Boyd Holmes, the Writer

Lessons from a Trumpet Jury or a Thing Happened on My Way to Mitchell Hall - Part Two

7/27/2022

If you haven’t read “Lessons from a Trumpet Jury or a Thing Happened on My Way to Mitchell Hall - Part One”, give it a good skim before reading Part Two.

It was freshman year at the University of Delaware and I was a first-year music education major, majoring on trumpet. I was in the wings of Mitchell Hall, waiting with my accompanist, Charlotte Joslin, to walk out and play my first trumpet jury.

I was performing a Rafael Méndez trumpet solo.

Walking on stage, the two spotlights obliterated anything in the house that now had adapted crypt-like qualities.

I played the piece.

After I was done, I stood there silently peering into the lights.

I heard footsteps approaching from the house.

It was the low brass professor, a rather sizable man, who spoke with an Alabama drawl.

He walked right up to me, maybe two feet away from my face, seemly unaware of the concept of personal space.

Everything about him exuded disgust and cheap aftershave.

“That is the worst music I have ever heard in my life.”

Pause.

“There is no place for you in the world of music.”

I didn’t move or break eye contact with him.

As he glared at me, Charlotte began to cry. I could hear her whimpering as she slid down behind the piano desk.

I finally responded.

“Are we done here? Is that it?”

He flared his nostrils, widened his eyes, but said nothing more as he walked off stage and back into the cavernous darkness of the house.

Afterwards, I took Charlotte out for a burger and Coke to help make up for her moments of distress caused by me.

My Reaction – or Lack Thereof
What this low brass teacher didn’t know was that I had survived a seven-year gauntlet of sadomasochistic nuns who, in comparison, made his sauce look weak.

If he thought he was going to impress me with his cliché insults, he had to contend with the creative jailers who had repeatedly beat me and made me ingest dusty holy water.

This is not to say that his words had no effect on me.

I placed him in context with other musicians I had met in my career.

My career, you ask?

Yes. I already saw myself as a musician and knew that I had marketable skills.

Before I had ever stepped into a college class, I had already played close to a thousand gigs.

Even more importantly, one of the things I learned while paying my dues was that you criticize the performance, not the performer, a concept that had eluded this low brass teacher on his way to a teaching gig in a college.

Could I have played the jury better?

Of course.

But that’s what I said after almost every gig I had ever played previous to that jury: I could have done it better – and I will next time.

Take Aways for Music Educators
Never let anyone define you.

When confronted with negativity, don’t take the bait - always choose to eschew the drama.

If you are going to predict a student’s future, tell them that they will be successful.

Criticize the performance, not the performer.

Praise the effort anyone makes in any field of endeavor when they travel the road to its destination without giving up along the way.

Training hard will give you confidence and mettle when you’re eventually in the arena. If you only pretended to train hard and still choose to enter the arena, all bets are off and instead of confidence, you will quickly learn what fear tastes like.

Realize that all who are the most successful in achieving their goals demonstrate a curious trait: they help others achieve their goals.

Your goals belong to you and no one else. At the end of the day, let others be responsible for their goals; you be responsible for yours.

Your successes belong to you as but you will only experience the true magnitude of your success when you share your success with those who helped you along the way.

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Lessons from a Trumpet Jury or a Thing Happened on My Way to Mitchell Hall - Part One

7/27/2022

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It was freshman year at the University of Delaware and I was a first-year music education major, majoring on trumpet. I was in the wings of Mitchell Hall, waiting with my accompanist, Charlotte Joslin, to walk out and play my first trumpet jury. As I stood there, I wished I was holding my double bass and reflected on how I got to this moment.

I knew how to play trumpet and had played lots of gigs on trumpet through my high school years, but I was no stellar classical trumpet player. I was an accurate sight reader and more of a jazz or pop player rather than a classical player.

My trumpet heroes were Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Miles Davis, Snooky Young, Marvin Stamm, and Chet Baker.

Each of them had different, distinctive approaches to their instrument and sounded very different than the classical model of tone, Maurice André .

My start on trumpet was atypical.

A Thing Happened on My Way to Mitchell Hall
As a child, by fourth grade, I had large protruding upper teeth.

My mother took me to the orthodontist who had an interesting observation after my appointment.

“I've seen this sort of thing before. You have two options, Mrs. Holmes. The first one is your son gets braces. Second is he learns how to play trumpet.”

My mother was puzzled as she tried to remember if it was trumpet or clarinets that I wanted to play.

