an extended tryout phase, I think this might be what it feels like to be a baseball free agent. I'm working out with a franchise that sure feels like a great fit. I'm excited to the point of near-tears. I am finally getting a shot to do make somewhat-of-a-living doing what I'm wired to do.

Here's how it went down.

I had gotten my substitute-teaching badge, and I knew that the Adult Ed Center existed. I have background in Adult Ed because I'm a barbershop chorus director, plus that was my master's at Kansas State University. So, when the HR rep at the AEC called to inquire about my interest to sub for them and asked about my background, she asked if I'd want to look at being a regular teacher there!

It's so strange to have a new entity say "we've gotten a good impression of you; we already know that we want you." Dear Reader, this does not feel real. Do good things actually happen in this miserable world? Even to lil' ol me?

New Job! First Day!

This new gig is apparently going to use every work skill I've ever acquired. Here's what I've learned in the early stages of my orientation process.

I am now a GED instructor-in-training at an Adult Education Center. One of the strangest phenomena? I'm actually using my degree for this job! Imagine that. A millenial. Working in their field of study. Who'dathunk it?

Skillset = Applied

A probably-not-exhaustive list

Disability services

Since 2013, I've been working in direct support for adults with developmental disabilities and/or on the autism spectrum. I've learned a lot about the minefield of ableism one must tiptoe through. Some of our students at the adult ed center are people who slipped through the cracks, perhaps for reasons of slight-to-major disabilities that went undetected.

Tutoring

I worked as a tutor at St. John's Military School for 7 years. I also have helped other community members on test prep. It's amazing all the holes one finds in people's academic ship that need to be caulked. And all signs say that's what we do in GED prep.

Teamwork

As a barbershop chorus director and member of the municipal band board, I participate in team meetings. Before being part of these organizations, I never knew that I could enjoy business meetings. When you care deeply about an organization's thrival, suddenly talking about logistics and learning monitoring becomes a joyful experience. At our adult ed center, it appears we basically have a turn-teaching mentality, and this means lots of communication and meetings.

Following guidelines

Working with folks with disabilities, one gets accustomed to filling out forms that are required by oversight boards to be done just-so. The adult ed center, similarly, answers to funding and oversight. Interestingly, I have found occasionally lacking in my fellow direct support workers skills that we teach for the GED. For example, when filling out incident reports, direct support workers are supposed to be just-the-facts-jack objective - opinion and feelings are largely irrelevant. I will probably be teaching this kind of writing to my GED students.

Memory recall

I have 19.something years of experience in the workforce. I've done cashiering, fast-food-ing, night-auditing, collegiate speech judging, vehicle delivery, leadership, and planning. Oh yeah... and athletics and sports fandom are my hobbies... and I have a master's degree in Adult Learning & Leadership. In relating to students and finding a pathway to successful instruction, I'm probably going to be mining every work experience I've ever had.

Maintain professional distance

This may prove to be the most challenging of all skills. While I will respect each individual I teach as an independent adult, I do tend to get attached to people fairly easily, especially if, y'know, they kinda need me/I can be useful to their life. Maintaining professional distance isn't easy to do when working with folks with disabilities because, in part, they tend to be so real and sincere. It's easy to be emotionally available to people who see you as a human just as you see them. My main coping mechanism for professional distance appears to be "keep moving; what's next on the agenda today?". In other words, I don't give myself time to dwell on any passing emotion from the day. There's music to play, books to read, comedic current-events videos to watch, and people to see. Just keep swimming.

Instruction

This goes without saying so much that I'm including it at the end (inverted pyramid, donchaknow). To me, instruction means three main things: 1) care for the individual, 2) seek to inspire my love of the subject matter, 3) and humble stubornness - when there's something a student needs to learn, I just keep trying different methods until something clicks for them.

Conclusion

Thus, ergo, and so, it looks like this job is going to use every professional tool and memory I've ever acquired.

Harmony is for Everyone

Like a good amateur journalist, I'm giving you the most crucial thing first... This link.
This is one of the greatest barbershop quartets of all time.
"But, Michael, I thought barbershop quartets were men."
Not always, dear reader. In fact, often not.

Sandi Wright herself once graced me with the chance to sing the tag (what's a "tag"? see previous blog post, Harmonizing the World: The First Falling Pebbles) from this song. I cherish this memory!

