13 Hours

I had parent/teacher conferences yesterday. My school day officially began at 7:30 AM and ended at 8:15. It was a long day. I kept track of what happened throughout. Here’s a glimpse into an extra long day-in-the-life of an elementary school teacher.

7:15

It’s -6 degrees when I leave, and a good 45 minutes earlier than I normally would. My first conference isn’t until 7:50, but we’re expected to be there at 7:30 for contractual hours. I want to be there before 7:30 because I know if I’m not, the parking lot at the end of the building right outside my classroom will fill, and walking out to my car at the opposite end of the school at the end of the day will feel like the Bataan Death March.

8:00

I have two morning conferences. Thankfully they’re both great kids and should be easy. I get through the first one relatively easy, even though I have to think through my words deliberately because it doesn’t yet feel like my brain is ready to form ideas, or my mouth is ready to form words properly. I would love to be at home now, having taken out Freddie, both of us having eaten breakfast, and both of us already napping on the sofa to finish up any leftover sleeping we still had to accomplish.

9:06

The safety patrol kids are arriving. Oh no. I forgot it was Dress Like Your Favorite Book Character Day. I mean, I knew it was, and I still choose to wear a school sweatshirt since that seems like something both comfortable and acceptable to wear for a conference day. But having the kids dress like book characters means 1) accomplishing nothing for at least the first 30 minutes of the day, 2) people hoping for, if not demanding, others pay extra attention to them because of their costumes, 3) people making fun of each other’s costumes, 4) people playing with their costumes all day as they slowly come apart, and 5) the extra chaos that comes with adding an x factor into a building already populated by somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 kids. 

9:27

A kid walked in with a Star Wars t shirt and a Pokemon sweatshirt for his book characters. I made the mistake of calling him “Pikachu-bacca. It was a mistake because now at least 12 kids are saying it over and over and over, and he’s basking in the attention.

9:50

Somehow a spontaneous argument about whether or not worms are mammals, independent of everything I’m trying to talk about, has started up.

10:27

I’m passing out papers for them to work on finding the areas of parallelograms. I have one more paper in my hand, that needs to go to the girl Tik-Tok dancing three feet away from me. (If you are unfamiliar with Tik-Tok, count your blessings.) “Whenever you manage to finish up your dancing, I’ve got some things for you to do,” I say to her. She takes about fifteen seconds to complete her moves, then takes her papers, completely oblivious to my sarcasm.

11:30

The temperature has gone all the way up to 9 degrees. This means outdoor recess on my day of recess duty. Hoo-ray. I knew there was a reason I wore a hood today. (Let’s not kid ourselves — I wear hoods almost every day. My daily fashion routine approximates what would be commonly seen at a college football game on a Saturday afternoon in October.)

12:04

Recess: 

Some extraordinary drama played out as one member of The Crew — our very own collection of disrespectful bullies — was working to separate herself from the others, and oh my, how they were not having any of that. We also had the usual football game was going on, as always, with absolutely no pass rush for some reason. One kid tried to dump his coat on the ground. I negotiated him back up to wearing it with at least the sleeves on. There was a group on the swings in the dead of winter, believe it or not. A group of six girls were saying they were going to follow me the whole time, until they realized I was keeping my playground monitoring to a very small area. Another group of girls had picked up large and seemingly unbreakable pieces of snow, called them their snow babies, and tried to break them by dropping them from the playground bridge. Also, for at least twenty of our thirty minutes, there was a yeti hunt going on. I never heard how that turned out.

Deep snow on the playground

1:21

The kids are working on opinion essays over Google, sending me their work for review and feedback as we go. I actually enjoy this; it gives me some insight into what agents and editors do when they review manuscripts, and even gets me thinking ahead in my writing as I try to anticipate what feedback I might receive from someone as I’m drafting. The topics I’m looking at today: “Why Math is Cool,” “Longer Summer Breaks,” “Why People Should Exercise,” “Climate Change,” and “Electric Cars are Good and People Should Use Them.”