She asked the orthodontist “How much will the braces run?”

“Somewhere in the neighborhood of $2000 to $2,500.”

“And do have any idea how much trumpets run?”

The orthodontist shrugged.

“I've heard you can get them for about $125.”

My mom thought for a moment.

“We’ll get back to you on the braces.”

And within a week, I had a brand new used trumpet.

I started taking lessons that summer with Mr. Zollie, a gruff tenor sax player who sounded like Vido Musso and had an Italian marching band that played in the Little Italy area of our town. He also played in bars and roadside joints and specialized in a rock sound that lent itself to him standing on the bar and walling away on “Night Train”.

He had Polaroids to prove it. There he was, channeling his inner Louis Prima, playing his tenor over his head, standing on a bar, with adoring people club patrons holding their Schlitz in wonderment at his musical prowess.

Seemed legit to me.

I never heard Mr. Zollie ever play an instrument that summer. He didn't know how to play trumpet. But he knew how to follow my “A Tune a Day” beginning trumpet book and had a lot of confidence that I would be able to play.

The problem was my teeth. They still painfully cut into my upper lip when I played.

As I would put that 7C mouthpiece up to my mouth and blow, my spit valve ran blood red. I had horrendously bad tone, so much so that when I practiced in my room at home and suddenly stopped, I could hear my parents laughing downstairs.

One day in fifth grade, it all clicked. I'm assuming that my teeth had moved enough so that the overtone series fell into place.

The summer before my freshman year, my band director told me that starting as a freshman, I was going to learn how to play tuba because I was the tallest brass player going into ninth grade and wouldn’t drop it.

I was game.

Before I left the director’s office, he stopped me and said, “Oh, and by the way, you're also going to learn how to play upright double bass.”

I frowned and asked why would I want to do that.

He smiled.

“Because you will be able to play in orchestra and orchestra has thirty-seven members with only four boys.”

I quickly revise my thinking.

“Yeah, that double bass does sound pretty good.”

I ended up studying double bass privately and learned how to make a significant amount of money playing it, from Dixieland gigs to folk mass gigs to pit bands to jazz trios.

When I arrived at the University of Delaware to audition on double bass, one of my auditioners, their trumpet instructor, knew that I play trumpet.

Even though I had brought my upright bass to my college audition, he feigned ignorance and asked “It says on your form here that you also know how to play trumpet. Can you play something for us today on trumpet?”

I responded with “Well, I don't have my trumpet with me and I haven't really prepared anything.”

He smiled.

“Well, I just happen to have a trumpet break here. Why don't you play something from memory.”

So I picked the most obnoxious piece of music that I had memorized, something that I really did not enjoy playing, but I could play fairly well, and I hope it would say to them that I didn't have any taste in music.

I played the first trumpet part from Leroy Anderson’s “Bugler's Holiday”.

By measure eight, both evaluators from the University exclaimed, “You’re in!”

As soon as they said that, I knew I should have played Herb Alpert’s “Spanish Flea”.

The reason they were pushing me to play trumpet was economic. While the university had a student orchestra, they did not have a string program at the time.

If the department I had decided that I could be a double bass major, they would have had to pay out-of-pocket for my out-of-house private study, and that was not happening.

Everything about music at Delaware revolved around marching band, PR image, and the money it drew from alums who were deeply committed to the rah-rah football experience.

The school didn't want a string program that would siphon any talent or budget away from the music department’s wind and percussion contingent.

Thankfully that this changed over the years.

I played in string orchestra for several years.

Some years I played tuba in marching band; some years, trumpet.

I also played second trumpet in the jazz ensemble because the second chair was the improvising chair.

Marching band and jazz ensemble performed some of my arrangemts and one of my compositions was performed at a senior recital.

At that time, I was the only major who was doing those things.

I loved being versatile.

So here I was standing in the wings at Mitchell Hall, the primary performance Hall on the University campus, my first freshman trumpet jury moments away.

To be concluded in “Lessons from a Trumpet Jury or a Thing Happened on My Way to Mitchell Hall - Part Two”

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A Good Song

7/27/2022

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One in the Back Pocket

7/26/2022

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Ahhhh, sweet summer time!

The time to chillax, drift away, and . . . . start planning what music you’re going to do in the next year.

May I suggest . . . plan what you are going to have in your back pocket.

What you have in your back pocket refers to the idea of a song you can pull out on a second’s notice when a great song is needed.

As the song goes, "You're never fully dressed without a song in your back pocket!"

Or something like that.

