Band (Banned) in Alabama

By now, if you’re any kind of (high school) (marching) band -associated person … you have probably heard about the Birmingham (AL) Police Department officers who tasered and arrested an Alabama high school band director for the mortal sin of letting his band continue to play to the end of their last postgame stands tune.

The headlines don’t sound great. “Alabama band director tased by police for not stopping his students’ performance”, said NPR.

But maybe it’s worth taking a closer look. Maybe there are details that the news articles didn’t cover. Maybe there are questions that the reporters wouldn’t have thought to ask. Maybe there were some things that happened which a police report writer would not think to explain differently.

I have now educated myself properly: by not merely reading the news articles about the incident, but by watching the bodycam footage that was helpfully released by the Birmingham Police.

They certainly thought the video would be helpful, particularly adorned as it was by captions which fully explained the police officers’ activities in a way that might convince people that it was “by the book”. Nothing unusual about this. Much ado about nothing. Move on.

Sorry, is my sarcasm showing?

Now, to be fair: as a former high school and college pep band director myself, I can think of a few things that I might have done differently than this particular director did in this situation. Not many, but they’re there.

• The particular band in question was the visiting team’s band, and it’s always nice to be a polite guest.
• In that situation, if I were the band director and several police officers had placed themselves physically between my conducting podium and the band I was conducting, shouting at me to stop my band … I’m not sure that as a band director I might have asked the police officers to “get out of my face”. Although the bodycam video did make it look as if the officers had gotten in the way of his sightline, such that he might have had trouble getting the band’s attention, in order to get them to stop playing.

There are also details that police officer training probably doesn’t cover.

• We can’t count on police officers understanding that a tradition at many high schools and colleges is the “fifth quarter”, when the two schools’ bands play tunes for a while after the final whistle. Perhaps these officers had never been to a school football game before. Perhaps their supervisor had not briefed them properly about that. Perhaps they actually had been living under a rock.
• The officers probably didn’t have any way of knowing the reason that the band director appeared to re-start his band: in that arrangement, the drum break was finishing up and the next thing to happen, on the way to the end of the arrangement that the band director had explained was their last song, was the brass and woodwinds returning to play one final refrain.
• From a strictly “game-management” perspective, there are ins ‘n’ outs of the band director game that no one outside the band organization really has any idea of, so of course police officers shouldn’t be expected to know, or really care about. Should they.

Come on.

As a watcher of the news, particularly since the George Floyd incident, I had immediate thoughts, probably very much as many of you did. But I thought I might want to wait to pass judgment before I saw the actual footage, so I waited. I’ve been burned before, by not reading past the headline, or not watching the video but instead just reading “the description below”.

Yeah, it turned out to be about as bad a look as I thought it might be.

All of this speaks to the impressive hubris of many law enforcement officers, and the agencies that recruit and train them; and not in a complimentary way. There are now so many incidents like this, documented rather fulsomely on video, that you would think such personnel would at the very least recognize that their actions might well be under scrutiny from videographers not on local government payrolls. You would think that perhaps at the very least, to save themselves from having to defend actions that might escalate into “over the line”, they might not let things get as far as wrestling a high school band director with a master’s degree into handcuffs and then hitting him with a taser. Not once. Not twice. Three times.

Clearly, the hubris has not been dissipated. The power associated with a badge is too self-empowering to resist, for some officers, it seems. Not responsibility — power.

In an alternate universe, where police officers are properly trained and good at de-escalation procedures — or are decent human beings with a sense of scale — or who aren’t spoiling for a fight to begin with … the postgame conversation goes like this:

Officer: “Can we wrap it up please? We’re about to turn out the lights.”
Director: “We’re fixing to go. This is our last song.”
Officer: “Great. Finish up, and then we’re all outta here.”
Director: “Right.”

No tasing. No injury. No arrest. No hospital visit. Everybody walks away happy.

Back in our universe, though, where everybody — even the keepers of the peace, it seems — are ready to drop the gloves and have a hockey fight: no such luck.

I hope the Birmingham Police Department gets the crap sued out of it.

But I’m not angry. No, I take that back: the dominant emotion that I felt as I watched the video, and as I sit here now, writing, is not anger.

It’s sadness.

Sadness for the band kids.

Because on the bodycam video, the instant that last band tune ends, you can hear shrieking. Not the kind that accompanies a touchdown. Not the kind that accompanies a bus accident, small or large. Not the kind that accompanies a lightning strike, or some other frightening event out of nowhere.

