Spinning Plates

Joseph Kemper

Spinning Plates

The year has begun, music is handed out, rosters set, notes being learned, anthems aligned with the lectionary, and first concerts of the year are just on the horizon. To put it succinctly: we’re in the thick of it. As we settle into our grooves, we, like our students, are juggling numerous demands. We might even have a sense that we’re past the honeymoon phase of new music, new people, and reconnecting with those we’ve missed over the summer. Add on the onslaught of emails, parental, congregational, or administrative pressures, observations, and disciplinary issues, it can feel like a losing battle. From this chaos and hubbub, which can be both joyful and laborious (sometimes at the same time), a singular question arises: How can this be sustained? And not just for this concert cycle, season, or semester, but for an entire career.

The confounding challenge of sustainability is that the answer lies uniquely in each of us, giving the veneer that the question itself is unanswerable. I once spoke to a choral colleague who said roughly, “I don’t believe in the word balance. Instead, I imagine my life like a bunch of spinning plates. Some may need more attention, and invariably, all will need a little momentum now and again. My goal is to make sure none of them fall and shatter.” I love this metaphor as it acknowledges the truth that none of us can be everything for everyone at all times. The answer for some may be to spin fewer plates, for others to add or change some out, and some may just need to adjust their “spinning” priorities. Shifting how many plates we have is also easier said than done, as many are also negotiating financial and familial factors that can make changes much harder. Regardless of the limitations, I believe a helpful first step is to take stock by asking, “What are my plates? Where am I spending my time spinning? Which plates bring me the most joy? Can I spin any of the plates differently? If I could remove or change a plate, would I? Can I?”

At a professional development I attended several years ago when teaching high school in Florida, the clinicians (one of whom was Michelle Bendett of Northfield Middle School) handed out a piece of paper with two blank circles. We were instructed to fill out the first circle, like a pie chart, detailing how we currently spend our time, including work, food, sleep, exercise, time with friends, etc. Then we were asked to fill out the second pie chart with how we want to spend our time. As a young work-obsessed early-career educator, this visualization was electrifying and transformative. At that time, I had no partner, progeny, or property, so it was no surprise that my work slice filled an unreasonable amount of the circle. This exercise revealed the truth that my “balance” was off. Over the years, I’ve found more and more sustainability by carving time away from work, saying no, and protecting my time for recharging. I welcome you all to take a piece of paper and to do a similar exercise – sometimes a ten-thousand-foot view of our lives helps us realize the need for change.

A simplistic takeaway at this point in the article might be “ok, so I should work less.” Well, yes and no. Put in less hours? Possibly. But more importantly, when you’re at work, be more efficient. In my early career, I’d painstakingly work on lesson plans for hours (sometimes staying at school until well after contract hours). Could I have come up with a strong lesson plan in a tenth of the time? Likely. Since I hadn’t put up the guard rails to protect my time, I simply filled the void with work. As the famous Bernstein quote goes, “To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” For me, I had given myself too much time and wasn’t working wisely. I needed to work smarter in less time.

For the public-school educators out there, can you imagine what would happen if you truly only worked your contractual hours? (This question is not asked entirely rhetorically – actually, what would happen? Would your program change? For the worse? For the better? Or, just different?). There was a director I knew in Florida who did something radical: she cut the end-of-the-year choir variety show that took an inordinate amount of her time, and subsequently her well-being. What happened when she cut it? As you might imagine, the first year was a nightmare, from parents and students alike. After that? Smooth sailing. Isn’t it funny how “tradition” is just anything we do more than one year in a row? You might wonder how the students in her program did. They did well. In fact, several of them have gone on to have incredibly successful careers in choral music education. I’m not advocating cutting your musical or other important traditions in your schools, churches, or organizations, but it does give us food for thought as we consider how we might better protect our time to ensure a lifetime of service to the profession.