When do you need to pull a song out of your back pocket?

How about when visitors unexpectedly show up in your class room or in the school.

Superintendents, perspective parents on a tour of the school, politicians, grandparents, photo-ops, visiting educators from other schools, Principals-for the day – all prime candidates for a polished back pocket song.

And over my career, I did one for all the above.

Pro tip: have more than one song in your pocket- you might need an encore.

Then there is the time you have to pull that one special song out of your back pocket: “The” back pocket song.

It has to be a solid vocal number that the kids love to sing, one they have memorized with a very recognizable intro lick.

When kids hear an intro to a song that they love, they immediately buzz and smile because they know what’s coming is something they always look forward to.

If it’s an up-tempo song, make sure it has a physical flourish at the end that ends on a freeze.

If it’s a ballad, make sure that it builds to the last note and that the vowel sounds are as pure as you want to convey that your students are.

Another great opportunity for back pocket songs is when there is a problem during a school assembly and there is an unexpected empty block of time that has fallen into your principal’s lap.

Almost every principal I have worked for has never forgotten the day that their school singers saved the day.

Every year in my elementary school, there were usually at least a half-dozen situations where there were hundreds of kids waiting for something.

They were times like the startup of an assembly, waiting for field trip buses, lunch lines, waiting for buses that broke down at the end of the snowy school day where not only was I able to pull something out of my back pocket, I had to.

My favorite was on those twenty degree winter days at 3:00 when hundreds of kids were bundled up in overcoats, parkas, and cinched hoods, waiting in the bus court for a fleet of late school buses that were stuck in snow somewhere.

Kids would start to get rammy and teachers would nervously look at one another about how they were going to quell the rapidly rising energy in the mile-long line of impatient kids.

I would often turn to two fifth graders, give them each a guitar pick, and tell them to RUN to my music room, bring back my guitar case and be sure that they carry it over their heads when they brought it back to me.

As soon as the back of the bus line saw that guitar travelling in the hall, the positive expectant buzz was in the air: they knew that a song wasn’t far behind.

"Mr. Holmes is gonna sing with us!!"

Without taking off my winter top coat, I would get that guitar out, strap up, and immediately start working the line, singing all the favorite songs that all the kids from kindergarten to fifth grade knew.

It felt like magic.

Guess what was the best day when I pulled some songs out of my back pocket?

My final day of teaching.

It was a sweltering day in June.

The kids had just given me a thunderous clap out through the entire school as I was privileged to lead the bus line for the last time at dismissal.

Like every last day of the school year, there were hundreds of honks from bus horns, hugs, waves, and tears as each of the twenty-five school buses pulled out for the last time for the school year.

Every bus but one.

One bus was missing.

The kids had to patiently sit in the broiling sun on the curb with Assistant Principal Roberta Jacobs and myself, waiting for their bus in the suddenly silent and still parking lot.

After a minute, I knew exactly what to do.

Two fifth graders came running out with my guitar over their heads, I worked the curb, and we shared some back pocket songs for the very last time.

Finally after twenty minutes, the bus came and, along with my guitar, I waved good-bye for the last time.

While I knew that having a bunch of songs in my back pocket was the result of me being proactively ready and planning in the summer time, I realized that it was the power of those songs and the power of all these positive kids, teachers, and administrators raising their voices together with me in hallways, classrooms, assembly halls, and yes, even curbs that was the REAL back pocket magic!

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Forgiveness

7/26/2022

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Choices

7/26/2022

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The Song

7/25/2022

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Sometimes it’s Not about the Notes and Rests: the Other Gun

7/25/2022

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Sometimes, being a music teacher has very little to do with notes and rests and everything to do with everything else – like building relationships.

It was 3:12 at my elementary school. Dismissal had just started and I was headed out of the music room into the bustling hallway to bus duty.

I don't know if you've ever observed the end-of-the-day dismissal at a 700+ student elementary school. It is a major operational, all-hands-on-deck component of each and every school day.

In the hands of a good administrator, the dismissal plan can make a well-oil machine look rusty. The goal is for all of the children to start walking out the doors of their rooms at different times over the span of three minutes and create a flow of students out of the building.

It sounds a lot easier than it is to accomplish.

My school’s dismissal plan was a cross between Balanchine’s “Swan Lake” and Eisenhower's Normandy invasion.

So it came to be that this day at 3:12 that the principal's voice came the school speaker system.

“Mr Holmes, immediately report to the B hallway!”

