In my opinion the lowly ‘regular’ choir seems to be more talented than the elite chamber choir anyway.
In this video the chamber choir performance exudes all the pomp and arrogance that is implied in the OP. But as each soloist steps up to roars from the adoring crowd they really don’t deliver much of a performance.
Inthis video of the entire choir there isn’t any pomp but they do deliver a quality performance.
The new teacher, hopefully not having any ulterior motives for choosing and promoting favorites like the old one did, might actually just be hoping that the chamber choir will learn something about singing and maybe become a little more humble through this merger.
This is crazy-talk. “Let’s dumb down people with talent so people without talent can feel better about themselves” should not be allowed anywhere near a school. Why not give opportunities to the best? Should we ditch all high school athletics programs? gifted and talented programs, etc for being “elite and exclusionary”?
Nonsense. Utter twaddle and an example of one of the reasons the public schools are irrevocably broken.
Opening up a movie field trip to the larger group is not dumbing anything down. Having a special choreographer for the small group is not going to make any of them better singers, much less contribute to their career or scholastic success.
Being excellent at your hobby is nice, but a public school just doesn’t have the funding to give everyone private lessons at everything they are good at. I was a competitive roller skater when I was a kid. Was it squashing my excellence that all I got out of my public school was the end-of-year roller party?
Forget the movie crap, that’s a silly distraction. If you’ve got kids with talent, school should encourage and nurture the talent, not dump them in the slow reader group because of idiotic “Harrison Bergamon” (vonnegut story I can’t remember the actual title of) ideal of egalitarianaism. LHoD was complaining about elite groups. Which would include gifted and talented programs.
Thanks for sharing those. I agree with your analysis. Maybe it’s because the audio is crappy, but none of those soloists wowed me.
And all that dancing bugs the shit out of me. It’s not complicated stuff, to be sure, but there are plenty of awesome singers who can’t put one foot in front of the other. I can’t help but feel that all these “America’s Got Talent” shows are perpetuating this strange idea that you have to be a “triple threat” to be talented. Can you be a klutz in be in that group?
Also seems like something the kids could coordinate on their own, if they really worked at it.
Or there might be personal issues. Two years ago my son had an English teacher who was rather flaky in her performance as a teacher. Last year she died of breast cancer - she was going through chemo with stage IV cancer and her memory and physical abilities to keep up weren’t great - but since she’d been teaching for 20 years and loved it, and wanted to keep doing it - they let her spend her last year doing that until she was ready to give it up. (She was eligible for disability long before she stopped teaching).
In many ways, she was the best teacher my son ever had, even if there was a sub in her room one day out of five and she didn’t always get papers graded.
Ain’t that the truth. It gets even funnier when you are a public servant who’s paid by taxes, but the people yelling the line at you don’t pay the right taxes!
As one who, in the line of duty, receives whacky letters on a regular basis, this is, by far, the funniest thread I’ve read on this site so far. It’s sort’a reassuring, too, to be reminded that there actually are some reasonable folks still left out there.
How is an “exclusionary” singing group that nurtures the abilities of the most talented singers any different than a Gifted and Talented program that nurtures the abilities of the smartest?
I loathe the idea that you put forth that encouraging and nurturing people’s gifts is somehow “exclusionary” and “elitist” and “not the government’s responsibility”.
Back when I was in high school, our Chamber Choir was a audition-only group that sang the more difficult and less popular works (hello, madrigals!) and it was a fairly big deal amongst us choir people to get in to it, but the only people who envied us were the ones who wanted to be in it but didn’t make the cut. The rest of the choir was happy to sing more popular stuff and do concerts…those of us in Chamber Choir had rehearsals every single morning before school, did most of the heavy lifting for Solo and Ensemble competition, had to learn all the regular choir music as well as our own (because you had to be in “choir- the for-credit class” in order to be eligible for Chamber Choir). We didn’t dance…we didn’t wear costumes…we wore robes just like the choir, and performed much more serious works. Yes, occasionally we might have a Chamber-only party, like right before a performance we were doing on our own, or when they took us on the bus trip down to Ohio Wesleyan for a workshop/performance with other elite choirs from all over Ohio. But we were still very much a part of the regular Concert (tenth graders) and Symphonic (eleventh and twelfth graders) Choirs. It wasn’t considered elitist for us to have a private outing…it was a “team-building” experience…and the regular choir had them, too. And 99% of our parents were completely hands-off, unless they were asked to bake for a bake sale or take tickets at the door during a concert.
