After a 39 year interval, I am taking piano lessons again. My goal is to play some songs for my students, and to learn how to count. Although my teacher Kim tells me I am making excellent progress, my playing sounds wooden, and nothing like music. It doesn’t really matter; mostly I play as meditation.
I started playing the school year before COVID as a way to deal with work stress. Although I had taught at the same rural school just outside Kingston for years, my school, and my job changed dramatically in 2019. For the ten years prior that I had taught there, and according to many parents at the school, who had also attended back in the day, the neighbourhood of 1950’s brick bungalows never seemed to change. Then, in the fall of 2019, a new housing development was built nearby and our school population ballooned in a short time. Many of my new students came from at-risk families living in poverty. Suddenly, I had significantly more students who struggled with food security. Our school also saw a rapid rise in students coping with anxiety and depression. And, we also saw a sharp increase in children whose parents suffered from addiction. Many of those children had experienced trauma as a result. While we previously had a food-sharing program at the school, we now also sent one student home with food over the weekends. At Christmas I tried to purchase enough non-perishable items to help the family get through the holidays.
Teaching children who live with unpredictability makes for unpredictable classrooms. My French lessons often didn’t go as planned and sometimes my back-up lessons needed their own back-up plans. Many days I spent more time dealing with complex behaviours than I did teaching French. I left school at the end of each day exhausted.
When I got home, shell-shocked from the day, I’d sit in my living room and try to play my piano. It didn't matter how terrible I was. The concentration required to coordinate my hands, and if I was feeling ambitious, the pedals, emptied my brain of school thoughts. I couldn't think about students and butcher “Lean On Me,” at the same time. And, when I was finished banging out the chords to Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting for You,” I was ready to tackle dinner and conversations with my own pre-teens.
That year I was writing my YA book, Cleaning Up, that came out this spring. The protagonist Jess, who cleans houses for a summer job develops an imaginary friendship with a girl whose room she cleans. Jess was like many of my at-risk students from the 2019 school year. She ate from the snack bin at school and struggled to show her emotions because of experienced trauma. She was a child who scanned her father’s arms for track marks. Jess wasn’t any specific student, but she reflected a growing number of children I’d taught in Ontario schools.
As my day job leaked into my writing, I realized Jess needed an outlet other than cleaning houses and fantasizing about rich girls. I wrote her new friends who had a band. Jess sang backup, and like me, learned how to play the piano. Jess also played poorly, but it didn’t matter. As she made her way through “Hot Cross Buns,” or Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” music became a way forward, away from busy thoughts toward calm. It was important to me that Jess have not only a financial way forward, and new social experiences, but also an outlet for her stress.
These days I have a new teaching position in a French Immersion program. Most of my students come from middle-class families, play hockey, take swimming lessons and vacation at Disney World. Like their counterparts at other schools, they struggle with anxiety and ADHD, but few worry about food security. Mostly I teach ten-year-olds, but I’m also responsible for art and music to a grade one class. Each day we dance, pretend to be animals, paint penguins and sing. Mostly we sing in French, but sometimes I take them across the hall to an empty classroom with an old piano. The kids sit on the floor and for a special treat, we sing in English. I don’t have a lot of piano repertoire for children yet, but I’ve taught them to warble the few songs I know how to play. And so we sing, Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on.
And everyone feels better when we’re done.
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