I just got home from a choir and band performance at a local mall. There were lots of parents, students, teachers, and administrators there and it was, indeed, a very good thing. They performed just outside a Barnes & Noble store, where I met the manager and my friend said that he would work with our English department for fund raising, summer reading lists, whatever we need. We made a nice contact to have on file and enjoyed ourselves doing it. Oh. And I bought about $100 worth of books, 15% of which went to our music department.
So maybe the way to keep everyone involved in the system is to have more of those. Perhaps that’s the key role of arts classes, to give the opportunity for emotional investment whenever possible, and not just to students taking the classes but to everyone involved in the school. That emotional involvement is crucial. If it’s missing, there’s no reason to take an interest in the school’s well being. If it’s there, nothing can stop people working to make things better.
We all stood and listened to the choir and band perform and had a great time, though a few complained of sore feet on the way out. I know several choir and band students so it was really nice to see them enjoying life. Of course, I was running through options for how to get students to care enough about an English project to show up after school for practices and, ultimately, the performance. I’m thinking of something like a Lit Jam night. A few rapper-students of mine would like to drop a rhyme or two and that could be a nice venue. Again, it would be a chance to build up an emotional attachment to the school and to see kids enjoying themselves. I was thinking of the final publication of the classroom anthology to be all audio posted online. The Lit Jam night could be the live version. I’d post the text of stories online, too, and burn a CD for all interested students. It’s a thought.
Overall, I’m just happy that my school put on a good show for the community (both choir and band sounded amazing; just imagine the reverb they had in a mall setting) and that builds good feeling toward the school. We need to do more of these things and it needs to be more than one department. How cool would it be if my school put on some kind of public performance every or every other month throughout the entire school year? How much more connected to the school would the community feel?