Teaching is not easy.
That was the takeaway many public officials and community leaders said Wednesday afternoon after spending the day in classrooms across the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District.
The district had allowed guest teachers into Sudduth Elementary, Ward-Stewart Elementary, Henderson School, Armstrong Middle School and Starkville High School, pairing them with educators so they could better understand the demands of the profession.
I spent my day in Starkville High School’s choral hall with choir teachers Regina Weeks and Joel Barron and their intern, Amy Arinder, a Mississippi State University teacher.
The day didn’t just include teaching. Barron and Weeks attended a faculty meeting during their second block planning period, where high school administration reviewed the process to turn in old laptops at the end of the year as the district prepares to get new ones. After that, Weeks had to review and critique a video for another teacher in the state she’s mentoring as the teacher prepares to become board certified.
The juggling act
The choirs at Starkville High are locked into contest preparation mode now, with state competition in Pearl looming next Wednesday. Because of this, I didn’t get the chance for much hands-on instruction, but I was perfectly happy to spend the day observing — beyond some basic similarities I could pull from my years as a band student, I don’t know a lick about choir.
The three classes started with warmups to prepare the students before they moved to practicing their music. From there, the classes varied as Weeks and Barron worked with each group.
It seemed to me that a director has to wear many hats.
Beyond conducting the choir and teaching the students, Weeks and Barron at times had to be motivators or disciplinarians. Sometimes they had to split focuses, like during fourth block when Weeks had to quiet students chattering in a back corner while she conducted a smaller ensemble.
All the while, they had to keep an ear open for the little things. Starkville High School’s choral students are talented and often sounded quite good to my unprofessional ear. But Weeks and Barron were quick to point out the small things here and there that will be crucial to impressing judges next week. Sometimes students needed to drop a bit of Southern drawl from pronunciation, or maybe one section was a little too overpowering. At times they needed to focus on emphasizing the proper syllable.
“It’s the little things like that are the difference between an ‘excellent’ and a ‘superior,'” Weeks told them. A superior is the highest rating in competition.
Still, Barron and Weeks weren’t afraid to let students have fun. The first two classes ended with Arinder working through pieces with dances for the spring choral concert.
In the second class, made up entirely of freshmen, a student convinced Weeks to let her conduct “Omnia Soul” after her classmates insisted that Weeks had to see the student’s impression of conducting.
So Weeks let the student, Asia, take the stand to conduct while she joined the students. Even that was a learning opportunity, as Weeks told Asia to be expressive, rather than mechanical, as she led the choir.
I thought classes would settle down as the day went on, and going by Starkville Fire Chief Charles Yarbrough’s story of his shock of how wired up elementary students were after lunch, I wasn’t the only volunteer to find out I was wrong.
“It gets rowdier at the end of the day,” Barron said. “The students haven’t seen each other all day, and they’re close to each other, which is great. They’re also ready to go home, so the energy is higher, which can make it tougher to keep that focus we need.”
The Starkville-Oktibbeha school district organized Wednesday’s “Educator for a Day” event to build bridges with the community.
‘Build some bridges’
Ginger Tedder, a teacher at Starkville High School, led the charge, with support from Niki Mulrooney and Carie McMillen from Henderson School, Monica Nunn at Ward-Stewart Elementary, Jennifer Carver at Armstrong Middle School, and Cindy Prewitt at Sudduth Elementary.
Tedder said she got the idea last summer at the Teach to Lead summit in Washington D.C. She said she liked it because it was a chance to open the district’s doors to the community.
“The perception was that the community wasn’t welcome in our schools,” Tedder said. “We realized that we had to build some bridges there and bring the community in.”
Tedder said it took a district-wide effort to make the Educator for a Day event happen, from administration, to teachers.
“We really wanted to strive for transparency,” Tedder said. “There wasn’t sugar-coating anything. This was the real deal.”
Because of that, Mulrooney said letting outsiders into the school could be scary, especially for the teachers who paired off with guest teachers.
But the teachers said that raw presentation was good — it showed that teaching is a challenge, and that it would hopefully give the community a better idea of what it’s like to be in the classroom day in and day out.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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