The answer towards a more sustainable balance possibly lies somewhere between the poles of “I leave exactly at my contract hours” and “just remember your why as you give hundreds of hours beyond your contact (i.e. unpaid).” My mom was a high school English teacher; if she hadn’t done some paper grading at home, well, it wouldn’t have gotten done! A helpful exercise for all is to evaluate our efforts and efficiencies while we are at work: what are we doing, how are we doing it, why are we doing it, and are there changes that could increase my joy and longevity in the profession? Those changes will look differently for each of us but might include delegating tasks to students or volunteers, utilizing artificial intelligence, implementing time chunking in your workday, building literacy systems, programming less music, selecting more appropriately-leveled music, asking a colleague for help, removing a non-curricular ensemble, doing fewer or smaller scaled concerts, advocating to administration for more support, etc.

Over the summer, I read a wonderful book titled The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness which presents the findings from the “Harvard Study of Adult Development,” an enormous multi-decade study following thousands of participants to answer to the question: “What makes a good life?” Their answer: Relationships. The book tells stories of people who led vastly different lives, some who built close-knit family relationships, some who achieved great financial wealth, and others who struggled with addiction, divorce, and other turmoil. When controlled for everything, the factor that correlated strongest with a happy life was those who had and maintained meaningful, reliable, safe, and close relationships. It is those relations that can help us through all trials we face in life. For many of us, choral music is our vocational calling (and primary source of income), meaning that the relationships we form at work are consequential to the joy we seek in our entire lives. The book doesn’t espouse the idea that your work colleagues must become your best friends (though they certainly can), but it does explore the fact that the richer and more gregarious our relationships are at work, the more likely we are to find happiness. And, as we know well, more than most professions, the relationship building we do with our colleagues and students makes everything easier and more fruitful.

Therefore, to sustain, we must form meaningful relationships at every level of our life: family, friends, and work. In our work with singers, the buck can’t (and shouldn’t) stop at start-of-the-year get-to-know-you games – though I love these exercises for laying the foundation of a beloved community. Our work in forming relationships with our singers must happen in small and large ways throughout the entire year – friendly and appropriate interactions around rehearsal times, in-rehearsal activities for community building throughout the year, and so on. With our colleagues, we likewise will benefit by making meaningful connections. These acts of relationship forging also don’t have to be onerous. For example, I have two options for walking from my office to the music office here at Concordia College: 1) through an atrium common space often populated by students, or 2) down a hallway passing the offices of many colleagues. Most days I alternate which path I take on the way there and back and make it a goal to have a meaningful interaction with either a student or colleague on each pass. Sometimes it’s a brief exchange, and sometimes more substantial. I also enjoy welcoming students at the door, giving fist bumps, asking how their weekends were, etc. Over time, these small interactions build into something of great value and meaning.

Up here in the Northwest district, we are celebrating the Minnesota State University, Moorhead Concert Choir directed by Dr. Michael Johnson who will be performing at the upcoming MN ACDA fall conference. Dr. Johnson has been doing innovative work including a recent collaboration this past spring with world champion beatboxer, Kaila Mullady. I applaud Dr. Johnson for finding sustainability through unique cross-genre collaborations. Sometimes finding sustainability might look like doing more, but I suspect that for him and his students it is simply doing work in new and fresh ways that is inspiring, invigorating, and joyous. We can all seek sustaining inspiration from our choral colleagues, the music we’re teaching, and of course the good people and musicians with whom we work.

How will I find sustainability this year? By maximizing time with my wife and daughters, socializing with friends, working joyously with colleagues, uplifting and challenging my students, collaborating with mentors, passionately engaging in music making, working strategically and efficiently, and forging new connections. I am looking forward to the upcoming MN-ACDA fall conference to learn from colleagues, to meet new directors, to see old friends, to be inspired by performances, and to see the next generation of pre-service music leaders gather and share their enthusiasm for our field. We are in the people business, and singing is our conduit for shaping these relationships. Our goal must not be to make music through people, but to make people through music. Therein lies the path to a life-long career and, most importantly, life-long love of choral music.

What plates are you spinning this year? How will you find sustainability? How will you help sustain others?