Guess who figured out the Juneau healthcare system this week?!

If only tea could fix all my problems.

Well, you may have guessed by the title that I did not, in fact, get better by Friday last week! My voice remained lost until Thursday, and it is still working its way to sounding back to normal. The thing that has really been bothering me, though, is my sore throat! It has not gone away! The pain lessened for a couple days and then just came back with a vengeance. I woke up Friday morning, feeling a giant lump in the back of my throat every time I swallowed and was convinced I had strep. So I decided that it was time to face the music by leaving the music at school halfway through the day to visit the lovely UAS health clinic. And I’m not being sarcastic here- it was actually lovely! The doctor was nice and helpful, and all the services were free (well, I guess if you don’t factor in the thousands of dollars I’m paying in tuition!). She apologized profusely for having to stick that unpleasant swab all the way in the back of my mouth, and I joked about how she must see a lot of disturbing-looking faces from these strep test experiences. She gave me some free over-the-counter medicine and some awesome throat lozenges as we waited for the strep test results, which made the visit feel at least a little worth it after I learned that I did not, in fact, have strep. Part of me was relieved, but I was mostly bummed! I could have had antibiotics prescribed, then and there, that would magically take away my symptoms, but instead she reassured me that it’s all “a viral thing” and I just needed to keep drinking tea and sleeping. Awesome. So I made my way back to school, taking the bus for the second time ever. I only got on two wrong buses before finding the correct bus stop. How did I survive in Chicago again?! After my unfortunate bus adventure, I waltzed into the music room just in time to give a presentation on a new music program Lorrie got a grant to use with the JAMM kids, called SmartMusic. Lorrie had been telling us about this awesome new program since the beginning of the program, and I finally got to see it in action a couple weeks ago when she showed it to some of her JAMM orchestra classes. SmartMusic makes practicing and assessment significantly more easy and fun, as it has thousands of pieces and several methods books available for students to pull up and play along to. Students can record themselves and hear an accompaniment part to everything, including the often-dull methods books exercises. Teachers can assign certain exercises to students, pull up submitted quizzes, and actually listen to the recording students did and see what mistakes were made. It’s fantastic, and I’m excited to use it as a tool to assess students’ playing levels! So Lorrie had told us early on in the program as well that two of our awesome GV third grade teachers are teaching an Ed. Tech course as part of the JAMM afterschool program on Mondays and Wednesdays. Neither of them are familiar with SmartMusic, but they will be showing the kids how to use it and helping them record themselves. So I took one of the four school-provided iPads we will be using this year home with me on Thursday night to become familiar with the program and make a teacher and student account in order to demonstrate to the third grade teachers how taking and submitting a quiz works, showing them what it looks like on both the teacher and student end. I was glad that my doctor appointment went so quickly so I was able to be back in time for the meeting, and Lorrie was so appreciative of me learning how to do it and showing the other teachers. She has deemed me the “tech guru” of the quartet, which I think is totally hilarious because I would have never thought of myself like that! But I guess I have developed certain basic (and I mean, basic!) skills that can be useful, and it feels super great to be able to contribute those to help the program. So while my throat still isn’t feeling better, all the good things that happened this week, like that meeting, make me feel better.

And it really was a good week! The kids were adorable, especially because I started to look at them more as humans again instead of walking lice/bacteria factories. And teaching went super well, which was so encouraging! Sophia and I team-taught some ukulele classes (did I know how to play ukulele before this year? NOPE!) that went great, and we felt so victorious after the last class of the week that we couldn’t help but cheer and high-five each other. It was a really nice moment! And a significant reason for why I came to the first part of school on Friday was because I was actually being officially observed for the second grade cello class I taught! The four of us have been assigned a wonderful man who has decades of experience teaching and a lot of experience mentoring new teachers who will come to our schools and observe us a couple times a month. So I felt very determined to push through and make sure I was there for that cello class so I didn’t miss that opportunity! And the class went great! He had some great feedback afterward, and I’m excited to learn a lot from him. I tell you, that’s a total growth mindset thought that is newly-developed in me. The “old me” would have been terrified of feedback, not wanting to admit any of my faults or areas that need growth, but now I am trying to really welcome those critiques because I know they will help me be a better teacher! It also helped me be receptive to his critical feedback when the first thing he said once all the kids left the room was, “That was so great. You have such talent as a teacher”. Yeah, that’s nice!!! So it was a great week full of good learning experiences and more cute encounters with kids. I’ve decided to keep record of some of the cutest anecdotes and one-liners I’ve been hearing, so here are a few.

