I used to be a colorguard director. I used to be a very good colorguard director. I've taken kids to Indy and Dayton (iykyk). I've won awards. I've trained champions.
Normally, I'd be busy as heck for the next couple weeks, preparing for band camp at the start of August. But I'm not. Because for the first time in over 15 years and over 25 seasons, I do not have a program to direct this fall.
The implications of that are only just starting to sink in. Today, though, what's hitting me is that I don't lack a program because of anything I did or failed to do. I lack a program because the band director killed it.
NASA calls space exploration "the ultimate team sport." I'll submit the marching arts as a contender for that title. Absolutely NOTHING we achieve is achieved individually. I've been telling kids that for years, but I didn't realize how deep that went until last fall - which is the first and only of my coaching seasons I will ever describe to anyone as a failure. It took me months to understand why: it's because the band director and I have incompatible expectations for our programs.
The band director doesn't show up on time, so his kids don't. He isn't locked in ready to go when the bell rings, so they aren't. He lets himself ramble off on tangents, so they talk out of turn and off-task. He does not treat the band's success or failure as a team sport, so the kids have no esprit de corps or sense of ownership. He makes excuses for himself and blames others, so his students do too. He gives the constant impression that band is a burden and a distraction to him from more important things, so that's exactly how the students treat it.
I cannot build a program on those expectations.
My expectations are different. I show up ahead of time so I'm ready to go exactly when practice starts. I focus from the first downbeat, using warmups as an opportunity to focus on technique and get the team locked in as a unit. I only do guard when I'm at guard. I'm clear to each and every member what their role is, including my own (it's all listed in the handbook and we talk about it), so everyone knows how the parts fit into the unit. I deliberately pass off ownership of tasks as soon as I can, bit by bit, until midway through the season the team pretty much runs itself - but I show up and teach anyway. I clarify the difference between "reasons" and "excuses," and while I may give my reasons for a mistake or failure, I don't use them as excuses but try to amend the problem as soon and as transparently as I can. My kids think I eat, breathe, sleep, dream, and live colorguard.
These expectations are fundamental. When kids show up with a conflicting set, my job becomes impossible. In the time I have with them, I can reset their expectations or I can teach choreography and technique. If I don't reset their expectations, they cannot safely learn choreography and technique. If I don't teach choreography and technique, they have nothing to put on the field. It's a Catch-22.
My husband and I had the same expectations for the program, so his work as band director and mine as guard instructor resonated with each other. We created a virtuous feedback loop that regularly took impoverished kids everyone else had written off and propelled them into championship teams. I didn't realize how much I relied on that feedback loop until I started trying to work with a director whose approach to his program works directly at cross purposes with mine. It took me five years to figure out what was happening.
Last spring, I told him what the problem was. The kids do what he does, not what he says. Like teens everywhere. And if he wants the program he says he wants, he's only going to get it by changing his behavior. Leaning on me to run his band camp (as he did last year!) is not changing his behavior. The best thing I could do for the long term success of his program was to make him figure it out on his own.
That's a really hard place to come to. Especially when it meant I have no program for this fall.
It's been sinking in for a few weeks that I don't have a band camp to prepare for. I've gone from relieved to have more summer vacation time to panicking because I'm "so far behind" in planning to sternly telling myself "no, you will NOT volunteer to come in and review the band's progress or do announcements or bring snacks, stop doing Director's job for him."
Today, however, it hit me that Director is the reason I don't have a program. My program is gone because of him. My program is gone because he cannot or will not build the band program that will sustain my program.
I don't even need much. The base expectations - show up on time, lock in, do your work, apply feedback - are so fundamental to any band program that this is literally the first time I have ever seen a band director who doesn't reinforce them. I didn't know such directors existed. I've been doing this since the early 1990s - longer than Director has been alive - and I have NEVER seen someone with the title of "band director" who has so much learned helplessness. (Makes me wonder if he came to this job with "ten years of experience" or one year of experience repeated ten times.)
That's a different grief from "I don't have a program." I'm not sidelined because my body can't keep up or because I made some catastrophic error. I'm sidelined because this man won't or can't do his job. It is both easier and harder to deal with. Easier because I know it's not me; I know I can wait him out; I know I still have one of the strongest resumes in the entire southwest part of this state. Harder because there's nothing I can do except to do nothing. To step away. To force him to succeed or fail on his own.
(I'm not stuck without a program. I could easily have taken a job elsewhere, but I don't want to yet. I want to see if this program - the one at the school where I work and where I'm building year round relationships with these kids - turns around. I also want to see what I do with myself without a program for a year. And there's a Master Gardener certification class I want to fit in too.)
It's also easier, somehow, because of an Emerson quote Gremlin shared with me the other day:
What is success? To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. I succeeded.
And although I may not have my program right now, those successes endure. They can't be taken from me. I have former students who still tell me how guard changed their lives. I still run into parents who tell me their child's life trajectory, their self-confidence, their health, changed completely because they did guard. I still have colleagues who share their successes and failures with me and consult me. I left the world much better than I found it as a colorguard director. I succeeded. I still succeed, just as a librarian instead of a coach this year.
Gremlin's mom died a few months ago, so we've been talking a lot about her legacy and about what death means. He sent me the Emerson quote because his mom was a nurse, and he found the final line - "to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived" - comforting. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives breathed easier, sometimes literally, because of her. She succeeded.
He said something else again today: "death locks in your score. whatever you did or didn't accomplish by then, that's it."
To me, this means that all we really have is the present. Because anyone can die at any moment. We don't know when or where or how that's going to be. If I die in the next moment, then all I ever had was everything up to this one. And since everything except now is already gone, that means all I have is now. All I can influence is now.
Now, today, my influence will not include being on a marching field with a bunch of teenagers armed with weighted poles and five pound rifle-shaped blocks of wood. That's not what I can influence this year. What I have in the present is not that. I can put that down. And get to work on everything I DO have.
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