It has been an eventful month and a half. Shortly after finishing finals for spring quarter, I flew down to Salem to see my family. The following day, I flew with my mom and dad to visit my sister and her husband in California and spend three days in Palm Springs. Afterwards, I had a few days at home to catch up with family, then drove to Portland to see another friend, then drove up to Seattle, discovered that my car’s battery decided it no longer liked me, replaced said battery, and made it to Vancouver on Sunday night in time to start my intensive week-long course on prayer the following morning. Monday through Friday, I was in class for approximately four hours a day, and spending about an additional two to three hours for daily reading. That weekend, we had a prayer retreat at Cedar Springs Retreat Center just across the border in Washington. (Since I have my car up here for the summer, I was put in charge of transporting all the “foreigners”: i.e. those from neither the US nor Canada. Since all of them were female, we realized afterward that it might have looked a bit odd to have a single male driver transporting a vehicle full of foreign females. However, I suppose we looked innocent enough to avoid giving the border guards too suspicious, since they didn’t give us any trouble. And, fortunately, I left my gold-plated cane and leopard-print coat at home).
The prayer retreat was really good, although quite intense (as I suppose spending 48 hours in more-or-less constant prayer, or at least prayerfulness, would have to be). I got confronted with a lot of stuff that has been building through this past year: bitterness against Regent about disappointed expectations and perceived grievances; bitterness against God for frustrated ambitions. This year has been yet another experience of thinking that I had known what I had gotten myself into, and having to spend a long time being re-educated to the fact that (shockingly enough), I’m still not in charge.
Still, the summer so far has been quite good. I quite unexpectedly got offered a job three days a week teaching music at a Christian school in the absence of the regular teacher. This, too, posed some unexpected challenges; I had thought that, after teaching in a low-income public school with predominantly ESL students, teaching at a Christian school would be a cake walk. I’ve actually found that it’s the most challenging group of children that I’ve yet had to work with. There are several reasons for this, I’m sure. One is that, due to the small number of students, I work with students with a wide range of age. I have 40 minutes with K-2 (in which we theoretically are trying to learn notes, but practically, most of the time is spent just trying to get them to stand still long enough to tell them anything). I then have 40 minutes with 3-5 (working with recorders); and then 50 minutes with 6-9 (ukuleles, which I had to learn to play the day before starting my job). Within these age ranges, you have a wide range of musical experience as well, from Asian 8th graders who have taken piano since they were five and practiced very consistently throughout that period, to students with no musical experience whatsoever. Further, since I started three weeks before the end of the year, it was hard to know what the routine was, and how to best insert myself into it.
However, beyond all these pragmatic reasons, one other thing that struck me as a possible reason for the difficulty is precisely that these kids, in general, do come from loving, stable homes. It’s counter-intuitive, but what I learned in public school is that, if you actually care about a child as a person, that child will respond by attempting to please you. However, I get the feeling that since these children largely have their needs for affirmation met at home, a teacher’s approval is a commodity of lower value.
That said, the job has been a great blessing. There’s the obvious financial side of things. But, more than that, I feel it’s been a link to reality: a chance to be deeply immersed in something that matters. And, while it has been an occasion to learn on the fly, I find that kind of challenge invigorating (at least, in moderate doses), and it has been quite rewarding to grow as a musician, teacher, etc. I made a three-part arrangement of Ode to Joy for the 3-5s to perform on recorders, which was the first experience many of them have had of playing something in harmony. It was amazing the change that happened in that class once they could hear that they were actually making music, not simply squeaking out notes. Although I wouldn’t buy a recording of it, it was still the most beautiful music I’ve heard in a long time.