By Dave Babbitt – Special to the Sydenham Current
As the students and teachers headed back to school last week, I was waxing nostalgic, just a little bit mind you.
As I begin my tenth year since retiring, I often think about my previous life teaching music.
My first day of retirement in 2015, I attended a function called “To Hell with the Bell”, with a group of former teachers, some of whom had been retired for many years.
I wasn’t overly comfortable being at that meeting because I actually enjoyed my career and felt that it made me seem ungrateful for the opportunities I had had for the previous 31 years.
Much like a house is not a home unless a family is in it, schools are just brick and mortar every weekend, and for two months each summer.
But once the administration, staff, and especially the students return as they did last week, a school comes to life and becomes a living, breathing entity.
Schools are complex places with several layers to their operation.
Administrators, which come and go like kidney stones, determine the morale of a school, the staff which is typically much more stable, establishes the culture of the building, but the most important layer is the students that provide the life, excitement, and our reason for being there.
As a staff member, I loved being a part of it.
But as much as I loved my career, I must come clean.
I wasn’t a high-achieving academic as a student and I didn’t like that aspect of school, but I sure loved the intramurals, bands I played in, being part of the wrestling team, the camera club, playing ping pong on the stage every day after lunch, and a host of other activities.
Yes, those were the things I remember the most, and once I became a staff member, I was determined to help create memories like that for my students.
In teaching instrumental winds in a Rock ‘n Roll world, students who were in my music classes were always fighting the stereotype of “band geeks” who wear leotards, play the flute, and listen to Mozart every day, not that there is anything wrong with listening to Mozart!
In some instances, I fought the same battle with a few staff members as well.
I chose to fight and hopefully change the stereotype if not for the students, for myself.
This led to maybe my favourite student event in my time at WDSS.
Surely everyone knows what a “garage band” is?
Most garage bands in my experience were guys, mostly self-taught guitar players or drummers, often fell short in the vocal department, and they loved to crank their amps, or beat the skins on the drums are hard as they could!
Some wrote their own material, and some played cover tunes.
And I loved them!
As I said earlier, we live in a Rock ‘n Roll world and every other young person would love nothing better than to be a rock star, especially amongst their peers so I decided to provide that opportunity.
Many of the students in my wind instrument classes also played guitar or drums and were members of some of these local garage bands.
In asking a lot of questions, I connected with members of some of these garage bands, put a large stage in the music room, pulled out a sound system I had, borrowed a few lighting trees, created a few advertisements for the morning announcements, and Rockin’ Lunch Hour’s were born!
Once a week during the lunch hour, we would feature one of these garage bands.
Some years, there were more bands than others but in our best year, we had a five-band rotation.
I would arrange with a band to bring their gear to the back door of the music room and set it up before school started.
I would then write members a slip to excuse them halfway through their class before lunch so they could tune (?), get everything plugged-in, sound-check, and be ready for when the lunch bell rang.
I would eat my lunch in the music room and encouraged students to bring their lunch with them also.
Band members would get a pass to eat lunch after the school noon-hour.
Right after the bell, off went my classroom lights, on went the coloured light trees, and students would start to stream-in very quickly.
I would allow the bands to crank the sound up as loudly as they wished without clipping the speakers that I provided for their vocals, and it was wonderful!
Some lunch hours, there would be over 150 students in my room from the time the lunch bell rang until the 5-minute warning bell rang for the first class after lunch.
I had to keep my room door closed both so that the lighting was effective, and because it was usually so loud, it bled far down the hallways.
I can’t begin to tell anyone just how satisfying it was to observe these students.
They clapped and cheered for their friends, yelled out song names, and the band played for 40 minutes.
It was precious.
In a day when I hear mostly derogatory comments about youth, I can assure readers that I never encountered one problem, not one chocolate milk spilled on the carpet in my music room, and zero damage.
I didn’t have to chastise anyone for foul language.
I would often go up on the balcony of my music room so that I could observe the proceedings below and sometimes, would videotape performances.
I have some great video of a few of these bands that I wish I could get clearance to post on my YouTube channel but in today’s litigious society, I don’t dare.
I have many tapes of school activities in my possession that I recorded long before permission was required to film students.
It’s been 9 full years since I left WDSS and I have no idea what opportunities students have before them today, but back in the day there was no more fun to be had than being a part of a “Rockin’ Lunch Hour” whether as a band member or audience member.
I felt like Col. Tom Parker, and they were rock stars, if only for forty minutes.
Rock on!