1:45

I’m in the middle of what will prove to be a ten-minute conversation at lunch about how bridesmaids dresses never support boobs properly, and how inconvenient it is. I started in the Elementary Education program at St. Cloud State in my junior year, which means I have been overwhelmingly surrounded by women for some 30-odd years now. Consequently, I have been on the sidelines for conversations such as this so many times I’m numb to them. 

2:38

I dropped the class off at the media center, checked my mailbox in the office, and came back to my room. It just occurred to me that even though I’m still stuck in this old brick schoolhouse for  close to another six hours, the only Have-Tos on my list are 20 minutes of read aloud, making it through dismissal without a headache, and three conferences. This means I have what amounts to approximately four hours of prep time this evening. I might be able to get out of here on Friday with no work to bring home for the weekend whatsoever. I now have a goal.  

5:38

My conferences are done. I’m here for another two and a half hours. I wish I had the stamina and willpower to actually buckle down and write next week’s lesson plans, but I know that won’t happen.

5:45

We’re all so thankful we have a PTO who arranges for us to have dinner on conference nights. Plus we had Texas Roadhouse donate a whole bunch of food. Free food is good. However: I’ve been to Texas Roadhouse twice, and each time I walked out feeling a little ill. But their salad dressing and croutons are amazing. I could have eaten a bag of those croutons like movie theater popcorn. By the time I’d spent 45 minutes in the lounge picking at food and talking with the people coming and going, I felt pretty certain the chances of my planning getting done were next to gone.

7:00

I just realized I still have over an hour to be here. I really could get some things done, and I really tried to. But it became too easy to come up with a question about the schedule that I needed to check with someone else about, which led to roaming the halls looking for the right person or people, which led to talking to other people, which led to a chain reaction of distractions that were all too effective at keeping me away from my plans. By 7:30, I knew I was a lost cause.

8:02

My mind is now incapable of productivity. I did get a good portion of my lesson planning completed, but I’ve also found some great time-filling activities to keep myself occupied: I’ve posted the picture day schedule in the staff work room. I’ve organized my classroom library. I switched out the colors of Sharpies I keep in the pencil holder on my desk instead of the giant Sharpie box hidden away in my desk. I may have occasionally checked Twitter. 

8:15

The call is made, and we’re officially released to the wild. Overall it wasn’t a bad day; to be honest, most of them aren’t. I’m lucky I have a class that largely gets along, and even the few kids that occasionally don’t usually keep their obnoxious drama contained to themselves or they save it for lunch and recess when I don’t have to put up with it.

Time to go home and fall asleep on the couch with a dog curled up in my lap.

Vinyl

There’s a thing going around my corner of Facebook right now when people are “giving the task” to each each other to list ten albums from the vinyl era that had influenced their taste in music. This comes with the added conditions of “no explanations, no reviews, just covers.” Well, screw that. I’ll list my ten albums here because I’m not doing another one of these Facebook tag games that will fill up my page with album covers if I don’t get to say anything about them. 

But what about this other condition, “the vinyl era?” There are no specific starting and stopping years to define when this was. It could be argued the vinyl era started when records existed, which went back into the 1800s. I think the easiest definition would be the years between the 1950s and 1980s when records were the primary way to buy commercial music. 

For me, the vinyl era stopped in the summer of 1986, as I was getting ready to move to college. I believe the last records I bought were “Please” by the Pet Shop Boys, and “Fahrenheit” by Toto, both of which I picked up during a trip to Musicland at the Northtown Mall just weeks before moving into my dorm. Because of that, no album on my list is more recent than that. Not to mention that my musical tastes were pretty much cemented by the time I finished high school, so anything coming after that wouldn’t be appropriate.

I began leaning more toward cassettes once I started driving, since they were readily portable and lent themselves to the creation of actual mix tapes, of which I made so many my parents should have invested in Memorex stock. I still own one mix tape called “Summer of 87” which is pretty great. It was about this time that brought in the different forms of Walkman personal cassette players we loved desperately since they let us bring our music everywhere. Because of my experience with Walkmans and the many cheap generic knock-offs I’ve owned in my day, I’ll occasionally feel half a beat of nostalgia when I hold a pair of AA batteries in my hand.