This shrieking was the kind that happens when high school band kids see their band director physically restrained and then assaulted by people who are meant to be keepers of the peace. In this case, for reasons that the kids didn’t fully understand in that moment, and couldn’t have agreed with or supported even if they did understand the reasons.

In the band world, if things are going remotely well, band members develop a bond with their band director. It’s anywhere from “s/he always makes sure we look good on the field and get home on the bus safely” to “we know s/he cares about us as people” to “we would throw ourselves in front of oncoming traffic for our director”.

And that’s what that awful shrieking from those band kids contained. Their director, for whom they cared (for either the past four weeks or the past four years, or longer), was being assaulted. And they couldn’t do anything about it — not that they would probably have had any idea of what to do, if they could.

I’ve had the honor of being the band director for quite a few high school and college kids. I’ve had the pleasure of being the band kid who would do anything for his band director, at whatever level. I am empathizing with everyone associated with the Minor (AL) High School band right now, hard.

I am also rooting hard for the Birmingham Police Department to be thoroughly investigated, and for the police officers involved in that incident to be dealt with appropriately, and for recruitment and training procedures in that department (and other departments, who see this news story) to be comprehensively overhauled. To face actual consequences.

Given the state of our world at the moment, I’m not holding my breath about that.

Instead, I will have to content myself with rooting hard for that band director’s lawyer to succeed in her endeavors to hold somebody, anybody, accountable.

Mostly, I’d like to find a way to reassure those band kids somehow.

Professional Children

If you’re a teacher, you occasionally get to see what your students went on to accomplish, after their time under your direct supervision.

Before the advent of social media, it was much more a case of students visiting their old stomping grounds and re-connecting with their old teachers, in person. During my time as a high school music teacher, I had the pleasure several times of looking up from my after-school office work to see a band alum standing there, ready to describe their latest triumphs.

I would always tell them that I was far more excited to see them than they were to see me. When my former middle-school teachers got a visit from high-school-age me (usually accompanied by two or three of my friends who also were their former students), they would look very very excited. –No no, we were the ones who were thrilled to see Mr. Tornrose, or Mrs. Lowe, or Ms. Minarsky, of course… Well, we didn’t yet have the perspective, the life experience, to know that any time a former student makes the effort to come back and visit, of their own volition, it’s a big deal.

With the immediacy and availability of social media as part of the landscape, it’s far easier to see what your former students are up to. –To be clear, in my case, I’ve always told my students (whether they were the multi-year high school band kids, or the four-days-and-“have-a-nice-life” Drum Major Academy folks) that on social media platforms like Facebook, I don’t go looking for them — that would be weird — but if they’re at all interested in tracking me down and leaving me a Friend Request, I am happy to include them in the circle of people who get subjected to my oddball little social-media feed full of marching band memes and Star Trek opinions.

So, I’ve been privy to the announcements of new jobs and graduate study, new cars and houses, new babies! And happily, on more than a few occasions, I’ve seen images of my former students’ new classrooms … the ones in which they’re about to engage with their own crop of new students. I’m not sure what’s more professionally life-affirming than seeing the people whom you had the pleasure of teaching … become teachers themselves.

Which, predictably, brings me to a particular teacher, one on whose memory (and memories!) a lot of us, his former students, dwell, as this time of year rolls around. Thirteen years ago now, to the day, George N. Parks passed away.

On the one hand, it’s generally agreed that he passed away “too soon”, since he was only 57 years old. (The age I am right now. It had to happen someday, I suppose.) On the other hand, he’d been the director of the Minuteman Marching Band for more than three decades; and a lot can happen in that amount of time.

A lot of former students can happen.

Quite a lot of former Parks students have gone on to become band directors themselves. And if you stay with it for as long as he did, your former students can have former students, and you can hear about them, too. (Gardner High School, as an extreme case.) If your former students can be considered, in a sense, your children … then George Parks has “professional grandchildren”. Thanks to the summer Drum Major Academy program that he founded, he also had the opportunity to teach alongside more than a handful of those people. If the one-off, after-school office visit of a former student sends a thrill through you … what must it be like to have one of your students’ students become a professional colleague?

On this anniversary of Mr. Parks’ passing, I’m thinking of one particular branch of his professional family tree. There were many successful band directors that he watched head out into the world to do great things; but surely one in particular stands out, in terms of professional longevity, and professional accomplishment, while brandishing Mr. Parks’ stylistic and philosophical influence.

If you knew George Parks well enough to create a short list of the people who were very very VERY close to him, within his profession but also in his life generally, it would not take much imagination at all to come up with the name Heidi Sarver.

