MISSING IN ACTION

 There seems to be an slow underlying message as we navigate through this crisis which is built on the old adage of 'carry on regardless' and 'best foot forward' which on the surface seems to be the only way to go.

In my job as a singing teacher however, this is proving to be a serious challenge and one for which I am not sure I am best equipped. 

One day in March, like every other teacher, I was working in a school, preparing my students for their high level singing grade exams (due the next day as it happened); the next day all that was cancelled and I was plunged into the world of online teaching and the now extremely well known Zoom platform.

In the spirit mentioned above, I embraced the technology and immediately understood there was a serious adaptation to be made due to latency or time lag. Again, I adapted and found ways around dealing with this along with a seemingly endless round of creating backing tracks, sending pdf music scores, organising timetables and doing it all differently, and it all taking much longer in preparation terms than before. Damn it, Janet was on fire.

Wi-Fi is not the most efficient way of using Zoom so I invested in an extra ethernet cable to manage the fact that two of us in our house were going to be using a lot of network and then we entered the world of 'oh, you've frozen again' and 'can you hear me?' and 'go into settings and find original sound and disable 'suppress background noise'. ' I started looking at teachers who had an established career teaching only online and marvelled about how they managed that and wondered how the nuances within a classical song were going to be enabled. I was impressed and overwhelmed at the same time by the amount of information that flooded my way. I discovered Zoom fatigue while all the time dealing with my income plummeting ever downwards as concert after concert was shelved and other work, all based on face-face-communication disappeared from the diary. I kept positive (until the moments I found myself crashing and crying and feeling bereft in this strange new territory).

There was on the one hand the brave new world of zooming and on the other the grief, loss and mourning of my voice being silenced more and more. 

Fast forward to today and schools are back. But we aren't. Not really. And there is a tension now as they try and catch up and make us into this new fangled teacher, because after all, this is what they need us to be. No stop! 

Teaching singing online is NOT the same as delivering other content simply because of the symbiotic interaction that is required; the constant evaluation that informs your next decision about what you teach; the continual realigning, moment to moment, with how the student is accessing and processing. 

I am being asked to do my job like I did before, yet I am ill equipped for this. It is like driving a car with one hand tied behind my back yet being expected to arrive unscathed and even ahead of time at my destination. 

I spent years, and I mean years, honing and perfecting the skills I bring to singing teaching; it will continue to be an ever evolving process. I have trained myself to be responsive to every subtlety in breath, tone, language and psychological thought. That hasn't disappeared, but the parameters in which I operate to achieve my outcomes have. 

Now I feel the expectation to produce what I did before, yet I am starting afresh with these new guidelines and it is as if my previous skill set is redundant. I have been appalled by the management skills at the top level in schools. I understand they are under pressure - although why and where is that coming from? - however, further down the line, peripatetic music teachers cannot have a voice. What schools would love is not to think about us at all, because it is as they try and accommodate our needs that the reality of the situation becomes starker. Singing is the bad boy of the music world now. We are super spreaders of those dreaded aerosols and all the wonderful work that my colleagues, and hopefully myself, have been doing over the years seems to have been wiped out with one swipe of the 'at least 70% alcohol based' cloth.

There is a tangible panic as schools put in place measures for our return that they then don't want questioned. It is another twist in the tale. Tempers are frayed and we are 'invited' to toe the line. This is no way to treat your staff, whether employees or guests. And I have been disappointed in the reality of stepping up to the plate from senior management. There has been poor leadership for probably some very understandable reasons, but the underlying message they give is of  having worked very hard to put measures in place for us and how can we now be asking whether the measures are actually fit for purpose? The truly exceptional manager knows that people are the most important part of the equation in any organisation. If you start marginalising and dismissing them, there is going to be unease. 

To cap it all you then get the 'we are all in it together' platitude, hoping this will bring a spirit of unity. Sadly all this has done is destroy the trust that has been built up in less tricky times as the truth becomes painfully evident.

There may be casualties along the way, indeed I may be one of them, but I cannot let all that I have built up be destroyed in this way. It is a life time of investment and expertise, yet all the adapting in the world is still leaving me missing in action. 

While this is a rant and may well be dismissed as such, there is passion in these words. In some future time, schools would do well to re-think their structure and put in place something more suitable for education; some emotionally intelligent response that allows them to listen and hear and put themselves in the shoes of their staff. Something that honours the psychology of being a teacher that is fundamentally to reach out and change for the better. A teacher will always go the extra mile under quite drastic conditions. It seems to me that the upper echelons in schools can call upon that certainty when they can't find a solution to a problem. 

I want to say, "Look it's ok not to know. It is ok to be fallible. By truly working together we can find a way through which may not be perfect but it will acknowledge the best of what we all have and yes, we will adapt so that we can create a workflow that creates something palpably good and fit for purpose". 

If that means setting up better wi-fi so I can actually teach a lesson online, then that is the least you can do. I don't want to hear you say you can't fix it, it isn't in your remit. No, you need to badger the department which is designed to fix it on my behalf because you care that I am compromised. If it means giving up larger teaching spaces with increased ventilation so I have a fighting chance when I finally come in, and listening about the size of screens and their effectiveness, then so be it. If it means you expect me to teach singing in a mask while a violin teacher can teach in a visor and you dismiss my protests and understanding on aerosol transmission and droplets, then you have fallen victim to that panic and marginalised my choices. If you tell me not to demonstrate during lessons and reduce the time I show my face to a student, you have compromised my teaching while possibly telling me it is about reframing how I work. there is only so much reframing that is possible before the picture suffers.

We all have stories of not being heard in this pandemic. Please write yours and protest loudly; don't leave me to be a lone voice requiring action!