Anyway, here’s my list. As always, even though the blog has been on life support for a number of months, the rule of listing things in no particular order still stands: 

*REO Speedwagon: Hi Infidelity
The biggest album in the world when I entered junior high, which was about the time I first began discovering music on my own. A great pop-influenced rock album which I argue still holds up today.

*Styx: The Grand Illusion
My first exposure to Styx was when my mother bought Paradise Theater because of that pretty “The Best of Times” song. “The Grand Illusion” had more songs on classic rock radio than any other Styx album, so that was one of my earlier purchases. Close to forty years later, I will still turn up “Come Sail Away” when it comes on the radio.

*AC/DC: Back in Black
My first rebellious album, since my parents were convinced there was something at least mildly satanic about the band. (Granted, they did name an album “Highway to Hell.”) My introduction to hard rock. 

Asia: self-titled
This was where I learned what a supergroup was. The members were all formers from major prog bands of the 70s, which automatically gave the band a respectable pedigree. It was much more of a pop album than a prog album, but it was my first touchstone of progressive music.

Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run
The record that helped me figure out so much about life. The “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” of rock albums. 

Def Leppard: Pyromania
It’s impossible to explain to people who weren’t following music in the early 1980s what a cultural behemoth of an album this was, especially to the junior high/high school crowd, right down to the urban myths about what was really being said in the foreign-language four-count at the opening of “Rock of Ages.”

Rush: Moving Pictures
The first modern progressive album I owned. “Asia” was a bunch of prog dudes who didn’t get along that well trying to cash in on their names and reputations. Rush was pure. 

John Mellencamp: Scarecrow
I grew up in a rural bubble surrounding the outer ring of Minneapolis suburbs, which was just rootsy enough to relate to the sensibility and sound of this. I’m not saying it would hold when measured against something like “Born to Run,” but it fell into the same straightforward, storytelling rock sound. 

Journey: Escape
Another record initially bought by my mother, this time for that pretty “Open Arms” song. I loved “Don’t Stop Believin’” before it was a national treasure. I loved “Stone in Love” even more, because it rocked so much harder. I thought “Still They Ride” was the superior ballad on the album by far. And the title song was just the anthem someone fighting his way through junior high needed in his corner.

Queen: Live Killers
I actually didn’t own this on vinyl, but had the cassette. It was perfect: a double live album with what amounted to a separate LP on each side of the tape. This was my frequent Walkman companion, drowning out the surrounding idiocy of a thousand school bus rides, and providing me with the first epiphanic moment of my life, when I really, really heard Brian May’s layered “Brighton Rock” guitar solo during a high school football game.

So there you have it. If you’ve ever had questions about where and how my lifelong music obsessions began, those ten albums had no small role. 

A Farewell to Kings

I was introduced to most of my music through peer pressure. I went from spending 6th grade at a tiny Catholic school to 7th grade in the public junior high, and quickly learned that much of your status came from the bands you liked. When I figured out the music the junior high hallways taught me I should be listening to, I worked to catch up. I began listening to classic rock radio. I joined the Columbia House Record and Tape Club more times than I can remember. I drew album covers on the brown paper bag covers wrapped around my textbooks.

Back then in early, early 80s, AC/DC was the apex predator in the hallways and boom boxes, with other now classic rock staples like Foreigner, Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and even Billy Squier earning what seemed to be permanent spots in the Ring of Honor. Another band with an unquestionably deserved spot on the list of our musical titans was Rush. 

I learned about Rush mostly from the radio, since they had a good number of songs deep in rotation from previous albums. They weren’t the kind of band you’d dance around to while playing air guitar in your bedroom, but the kind you’d actively listen to. All of that complicated music was coming from only three guys — Alex Lifeson, playing insane guitar lines, Geddy Lee, playing bass with his hands and using foot pedals to operate keyboards while singing at the same time, and Neil Peart, a drummer who clearly was not human and played like he had nine arms. Being a drummer in the junior high and later the high school band, I was drawn in to Neil Peart’s playing. I knew to ever play like him was beyond my capabilities, but there were still things there to try and learn. 