After they marched together with the Reading (PA) Buccaneers drum corps, and after she marched for two undergraduate and two graduate-student years at UMass while Mr. Parks was leading the Minuteman Band, she headed out into the world of school band directing. And after a public-school stop on Long Island, NY, and a collegiate stop at Temple University, she arrived in 1995 at the University of Delaware. And this very evening, she embarks on the last of her 29 fall marching band campaigns in Newark, as she will retire at the end of this academic year.

So, longevity.

And we can consider accomplishment: the Delaware band has unquestionably undergone a transformation over three decades, in terms of its resume, its reach, and its influence on the larger marching-arts activity. An exhibition appearance at the Bands of America Grand National Championships, and playing host to several BOA Regionals. Recognition by the College Band Directors National Association as an exemplary college marching organization. Two appearances at Presidential inaugurations. And a mid-Atlantic region littered with public-school band directors at every level — most of whom could probably write something equivalent to the first few paragraphs of this little essay, only with “George Parks” and “UMass” swapped out, and “Heidi Sarver” and “UD” swapped in.

(And if he were with us, Mr. Parks would probably smile self-deprecatingly and say, “well, I would have to write something that talked about Mr. Rehberg at Christiana High School…” Anyway…)

So, accomplishments.

Lastly, I’m thinking of philosophy and style: as strong as Mr. Parks’ influence has been on any of us who ever became band directors … it’s probably fair to say that it’s a wiser strategy to apply his Starred Thoughts and other teaching philosophies and stylistic mannerisms where they will work well, and otherwise build band programs “in our own image”. Starred Thought: do what works. If we try to create bands that are basically “little UMass”, they’ll never achieve the heights that we very clearly remember — and we’ll be fated to be continually looking backward in time.

If you’ve ever seen the Delaware band in action, in the last three decades, there have been elements you’ve recognized, even if they were dressed up in a lot of blue and gold, rather than maroon and white. (Or bright red and white and black… “Ladies and gentlemen, the only college band NOT to wear their own school colors!” quipped a friend of mine once, and correctly.)

“How are your feet?” asks their director, and they respond, “TOGETHER!” “Stomach?” “IN!” “Chest?” “OUT!” And onward, until… “Eyes?” “WITH PRIDE!”

(Well, they aren’t the only band ever to use that little hyping-up activity. There’s this group in Amherst…)

They play halftime music that includes pop-singer medleys and Broadway anthems and pieces of classical music in a certain way, with a certain style.

(Well, they do share with UMass a couple of musical arrangers who have some particular ideas of how to get a crowd in the game and on its feet.)

Their percussion content (and assuredly the first couple of bars of their parade cadence) provide reliable underpinning for the band’s movements and music, and entertaining inspiration for the folks who get to watch it all.

(Well, Jim Ancona, whom Heidi tapped to be her assistant director and percussion caption head at the beginning of these last 29 years? Jim did march at UMass, and studied under the tutelage of a particular percussionist, last name of Hannum, whom George Parks had seen fit to bring to the UMass marching program and keep him there for what turned out to be four decades. Talk about somebody who now has professional grandchildren, and great-grandchildren! There are an awful lot of high school and college drumlines, and drum corps, which at some level have the Thom Hannum sound … and now, an awful lot of them that have the Ancona sound.)

But what I’ve appreciated most about the Delaware band is something that yes, you can spot during a halftime show, but that is also at least as evident in their out-of-uniform life. Not just what the they seem to be like, out there on a green field with white lines … but who they actually are.

Any time I’ve seen one of their rehearsals, they have been relaxed yet focused; patient and not grumbling (unless it was thirty-seven degrees and breezy out, and COME ON! we’re in Delaware, not New Hampshire!); with a sense of humor and a sense of fun that nonetheless didn’t get in the way of the task at hand. Enjoyable to watch; and, I have to assume, enjoyable to be in the middle of.

Any time I’ve been near the group at all, they’ve been unfailingly polite … they’ve been as smiley as undergraduates can be in response to this old guy whom they’ve seen rarely, if at all, because he lives a six-hour road trip away … and once they had any idea what I was doing there, they’ve seemed prepared to look at me like I was part of the family, if only that uncle you only see once a year.

It’s all reminded me of a group I was a member of, once upon a time. And that their director was a member of, too.

My favorite mental image of the Delaware band, though, has been their demonstration of a philosophy that I tried to carry with me when I directed the Holy Cross band for a time — and which Heidi has carried with her all this time, too — which we both got by osmosis from Mr. Parks, which is simply this: “Starred Thought: Be the best audience that other band has ever seen.”

