The Two Most Important Notes.

“To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.” ~ Stephen Covey

The two most important notes in any song or performance are the first and last. And the two most consequential classes I always taught each year were each section’s first and last class of the year.

If you are getting ready to graduate and start teaching, you are on the starting line of many “firsts”. If you are approaching retirement, you are looking back on a long arc of teaching and contemplating how you want to leave this profession. If you are somewhere in between, you are lucky – you have many options open to you.

No matter where you are on your professional journey, Gary Ryan Blair’s words were meant for all of us: Many will start fast. Few will end strong.

Begin with the end in mind.

People remember your start and they remember your finish. The first few steps of any race have a significant impact of a runner’s final steps and how they cross the finish line. The financial choices and habits we make and develop in our twenties, thirties, and forties have an almost incalculable  effect on our fifties, sixties, and seventies. What happens in the middle of a performance, a race, or a career is often hazy and easily forgotten, or quickly summarized as good, bad, or indifferent. But those beginnings and ends tend to be what we’ll remember most and forget last.

For example, when you determine the performance order of your music for a concert, how do you line up your songs? You usually start with your second strongest piece and close with your strongest piece. I did a concert where half way through the program, to the shock of the audience, a thirteen year old girl literally walked off the stage into the pit (she was OK) but what people remember from that concert to this day was the finale.

As far as the school year goes, the first and last class of the year are the most important classes. I often refer to the first class as “the Golden Hour”. The kids are in a state of tabula rasa: at their most open, impressionable, and expectant to see what you are bringing to the party. The last class is where they will be looking for signs of your approval for a year well done. These two classes should command your greatest respect, hours of preparation, and editing your script.

Yes, script. Any time I had to speak at school  from the stage, especially when there were parents or administrators in the house, I memorized a script I had written. As far as my first and last class, they were always scripted and always in a state of constant revision. More on editing later.

Needless to say, if you buy into this concept, you will discover that your first and last weeks of the school year will be the most physically and emotionally taxing you’ll ever experience. Bring extra coffee.

The Golden Hour

As my father used to say, “First impressions aren’t that important. People will give you time and wait about eight seconds before they size you up and either hate or love you.”

At the beginning of the year when you meet a class for the first time, you will set the tone for the next nine months. Once that first hour is over, you can’t get it back. You have imprinted on the kids the idea of just who you are, what is important to you,  and what they can expect from you.

You've modeled what you want to see in them.

I know many music teachers who promote the idea of getting the kids singing or playing music right away in the very first minutes of the first class. I don't. That Golden Hour was the BEST, most dependable hour where I could accurately set in motion the momentum I wanted to see through the entire year. That momentum hinged on the students understanding what and how I would communicate with them. That first hour relentlessly focused on one of the most important concepts I wanted to embed in them: namely, developing their self-discipline, which in turn would free me from being a disciplinarian and allow me to be more of a musician and a teacher.
I’ll detail my Golden Hour scripts in future blog posts.

The Final Hour

Your last class of the year will become a denouement  for everything you have presented to the children for the past nine months. While the first class of the year focused on self-discipline and communication techniques, the last class is a more of an emotional fulfillment. It becomes a highlight reel of your  successes together from the past year.

My recommendation is to keep teaching right up to the last hour of the last class on the last day. There is an old African saying: When death finds you, may it find you alive and not already dead. The last few weeks are not a time for a victory lap. They are an opportunity to communicate that there is more to learn, accomplish, and resolve from the past months of musical work. There is still time to have fun.

​When your last class finds you, my they find you still teaching.

Don’t lose sight that your final 45 minutes with any student might truly be your final 45 minutes with them. In my old school district, the turnover rate of students within the district was 40% every year so there was no guarantee I was going to teach those children again, let alone see them again after June 15th - so that makes the stakes a little higher for that last class. Say the important stuff. Don't leave anything out. Nothing like a little pressure, right?

For the final class of the year, I often showed a video I found on YouTube about people helping one another in a community. There was no dialogue - just a soundtrack with visuals. If I had a kid who recently transferred from a foreign country and couldn’t speak a word of English, he could still  readily understand the movie.
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The gist of the story was a connected chain of people on a downtown street who are helped and, in turn, help the next person they see. It starts with a construction worker helping a young boy who falls off his skateboard. Here’s the video:

I would show this movie to all of my students – kindergarten through fifth grade. The older kids would get the idea in about a minute into the movie; the younger kids took a few more minutes but were always proud that they “figured out” the story on their own.

This movie would be shown literally right before we sang our 'so long' song ("So Long, Been Good To Know You" by Woody Guthrie that we sang at the end of every music class through the year)  and minutes before they headed out the door from our last class. As the credits rolled and the scoring played out, I would always remind them that if they forgot everything I taught them about music - how to keep their hands off their face when they sing, how to read notes, how to hold their fingers over a keyboard, how to strum a guitar to make it sound like a drum set - if they forgot all that, it would be okay if they remember the idea of that final movie and what we had done for each other throughout the entire year: namely, we are here to be kind, to help one another so our lives can all be better.  

I would always end with the famous Zig Ziglar quote that says, “If you help enough people get what they want, you will get what you want.” 

The only reason why this movie/last class/last statement really worked with the kids, and always emotionally resonated with the kids, was that they understood that I truly believe that statement, that my actions through the year had been congruent with that idea of kindness and helping one another.

Through the year, I would orchestrate opportunities in my lesson plans where I could say that I was not so much a teacher and they were not so much students as that we were all just musicians traveling the same road and that I was just a little further down the road than they were. I would remind them of that as they lined up to leave the music room at the end of that final class of the year. At long last, we were together on that road but just as Life sometimes dictates, we had come to a fork in the road and it was time for me to travel one way and for them to travel another. But . . . . if we were lucky, we would meet again someday further down the road.

Seneca said that every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. Just like when performing a song, try to make that first class of the year your second best class and your final class your best class.   Give your students - and yourself - the gift of a new beginning.