These are the things they don't teach you in Music Education School

Let me paint a scene... Picture me standing in a muddy field, surrounded by 130 teenagers, as Hurricane Ike dumps the last of its deluge on the Upper Midwest (myself specifically). Worse still, I'm dressed from head to toe in purple and orange, and I'm dead sober. Somehow, in the three years of education classes which I took, no one mentioned that I'd end up in such a situation within a month of starting my student teaching. But the thing is, it didn't suck. I mean, it sucked, but the kids were having so much fun that it was all good. Our football team was routing the crosstown rivals, and these kids are too stupid to realize that sitting at home with a bottle of scotch is a much better way to spend a Friday night.

Holy crap, does this indicate that I'm developing some degree of empathy for my students? 'Cuz I'm pretty sure that constitutes professional malfeasance.

Here's another scene for you... The middle school band director wants to show a video to his 4 beginning percussionists, but he doesn't have a DVD player in his classroom. So he tries to bring them to his office to watch it.

The problem is, his office is where the administration goes when they need to have a private meeting. (The school is undergoing renovation, so the main office is in the choir room down the hall. But there's no privacy, so they use the music office for meetings.) They usually tell us about meetings, but today we walk in to see the principal, assistant principal, superintendent, assistant superintendent, police chief, and three cops in body armor standing in the office. The band director, showing enormous aplomb, simply told the kids "oops, sorry, my DVD player isn't working, let's go back to the bandroom" and ushered them away before they could see what was going on.

It turns out that there was a shooting threat written on a bathroom wall. Nothing really came of it, besides a lot of behind-the-scenes wrangling and an announcement from the principal. She informed the students that the situation had been dealt with, and the perpetrator would be caught, expelled and arrested. From the tone of her voice, it was obvious that she was willing to skip the latter two steps and simply hang the kid from the flagpole by his testicles.

These seem like decent topics of discussion for an education class, right? I guess I must've skipped school that day.