-: I really love my kids.
I really love when we are singing a piece of music
and they finally get something really right
and you can just see how proud they are of themselves.
Or when we get through a song and they,
you can see across their faces that they have connected
with the music.
Last month in one of my,
this is general seventh and eighth grade choir.
So it's kids that love to sing
but maybe this is their first year in a choir at school.
Or it's kids that are not quite at the advanced level
but they're not quite at the beginning level either,
they're somewhere in the middle.
We are singing a song that's mostly in English,
but there's one Swahili phrase.
That repeats over and over and over again.
And it was like pulling teeth to get them to sing
this one phrase that is not in English.
But they finally did it.
And then we used this song to talk about
how any song, no matter if it's a choir piece
or if it's Beyonce or One Direction or a pop song
or a hip hop or anything, if it has words it tells a story.
It's a lot of
struggling to get them to work together sometimes.
It's a lot of struggling to get past the drama
in their lives to just sing for me for 50 minutes everyday.
But, as I build a relationship with them that gets easier.
The administrative stuff is the really hard stuff
because all you wanna do as a teacher is teach.
And those things aren't bad things,
but it just, you know, when you've got five minutes
for announcements and five minutes to pass out this thing
for the front office and five minutes to do this
and five minutes to do that,
suddenly you've only got 15 minutes to actually do
your lesson and that gets frustrating and hard.