First of all, to accompany my horrific-sounding voice at the beginning of last week, I also woke up with a completely bloodshot left eye that remained an eerie shade of red for two days. Beautiful. So I stuck to wearing glasses, partly to help my eye heal from whatever that was and prevent irritation, but also to try to hide that as much as possible so I didn’t scare the kids. So I go to help a little kindergartner during violin class for a few seconds on Monday, and she immediately asks me if I am new. And I say, “No, I’m not. I’m Miss Ruth!” And then she asks, “Then why are you wearing glasses and earrings?” I just found that so amusing, not necessarily because it’s super funny, but it reminded me of the developmental level at which five year-olds are. Their recognition of people is probably based on main characteristics like jewelry, hair color, basic face structure, etc., and wearing glasses and long, dangly earrings just threw this girl for a loop! It’s so crazy that I looked like a different person to her just because of those things. During those two glasses-wearing days, I also had a second grader ask me if I can see without them. What was funny about that was he was asking me loudly in the middle of class! And I just said, “No, I can’t!” and moved on! And the last funny one of the week was when I was walking from one violin row to another in the first grade class, and as I passed a young boy, he asked, “What’s in your nose?!”. I was not expecting that and was so surprised that I forgot how to answer that one and eventually just said, “It’s a nose stud,” and watched his face remain just as confused as it was when he originally asked his question. So I just walked away. HA!

JAMM is officially starting this week, and I wanted to give a brief overview of what this El Sistema-inspired program looks like, now that I have a better picture of it. Something I love is that Lorrie strives to form as many connections between the school/its teachers and the program as possible. So having teachers like the two third grade tech. teachers helping out is amazing, and that’s not a rare occurrence with JAMM. So, we have over 130 Glacier Valley kids signed up for JAMM, and these students will stay after school for four hours a week (two hours each on Monday and Wednesday) to receive group and private instruction in their instruments for an hour and take some sort of exploratory class during the second hour. The exploratory classes throughout the year will include ed. tech, ukulele, viola, chamber music, and improv. So kids are gaining experience with SmartMusic while learning more about their instruments and other ones during those after-school hours. And then Friday during school is JAMM day, so all the kids signed up for JAMM will come into class by grade level and have orchestra for 45 minutes. We have been breaking into different classrooms by instrument in order to catch the new players up and also because it’s quite hard to fit all the students into the music room! But eventually, all the students of that grade level will be together for orchestra, so they will gain ensemble experience as well. It is a great system, and I am excited to see how it all goes, starting tomorrow! And as far as my involvement with JAMM, I will be teaching bass group classes (have I played bass before...today? NOPE. Have I been googling a LOT about bass technique this weekend? YES.) and cello group classes and will possibly be helping with the ed. tech classes, as I am now familiar with SmartMusic, and might also be coaching chamber groups. These are great ways for me to help out, but I am also learning so many different instruments and skills in the process, which makes me doubly excited!

And one more development I wanted to share, now that it is official: I will also be learning how to teach high school Spanish this year! The low-down is this: there are four of us who all need student teaching experience in a music classroom but not enough hours to go around between the two music teachers who are our host teachers, Lorrie (who is at Glacier Valley Elementary) and Rebecca (who is at Riverbend Elementary). So Lorrie talked with our UAS advisor about it, and he told us that if we are interested, we can put some of those hours into a classroom of another subject and take a test once we are certified teachers to be “highly qualified” to teach that subject. And for those of you who know about my Peruvian adventures, I love Spanish, and I love Hispanic culture! And I greatly enjoyed teaching in Spanish, so why not teach Spanish too?! It gets me very excited. And it works out because we also learned that we need to have some experience at the secondary level (middle and high school), since we are being certified to teach music, K-12. So I have organized a schedule where I am teaching orchestra at Thunder Mountain High School (TMHS) three days a week and following the orchestra teacher, Tyree, into his Spanish classroom (oh looky there- someone who already teaches orchestra and Spanish!!), where I will be observing and eventually teaching his two Spanish I classes. So I actually got up in front of the 40-person TMHS orchestra last week, awful voice and all, and conducted 10 minutes of the rehearsal and then sat in the back of Tyree’s Spanish class right after to get a feel for it. And the rest of the week I spent at Glacier Valley! So I will be at TMHS and Glacier Valley every day, which will probably end up being very stressful as I travel around and teach at extremely different levels, but at the same time...I am learning sooooo much! I get to work on my conducting skills (as much as I hated learning conducting, I know I need to develop that skill!), while learning to work with high schoolers, teach a core subject, use music technology, and teach instruments I’m eager to learn, like violin, ukulele, xylophone, recorder, and bass! Wow, that’s actually a lot when I write it all out there. But when I don’t think about it too hard, I still feel really good about my schedule. And when I think about how knowledgeable I’ll be by the end of this year, I feel even better! So it’s all good! I might also throw some ESL classes at GV next semester into the mix so I’m getting a language-learning experience from the opposite end. How cool is that?!

Anyways, that ended up being way longer than I expected! I always sit down and think, “Okay, it’s already late, and I need to start off this week well and go to bed early. So I’ll just write a short post and try to sound as peppy as possible so nobody feels worried about me”. And then I just EXPLODE with actual, genuine peppiness over all that I’m doing here, which actually makes me sleep a lot better anyways. WIN-WIN! Or as my beloved twinny and I would say, “TWIN WIN”.