When another band is in your house … roll out the red carpet. When another band is on your home field at halftime … cheer as loud as you can for them, since minus the uniforms, we’re all band people that need to support each other, otherwise who else is going to?

And in specific cases … cultivate a relationship with that other band that transcends mere annual hey-how-are-ya, in-conference-game moments.

At DMA, Mr. Parks would ask his future-high-school-drum-major students, “how many of you know that your rival school’s drum major is in this same room right now?” So, at that Big Rivalry Football Game, maybe you might go over to the visitors’ bleachers, find those DMs, and reminisce about DMA. Maybe bring them a tin of cookies. Be welcoming. Connect your two bands, who really ought not hate each other, yeah?

During the first fifteen years of Heidi’s time at Delaware, while Mr. Parks was still on this good earth, the Delaware and UMass bands would make it a point to get together, to perform jointly, to socialize. Two bands from two schools with a, hmmmm, heated football rivalry — at least until they weren’t in the same conference anymore — essentially having a play date.

There was the legendary joint performance of “God Bless the USA”, at Delaware, on the weekend following the 9/11 attacks.

There was the joint performance of “In My Life” at the end of the Allentown college band exhibition day, celebrating Heidi and Jim’s twentieth season together, in 2014 … and the two sets of drum majors greeting each other like old friends, because they were.

And, memorably for me, there was the Delaware band’s visit to Amherst in 2008, ostensibly for what turned out to be the last UD-at-UMass football game ever, but really it was Heidi bringing her band (with percussion led by Jim Ancona, and wind arrangements written by some UMass grad with a blog) … home.

If a band is a reflection of its leadership (Starred Thought) … and all of the above statements about the Delaware band are really true … then the Fightin’ Blue Hens are what they are because Heidi took what we’d all learned at UMass from Mr. Parks (and the good people he surrounded himself with), incorporated the most useful parts of it as part of her standard operating procedure, and built a program that has, itself, gone on to influence other bands, to inspire more kids to keep on doing band, because band is the best thing you can ever do, and don’t let anyone tell you any differently.

And again — it’s not all #BecauseOfGNP, and it ought not be; otherwise we’re just making UMass clones, and that doesn’t encourage the full measure of creativity, on-field or off-.

But it’s an example that I’ve been pleased to be able to point to, and humbled to have been allowed to be a teeny tiny part of.

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“A teacher affects eternity; he [she!] can never tell where his [her!] influence stops.”

-19th-century historian/journalist Henry Adams

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P.S. On top of all of this: selfishly, it’s been my pleasure to teach DMA sessions alongside, to write musical arrangements for, to be a friend of (since the second Reagan Administration!), Heidi. But that’s a TL;DR for another moment.

Advanced Placement

This morning, whilst unwisely doom-scrolling through my Twitter feed, I happened upon a Tweet that kicked loose a memory or two.

The author of the Tweet noted that during their high school time, when they had been a student in their AP US History course, the teacher had shown them the movie “Gone With the Wind”. Not as an extra; during class.

The Tweet did not explicitly say whether the showing of that movie was done as some sort of genuine attempt to teach about the Civil War. If you’re going to use video to teach, at least find yourself some Ken Burns. If this is a Media Studies sort of class, conceivably you might use that movie to spark a little class discussion about Hollywood’s racist past, and how it was a reflection of American society’s as a whole, or something similar maybe. At the very least, note that a movie like “Gone With the Wind” is, famously, fictional.

For an Advanced Placement class – and let’s for the moment set aside the question of whether AP courses are in fact merely a moneymaking effort for the College Board, which has come up lately – but for an AP class, surely there are more substantive texts and resources to draw upon?

And I would be hypocritical if I threw shade at the idea of a teacher ever cueing up a video in a moment of “I need something to get me from here to the beginning of school vacation or I might not make it.”

(I like to think that the video choices of my fifteen-year teaching career were a little bit more on-topic and educational than “any old random ‘Home Alone’-esque piece of fluff entertainment, unrelated to the curriculum, to keep the children pacified”. One Friday afternoon before a school vacation week, I showed my sixth-grade general music classes a double-feature: the “Ride of the Valkyries” chorus from the opening of Act 3 of Wagner’s Ring-cycle opera Die Walküre, back-to-back with the Phantom Regiment drum and bugle corps’s “Spartacus” competition field show, from summer 2008.)

