There’s A Great Big World Out There

When you’ve spent essentially your whole life going to school, it can be easy to forget that not everyone else out there also follows the flow of a school day and a school year. 

There’s a great big world out there… but sometimes I forget about it.

As an itinerant teacher teaching music at multiple schools, some years I have a midday travel in my schedule. Yesterday, driving from one school to another, I passed a park and saw some people out running at 10am.  Um, isn’t there a class they are missing? 

Occasionally, I’ll use a sick day to attend an appointment of some sort, and there will be all these people out driving places.  Who are all these people? Why aren’t they in school right now?

Home for a sick day for myself or my kids, I’ll see neighbors out walking their dogs or tending their lawns. Aren’t they going to get in trouble?

Driving to school each morning, I pass a park and a coffee shop.  There are people at the outdoor tables, sipping coffee, meeting with friends, or at the park getting their morning exercise.  Aren’t they going to be late for their first class?

Often, school feels like a bubble, a microcosm of the larger world beyond it.  It has its own rhythms which ebb and flow through the days, semesters, seasons, and years. It is an intricate community unto itself, with each person playing a role. 

I was once a kid who loved music, had amazing music teachers, knew I had some leadership skills and insight for working with others, and believed I could make a life for myself teaching music to others. Now I am a grown-up doing just that, flowing from my own schooling right back to school to do the teaching.

Teaching is not easy work.  Some days are so challenging and stressful that I find myself wondering what other kind of work I could find with a masters degree in music education. What kind of place might I make for myself in the great big world out there? 

Teaching is not easy work. But some days or lessons are so wonderful, I see the work of spending my days making music with children for the privilege that it is. This feels like the place in this great big world that I am meant to be.

Truth be told, most days live on the spectrum between those two extremes, made up of a mix of both hard and rewarding moments. And, truth be told, sometimes I wonder what I might have done with my life if I had thought of what I might do beyond the walls of a school.

Tomorrow, I will be in my classroom with my students, going through the rhythm of our school day. I will largely forget about the world beyond our classroom, until at day’s end I emerge and, for the evening, rejoin it.

There’s a great big world out there… and for now, I will use music to help children learn about it.

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This piece is part of the #SOL24 March Slice of Life Story Challenge hosted by the Two Writing Teachers.