They didn’t get involved because they didn’t have to…both our choir directors/band directors were professionals who took every single group and sub-group seriously and showed up to work when they were supposed to. It sounds like the OP really should have stated that fact a bit more clearly in his letter…this teacher is NOT showing up for rehearsals. It’s unclear what reason she has given the kids for her absence, but if I had shown up at rehearsal every morning at 6:30 after having been driven there by my mom, and I had told her that the teacher hadn’t shown up, she would have made a call to find out what was going on. If the teacher is not doing the work she has been contracted to do, the parents are right to demand answers. If this is a pay-to-play type thing, or if these kids are not getting any rehearsal time at all when in past years this has been a competition choir and they will be expected to be performing soon, then I think the parents should be asking why. If this teacher doesn’t want this job, there are surely lots of under-employed teachers out there who do. The kids should not have to be dealing with these type issue beyond making the initial complaint to the guidance counselor, the principal, the President of the music boosters group or the head of the PTA. If the parents are not getting calls back or explanations from the teacher, then by all means contact the principal to ask what is going on. But not in such a convoluted way. Say, “I got a call from my daughter to pick her up after school earlier than planned because the director didn’t show up for rehearsal for the fourth time this month. Why are these kids being left unsupervised?”
It should not matter at all that the previous director left suddenly under a cloud. That was last year. It’s November…the kids have grieved and moved on. If the teacher is planning on disbanding Chamber Choir because she doesn’t want the extra workload, or doesn’t have the skills, then she needs to end this charade of rehearsals and arranging for mysterious choreographers (who did that part of the job last year, anyhow? Don’t they know who that person is?) and just concentrate on getting the whole choir through the holiday concert.
So hard to know if I’ve absorbed the salient complaints about this teacher because it was behind way too much politically correct, touchy-feeling obfuscation. Sounds like a Republican wrote it.
First, and most importantly, go back and read post 57, where I admitted that the obnoxious tone of the OP got up my nose and I’d overstated my case.
Second, if I call for tax dollars to be spent on expanding the pool of folks getting services instead of on providing more services to fewer people, that’s nothing like calling for “dumb[ing] down people with talent so people without talent can feel better about themselves”, which was your profoundly stupid rephrasing. I also don’t think that the government ought to pay for kids to eat caviar, but I’m not calling for outlawing caviar.
As a very wordy person myself (see username), your letter is way, way, way too long, so much so that it took the other Dopers’ synopses for me to figure out what it was the issue was.
As a writer, my rule of thumb is get it all out on paper and cut it in half. Set it aside for a night and look at it again. You’ll probably want to cut at least a another third.
It sucks, but I’m sure the principal has gotten many such letters about just about every aspect of school; my guess is that he might just roll his eyes, talk with the choir teacher to let him/her know that you complained and move on. If your kid doesn’t like the choir anymore because of these issues, find one that’s not affiliated with the school that your kid does like.
This is plainly false. A true Democrat would— let me just check my Encyclopedia Sterotypica— ah, here we are. Would never dare speak one critical word against a government school or risk offending the teacher’s union, and would (in this and in all matters related to the raising of his own children) meekly acquiesce to the superior wisdom of the all-powerful Nanny State.
To the OP: The comments about being a Democrat and about the designated hitter seem bizarre and inappropriate and don’t help to support your argument.
And the thing about allowing the Chamber Choir to have exclusive social gatherings also seems petty.
The Chamber Choir should be establishing its elite status through auditioning, elite training, and elite performances. Why should the school also take up the cause of enforcing exclusive social occasions? Teen-agers are already quite capable by themselves of establishing and maintaining social divisions.