As I started walking to the B hallway, I felt more and more like an out-of-place salmon trying to swim upstream in the Monongahela River. The halls were flooded with kids going in the opposite direction.

By the time I approached the B hallway, kids were running past me.

As I turn the corner and walk down the B hall, I saw the principal at the end of the desolate hallway, standing outside a classroom door.

Walking up to her I realized how quiet the school had become.

“What's up?”, I asked.

“I need you to go in that room. The teacher told me that there's a kid in there who apparently asked one of his classmates at dismissal if he wanted to see a gun that was in his backpack."

Going full-on sotto voce, she said, "You need to go in and check his backpack and tell me if there’s a gun in it. We’ve emptied the hallway and are going to evacuate the building depending what you find.”

At this point, because I have an over-active smart-ass chromosome floating around in my genome, I started thinking of all the possible snappy comebacks.

”Why don't you want to go in there? Why waste a good administrator should there be a problem, right?” or “Lucky for me, I wore my bullet-proof three-piece black suit today.”

“Is he angry?” I inquired as I peered through the window in the door.

“That's a good question.”, she said over her shoulder as she ran down the hallway away from the classroom.

I entered the room.

There was one second grader with a forlorn look on his face sitting at his desk.

He was a good kid who loved music class.

I asked him to come up with his backpack and sit with me on the rug where they do circle time.

Pointing at his bag, I started with, “So I hear you have something special in your bag there. What is it?”

“Am I going to get in trouble?”

“That all depends. What's in the bag? Did you bring something from home that's in your bag?”

The boy started whimpering.

“Mommy said I wasn't allowed to bring it to school but I did and I'm sorry. Am I in trouble?”

“Well, let's just check out what's in that bag. Unzip it for me, please.”

I looked in and along with his take-home folder and some Pokémon cards, there was a baggie filled with “Double Bubble” bubble gum.

“What did you tell that your classmate that you had in your bag? Did you say you wanted to show him a gun that was in your bag?”

The kid looked at me like I was speaking in a foreign language.

“No, I said I had gum. I wanted to show him my GUM. Mommy told me I wasn't allowed to bring my gum to school but I did and I wanted to show him. Am I in trouble?”

“Nah, you’re okay,” I said reassuringly.

“You're not in trouble with me or with anyone else here at school. Mommy might be a different story."

He didn't look convinced.

"Tell you what. When we tell Mommy that you brought the gum to school, I'm going to tell her that you're one of my best musicians in music class so that might make her a little less ticked off.”

As his fear was began to fade, so did my avuncular smile.

“If mommy says don't bring something to school, you leave it at home next time.”

We were up and moving to the door. I could see the principal peeking in the window.

I turned back to the boy and whispered to him.

“But for now, you know what your teachers always say: sharing is caring. How about you share a piece of that “Double Bubble” with Mr Holmes?” which he gladly did.

I popped it in my mouth and loudly said “Let's hurry up, I think they're holding your bus for you.”

As the boy and I walked out of the room, the principal looked expectantly at me, and quietly asked, "Well?".

I turned to her and replied, “He didn't say he had a gun in his bag . . . . .”

At that point I blew a big bubble and popped it – which made the kid giggle.

“He said he had gum.”

Like I said, sometimes, being a music teacher has very little to do with notes and rests and everything to do with everything else – like asking the right questions and bubble gum blowing technique.

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Sometimes It’s Not about the Notes and Rests: the Gun

7/24/2022

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Sometimes, being a music teacher has very little to do with notes and rests and everything to do with everything else – like building relationships.

It was about 7:30 on a spring morning when I pulled into the elementary school parking lot.

I had just taken my dreadnought guitar case out of the back seat and set it down to get my travel mug and lock the car door when I saw someone running out of the school's entrance.

As he ran by me into his car, there was no mistaking the fear on his face.

I asked what was wrong. He said, “There's a guy in that school with a gun! I mean he's got a gun!”

I put down my dreadnought, muttered my favorite obscenity under my breath, and broke into a trot to the school entrance.

When I was about ten yards away from the front door, a gentleman, about five foot six, in his thirties with a beard and mustashe, came out the front door wearing camo pants, an NRA t-shirt, and a baseball cap.

On his hip look to be a glock in a holster.

He was oblivious of me.

I walked up to him and said, “Sir, my name is Holmes and I work in the Colonial District. Is that a gun on your hip?”

He gave my three-piece suit a suspicious look.

“Yeah? So what.”, he said.

“Do you realize that you are in a gun-free zone, where you're not supposed to have guns within one-thousand feet of a school? And you just took one into a school?”