Wherever you are on the gender spectrum, barbershop is for you.

But, I'll be frank; I didn't always enjoy women's quartets. My only saving grace is that my mind was open enough to receive new data to change my mind. Four years ago, I got to watch a master barbershop coach work with The Ladies. Beautiful sound. Fabulously cohesive group. They opened my eyes and my heart to women's barbershop. They even inspired me to write a tag specifically in a key for "women's" (in the loose sense of the word; gender is a spectrum, of course) voices. It's called "Bittersweetness". I should probably try to generate a Spanish version now, too, huh?

Why Do We Insist on Making Learning Music Hard? Episode One

Pick up a sheet of vocal music and tell someone to read it.
Now, try to explain why, in 2021, we aren't printing/displaying sheet music such that the frequency spaces between notes are more to-scale.
Seriously.
It's time.
We ask new singers and new musicians to overcome this pretty-glaring issue of inaccuracy.
"How far up do I go from a C to the note on the next line?", they might ask.
Well, it depends on the key", we say.
WHY???
Why can't we just pinch the lines in for the half-step distances? Surely, we have the technology to do this. The graph-that-is-the-staff should be to scale!
...
...
Now, the barbershopper in me also believes that it wouldn't kill us to do this for chords, too, but there are different schools of thought on whether you harmonize to the melody or to the key. So, for now, making the musical scale a more accurate graph, and thus more intuitive for learners, would be a nice start.

Harmonizing the World: the First Falling Pebbles

Like the first pebbles of the rock slide, I hope that my goal to harmonize the world can start with my little grad school project of generating Spanish lyrics for barbershop harmony "tags".
If you're familiar with some music terms (and even if you're not), a barbershop "tag" is a coda.
Within Barbershop culture, there is an entire sub-culture comprised strictly of learning and singing tags (there is also a social component).
It took me a couple of years to start to get why people loved tags. I'm going to save you the trouble.
Not an exhaustive list, but this will get you started:
It's almost akin to learning/singing the gist of the entire song. Efficiency!
Arrangers often put the coolest chords into the tags.
You can switch and sing multiple parts.
You get to practice little techniques you've been working on, and putting them into a semi-complete context.
As a teaching vehicle, tags allow a coach/director to provide many opportunities... Give singers chances to have their first taste of quarteting; show the learners that they can do all of the above; develop learning-by-ear skills... And so many more.

Having shown this, you can see part of why I think tags could be a great vehicle to bringing the spirit of harmony around the world: efficiency.

But, there are thousands of extant languages, so how can a barbershopper like me reach out to other people in the world? If I expect them to sing in U.S. English, they're likely to be less comfortable. So, we make versions of the tags in their language! :)

Enjoy the first pebbles!
~Michael

Comparative Education, Music-style

I think it'd be great to work for some organization that does comparative education research in music.
There would be so many benefits.
But, the way the job market is, I doubt there's anything available.
So, it falls to me to do the work here. At the least, it'll be fun and I'll learn things.
And it'd give me some samples to send to companies in case they need someone.

Coaching Wisdom in the Trenches

The two paramount priorities of education should be kindess and inspiration.

We can talk all day about teaching methods and their efficacy (and there are gobs of good ones), but those are supplements.

I enjoy an advanced discussion as much as the next nerd, but, when it comes to coaching, I like being in the trenches.

In my tutoring experience, I have loved the challenge of trying to change people's minds about subjects I love.

Think about your field. If you love it, you want more people to love it. Of course you do. So, we should teach to clone our love. We should love the learners. Everything else flows from these two principles. We want the learners to stay connected to our subjets long after they have ceased accepting our services. It does less good to focus primarily on the immediate. Our goal is to maximize their potential, and, as we all know, that means delayed payoff sometimes.

For example, I've been studying music formally since 2003 and I feel like I am only just now beginning to round out. My music teachers best accomplished the payoff of avoiding harm. This is to say that I feel like I might have learned more if I had been more motivated to practice. Still, my teachers never made me feel like I wasn't good enough ... that I couldn't learn. Hence, to this day, I keep getting incrementally better. Michael Tate is a near-master's graduate in Adult Learning and Leadership. He directs a men's barbershop harmony chorus.