In our microcosm of the world, Rush was mostly known back then for the song “Tom Sawyer,” and primarily for the drum solo. I recently told a colleague that every music fan from my generation had air-drummed to “Tom Sawyer” at least once, and I feel confident that’s a truth. The song, and the solo, were that important to the time.

Rush has been one of my bands for decades. No matter which musical era of the band an album represents or what influences were on display in the music, I could always find something about it to like. For the longest time they were mostly just present and reliable, resurfacing every year or two with an album of new songs or one of their many live recordings. After a few decades, you come to realize you’ve connected with them more deeply than you have with you most of your other favorite artists.

They are still the only band I’ve seen twice on the same tour, once at the Minnesota State Fair and nearly a year later at The Gorge in Washington state. My friend Erik and I would amuse ourselves during marching band practice, dancing with our drums the same way Geddy Lee danced with his bass guitar in the video for “Distant Early Warning.” When I drove out of the city after presenting the summary paper for my Master’s Degree, hearing the song “Marathon” come up on my car stereo was the moment it sank in that I was actually done. The song that ran through my head in the days surrounding the birth of my first nephew was “Manhattan Project,” mostly for the lyric, “All the powers that be / and the course of history / would be changed forever more.” It seemed appropriate then for the first baby born into my family, and it was. When I had to think up a four-digit passcode on my first smartphone, I used 2112. While talking with my friend Staci at an after school happy hour, I mentioned the only thing I wanted for my birthday was Rush’s newest album, “Vapor Trails,” and I didn’t think anyone in my family was going to buy it for me. She did instead. I played through it for the first time in my classroom. Years later, when Rush released a Blu-Ray concert of the final show of their final tour before retiring from touring, that same first nephew, now an adult, gave it to me for Christmas. It came packaged with a keychain — a small Gumby figure, wearing a Rush t-shirt. I still keep it with my keys today.

It was bittersweet when the band announced their retirement, because you know they meant it. Neil Peart had been drumming at a level of virtuosity that had him widely recognized as the best drummer in popular music for four decades, and his body was wearing out. I couldn’t blame any of them for retiring, and respected them for making it an all-or-nothing decision: If one guy was ready to be done, they were all done. The way I saw it, they deserved it after giving the fans so much music for so many years. The word was that Neil was ready to spend more time writing — he had been the primary lyricist for the band throughout their career, and already had a few books to his name as it was.

The artists who produce your favorite songs become companions for you, communicating with you through the ideas and perspectives they’ve shared through their art, and the opportunities they’ve given you to interpret these ideas, either literally or through any number of degrees of metaphor. Sometimes you’ll find something buried in a song you can apply to your own life and beliefs, and sometimes, and just as importantly, you’ll find a soundtrack for the key events of your life, even elevating events from the mundane to significant by the addition of their music. Their songs become a language of shared experience with other fans; you only need to drop a song title like “Red Barchetta” for another Rush fan to know how that song affected you.

Now that I’m in the back half of middle age (at best), I’ve reached a time when the musical heroes of the generation ahead of me are becoming the ones we lose and miss. When I first heard that Neil Peart had died earlier this month, after a mostly private struggle with brain cancer, a shadow crossed my heart (to quote the man himself). I had not been as strongly affected by the loss of a musician I admire (I won’t say hero, knowing how Neil would have bristled at that term) since Freddie Mercury died in 1991. And I named my dog after that guy. 

The weekend after his passing, I watched “Beyond the Lighted Stage,” a documentary about the band that I’ve seen a double-digit number of times. The movie ends with a scene of Alex, Geddy, and Neil getting together for a “business meeting” at a nice restaurant in a private room, which amounted to little more than the three of them joking and laughing like the friends they were. When I think about losing Neil now, one of the first things I think of is how hard it has to be for those other two guys as they miss their longtime friend. 

The relationship the fans like me had with Neil was nothing like that, but it was just as real. Knowing that he’s gone now, that we’ve lost someone who worked so consistently hard to be as perfect as he could at what he did, leaves the world feeling a little less pure.