He came right back with, “Is that a fact? Well, I got a license for this gun, and Imma gonna to carry it wherever I want.”

Clearly by his speech inflection and articulation pattern, he was southern. There was dentalization of the “th” sound and a substitution of the “i” sound for “e” which made me think he was from Alabama.

He started to try and walk past me to the lot but I side-stepped into his path.

I responded with, “Look, I totally understand the fact that you might have a license for this gun, but hey, we don't have it here with us right now, do we? As things stand, you are not to be inside of school with a gun.”

He took a step forward toward me.

With unsympathetic determination, he leaned in, rested his right hand on the glock's grip, and said, “I got a right to have this gun.”

The way he said “right” sounded almost like he was saying “rat”.

At this point he was unyielding with no hint of backing down.

I didn't even have my dreadnought case to defend myself. I was armed with a three-piece black suit, a fountain pen, and a pocket full of guitar picks while he had a glock.

It felt way beyond uncomfortable.

He knew I was blocking his way on the sidewalk.

I was afraid of what I might find inside the school and I didn't want him to run away.

I decided to play the numbers.

While I had only been in the school for several months, the membership in chorus was huge and the kids who were in the lower grades all wanted to be in chorus. If he was a parent, there was good chance his child was in chorus.

I looked at him and asked, “Hey, isn't your kid in chorus?”

His face lit up.

“Oh, you're THAT Mr. Holmes! Our kids LOVE you! They're always telling stories about how you that throw a guitar up in the air and catch it!"

I smiled, “Yep, that’s me.”

“And they're always singing those crazy songs in our car! They LOOOOVE you!”

In a matter of seconds, his whole demeanor and physiognomy transformed.

“That's awesome”, I said. “But let me just ask you this, dad. The next time you need to go into the school, could you please leave your gun under your seat in the truck or maybe in the glove compartment?”

“Yes sir, I will do that definitely, sir. Wait till I tell the kids who I saw today!”

I shook his hand and said, “Well, that's awesome.”

I lowered my voice. “I'm glad we understand now how to do this next time in the parking lot with a gun. Here, take these for the kids.”

I reached in my pocket and gave him a handful guitar picks to take home.

“Oh my lord, the kids are going to go nuts when they see these! They talk about those guitar picks all the time! Thank you so much thank you, thank you, thank you!”

He headed to his pickup truck and I ran into the school where I found out he came in to complain about some fee he had been charged that had been attributed to his children that wasn't warranted.

Like I said, sometimes, being a music teacher has very little to do with notes and rests and everything to do with everything else – like convincing a dad to keep his gun in his truck.

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Sometimes It’s Not about the Notes and Rests: the Bus Run

7/23/2022

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Sometimes, being a music teacher has very little to do with notes and rests and everything to do with everything else – like building relationships.

In one of my elementary schools, we had several afternoon bus runs where fights often broke out, resulting in injured kids, massive paperwork, parent meetings, and follow up meetings for the administration in my school.

I’ve always considered one of the hardest and critically important jobs in a school district is driving a bus full of kids.

The driver is basically trapped behind the wheel and can’t go eye-to-eye with disruptive students.

On the morning run, many kids get on a school bus with incredible anger and emotional baggage from the home they just walked out of. The bus is the first place they can vent.

The same at the end of the day. The bus is the first place where some kids feel that they are back in power after a seven hour school day.

That said, I learned a lot by observing superior bus drivers build solid relationships with their student passengers by implementing brilliant behavior strategies.

I often volunteered to my administrator to ride some of the more problematic buses on the afternoon rounds to keep the peace. The bus driver would take me back to the school after they dropped off the last kid and went to the bus yard.

Having a teacher sit at the back of the bus had a calming effect on the kids. They would quickly settle down, start conversations or read a book. They also knew that many of their parents would be waiting at the bus stop and I would talk to their parents if their behavior warranted it.

One afternoon, the principal asked if I would ride the next morning bus run because of a developing situation.

There were often student conduct issues on morning runs but we had never placed a staff member on a bus to monitor behavior.

A morning problem?

Apparently, angry parents had contacted our school saying that the bus driver had laid hands on a student on the bus that morning and threatened they might confront the bus driver the following day.

The bus driver swore that she hadn’t touched anyone.

There were kids who said it happened and there were kids it said it didn't happen.

The idea was to have me on the bus that morning so that when it approached the bus stop in question involving that child, I would be there to cool down any potential emotional issues before admin could sort things out at school.

