Last Saturday, a group of women who are also Luther students perform Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues in order to raise money and awareness for abused women. At first, I wasn't sure how this shocking and powerful performance of a rather risque work was related to education, and then I realized that education doesn't always have to do with music in the k-12 public school system. Sometimes, education can have to do with things that I learned, or things that people in general learned. I think both are true of the performance of the Vagina Monologues. Although I was shocked by some of the colorful things that were said, I learned a lot, especially about the shocking rate of abuse among women. I'm sure that no one in the audience went away thinking that they had known everything that had been presented. Education sometimes shows itself in situations like this that were educational in that they were meant to raise awareness. It really got me thinking about how broad education really is.

Over the weekend, I saw a great movie, Music of the Heart, that I thought was relevant to teachers in the public schools. It's particularly relevant to music teachers, which is great since that's why I'm at Luther in the first place. The plot focuses on Meryl Streep's character, Roberta, who decided to give up her dream to be a concert violinist and teach instead because she was told she wasn't good enough. Recently divorced and with two young children, Roberta literally has to beg for a job at an inner-city school teaching violin classes. Her first year was a little rough. The kids were hard to work with and Roberta's fellow faculty members weren't much better. The students, for the most part, came from rough home lives and many were a lot to handle for just one teacher. The other music teacher at Roberta's elementary school was only there to get his paycheck. He was not invested in his students and he was not invested in helping Roberta and seeing her program grow. It also seemed that none of the students' parents cared about what their children were learning. One mother in particular, whose son really did want to learn to play the violin, refused to let him continue in Roberta's class because she did not want him playing music by "dead white men." But despite having the odds stacked against her, Roberta continued to perservere, knowing that she wanted to teach these children to play the violin. She learned to adapt. During one class, when she discovered one of her students wasn't "standing strong" because she had weak ankles, she allowed Guadalupe to sit. In fact, Guadalupe always sat, and neither Roberta nor the other students in the class ever said anything about it. She adapted when it was necessary without making the young violinist feel out of place. When she recieved notice from the administration that she was being too harsh with her students, she tried to make the necessary adjustments in her classroom, although the students did ask her why she was acting so strangely and told her that they preferred the old Roberta better. As the school continues and Roberta becomes more and more involved in the program, she also becomes more and more involved in students' lives. One morning, she walks into school only to discover that one of her violinists was accidentally killed in a drive-by shooting. No one was expected to play that day. Instead, the students sat in a circle with their teacher and she asked if they wanted to talk about it. They agreed that they should play the violin instead. However, a few evenings later, Roberta went to the home of one boy who was particularly upset over the accident. She wanted to know if he was okay or if he needed to talk to her about it. It was this scene that made me realize that Roberta had become much more than a violin teacher, and these kids from the inner city had become much more than her students. A few weeks later, Roberta discovered that the school district's budget cuts would make it impossible for her to continue teaching her violin class, which, by this time, had become wildly popular. With the help of her students and such violinists as Ithak Perlman, Isaac Stern and Joshua Bell, a benefit concert to raise money to keep the program is prepared in only six short weeks. The concert at Carnegie Hall raised over four thousand dollars and helped the program stay alive. It was a feel-good movie and there were a lot of good themes presented. It would be worth the time of any music education major out there to see this movie.

So here's something that's been on my mind a lot lately. Why do we distribute funds to public schools in the way we do here in the Untied States? Funding for public schools is based on property tax, so a neighborhood with a lot of well-off families will have well-funded schools. And that's great. I'm all for well-funded schools. The problem starts when we look at neighborhoods where families just don't have the same assets. Neighborhoods that pay less in taxes get less back in their school systems. I still can't figure out why we do it this way. It only perpetuates the vicious cycle: students don't get a quality education in the public schools, many drop out of school (Why should they stay if they're not going to learn anything anyway?) and end up in low-paying, dead-end jobs, so that when they have kids, the cycle can start over. I admit that I came from an affluent neighborhood and from a school that had enough funding to educate its students well. But looking back, the day my AP Chemistry teacher threw a sizeable chunk of sodium into a bucket of water just to show is that it explodes was probably not the best use of funds. Why can't we take some of the funding away from the rich suburban schools and redirect it in a way that can be beneficial for American schools as a whole? I am ashamed to think that some schools have money to literally throw around, while others do not have what they need to teach adequately.

People teach for a lot of different reasons. The whole "Those who can't do, teach" stigma gives teachers kind of a bad name. But I know many people who CAN do who WANT to teach. That's why I'm in this business. I want to teach. I've had so many good teachers who have helped make me the person I am today, and I want to have an impact on someone's life in the same way. There are a lot of different attributes for good teachers. I think among the most important are patience and understanding. Not all students are going to have the same abilities and interests, and it's such a hard balance to strike. Teachers want to challenge the strongest students without leaving the weakest in the dust. How do you do that? And how do we most effectively learn? Do we need to have work to learn? I don't think so, although it is important to reinforce learning in some way. So when does work become "busy work?" Of course, as teachers, we want students to get the most out of our subject as we can, but we can't overwhelm them. Again, we need to strike a balance. And that's something we figure out the more we teach. As teachers, we never stop learning. And I think that's so cool.