As we approached the bus stop, I couldn’t believe the group of parents congregated at the street corner.

It wasn’t the final reel of “Frankenstein” (cue the pitchforks and torches) as the town folk approached the castle but it was similar enough to make me nervous.

There were at least a dozen and a half parents waiting for this bus. One of them held a hastily-made sign that implored “Don't touch our kids!”.

After the bus stopped, the door opened as the students came on board in single file. Some of the moms tried to tag along at the end of the line of kids.

That’s when I had to step up and try to block the door.

One of the offended parents forced her way pass me and started yelling at the bus driver behind me.

I had to get between her and the bus driver and back her down the steps to the sidewalk.

After I got the mom off the bus, I was now off the bus, too, and standing on the sidewalk with the parents.

The bus door slammed behind me.

While women were banging on the bus door and yelling at the driver, the bus driver sat in her seat looking straight ahead, wearing the countenance of a sphinx.

One of the parents apologetically came up to me with a heavy Delaware accent.

“Mr. Holmes, we all respect you here, we know you're a gentleman, and we know you're kind to our kids.”

The volume and intensity of her voice slowly started to ramp up.

“We know you would never do anything bad and we would never want to disrespect anyone or talk disrespectfully in front of you but I will tell you this, Mr. Holmes.”

By now she was shouting.

“Mr. Holmes, my friend is going to f*** up that woman bus driver, I swear to God she's going to f***ing pull her out of that bus and f*** her up!”

At which point, all the other parents start cheering. Three burly fathers walked in front of the bus, arms akimbo, blocking any forward movement of the bus.

We were at a stand-off.

These people were not happy and not inhibited in the least in showing their displeasure and anger.

I noticed someone in the crowd holding a broken broom handle behind their back.

Then I look down at myself.

I was armed with a three-piece black suit, a fountain pen, and a pocketful of guitar picks.

I moved in front of the bus door so the ladies had to stop hitting it.

Hands up and palms out, I invited the mothers to come back to school, meet with the administration, and sort all of this out.

I made a suggestion.

“You know, the kids really want to get to school.

We’re doing a lot of fun stuff in all the grades today, including pianos and guitars in music. If you would agree to come to school and iron this out with the student advisor, maybe you could stop in the music room for a song or two and we can get this bus on the road so the kids won’t be late . . . for breakfast.”

The word “breakfast suddenly got everyone’s attention.
“You want your kids to have breakfast, don’t you?”

I looked at my watch.

“You know, they stop serving breakfast in a little while.”

I turned to the bus and asked the kids, “Who on the bus needs breakfast today?”

The bus started rocking as every kid shouted that they did indeed not only wanted but needed breakfast.

The three husbands fathers who were still blocking the bus from going forward looked confused.

One of the mothers, referencing their son on the bus, screamed at her husband, “Well, are you going to get him breakfast? Because if you ain’t, you better move your ass and let him get to school!”

Insert pregnant pause.

I intoned my most “old soul” voice.

“You know, we all need nourishment, both for the body and for the soul.”

It was so still that you could almost hear the drama leaving the balloon.

I overheard one of the mothers murmur, “Mr. Holmes says the smartest f***ing things sometimes!”

Consensus can fast and furious. The mothers agreed to come to school. The fathers moved away from the bus.

I got back in the bus and barked at the kids that only the hungry kids were showing me that they wanted breakfast and the noisy ones weren’t hungry and would be skipping breakfast that morning.

A kid named Joey yelled, “You can’t do that!”

I whipped out my fountain pen and a scrap of paper and without making eye contact with Joey barked even louder, “So Joey wants to be first in the ‘I don’t want breakfast’ list. Who’s next?”

Pin drop moment.

We headed off to the remaining bus stops and made our way to school.

The bus driver story got sorted out in a meeting with the parents that day. No one touched any one – but there had been a lot a yelling including inappropriate remarks.

Like I said, sometimes, being a music teacher has very little to do with notes and rests and everything to do with everything else – like getting the bus back on the road.

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Lessons from a Trumpet Jury or a Thing Happened on My Way to Mitchell Hall - Part Two

Lessons from a Trumpet Jury or a Thing Happened on My Way to Mitchell Hall - Part One

A Good Song

One in the Back Pocket

Forgiveness

Choices

The Song

Sometimes it’s Not about the Notes and Rests: the Other Gun

Sometimes It’s Not about the Notes and Rests: the Gun

Sometimes It’s Not about the Notes and Rests: the Bus Run

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