Meanwhile, the abovementioned Tweet’s comment section contained mainly one-word responses of horror or disgust at the use of “Gone With the Wind” as some sort of historical record – along with, predictably, some more-than-occasional “person-vomiting” and “person crying” emojis.

But interspersed with all those relatively knee-jerk reactions (for which Twitter is famous) were anecdotes of other people’s similar experiences: “my teacher showed our class this movie to teach us about that subject; how inappropriate/inadequate/racist/sexist/etc.”

I fought hard not to see it as an indictment of the entire American public education system. I know plenty of teachers who are figuratively killing themselves to get it right, to teach well and thoroughly and accurately, in spite of everything that is being inflicted on public education – and has been inflicted on public education for the past four decades – and these teachers and legions of teachers like them are fighting the Sisyphean battle to get our kids ready, not just to be members of the “21st-century workforce” (whatever that really means) (I know what it means) (good little obedient worker drones), but to be wholly-educated people who can think for themselves, who can take in information and review it critically rather than just mindlessly taking whatever Fox News hurls at them as the god-danged gospel truth.

And yeah, I know that there are teachers who are mailing it in. There are plenty of members of other professions who are mailing it in, as well. Sometimes it’s their fault; sometimes they just don’t have the requisite remaining bandwidth to do otherwise – many times, in their lives in general, they’re just barely keeping their heads above water, and sometimes “special orders DO upset us”.

No, instead I got actively exasperated with the folks in education who are doing their jobs not with inadequate materials and resources but with actively inappropriate or misleading or (fill in the blank: racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc.) materials and resources.

(One of the comments described how a teacher had shown the 1992 Disney movie “Aladdin” as part of teaching Arab history. … Face. Palm.)

And with the administrators and school boards who are aiding and abetting this mis-education effort. I remember, probably twelve or thirteen years ago, reading about how the Texas state education leaders rewrote their public-education standards descriptions – omitting any mention of critical thinking. In that moment, I remember thinking, this is an Archduke-Ferdinand-getting-shot moment … it’s a little tiny event that we’re going to look back on and realize was the beginning of the downfall.

And, equally, this all has caused me to look back with fondess and gratitude toward the teachers I had, during my time as a public school student, whose teaching styles and tactics caused me, forced me, to be a hard worker and a critical thinker and a perceptive consumer of media and all the other things that fascists and authoritarians hate, because an educated and discerning electorate is less easily hoodwinked into giving up their democratic privileges in the service of a mere dictator.

Therefore I have remembered back to the classes I took, and had to work hard to get decent grades in … taught by the likes of Frank Smith and Helene Mensh and Shirley Lowe in the classical-language world; by the likes of Serica Luther and Ken Altshuler in the sciences; by the likes of Elysse Price, Dave Meoli and Diane Minarsky in the fine-arts realm; by the likes of Barbara Howe and Pauline Natale and Russ Tornrose in the area of creative writing …

… and in the field of social studies and history, by the likes of Esther Markman and Frank MacKenzie-Lamb and Larry Hines, and (I would judge) the very most of all, by the Benevolent Dictator, the great “Rex”, hands-down the toughest teacher I ever had, whose standards were ferociously high and whose positive feedback felt like a trophy to be raised high above my head:

Joseph P. McCoy, teacher of Wayland High School’s AP US History class.

I’m not eulogizing him. He’s still, thankfully, amongst us … long since retired to Florida, but with all his marbles still firmly in place. I know this, in part, because we’re connected on Facebook.

Every once in a great while, a Facebook Friend is not merely a happy connection, but wanders into the territory of Achievement. I don’t know whether Mr. McCoy felt it reciprocally, but I clicked the “accept Friend request” button with cheeriness and humility in just about equal measure.

Mr. McCoy ran a tight ship: in terms of classroom deportment, in terms of timeliness AND content of assignments, in terms of intellectual rigor. He assigned us a three-page paper every week, due on Friday in class, and told us explicitly: I will read only three pages per person. If you make your grand final point on the top of page four, I will not read it, and I will grade your paper accordingly. Be concise and to the point, and don’t pad your paper with extraneous cutesy stuff thinking “length is noble”; follow directions. Good lessons for the classroom, and for the rest of your life while you’re at it.

And, simultaneously and significantly, he made us laugh uproariously. He held the characters in American history to account just as firmly as he held us to account. We learned that Roger Williams was a bit of a loon, as he moved his pack of fellow quirky comrades to “Rhode I-i-i-i-i-island.” We learned that H.L Mencken was right to note that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. …We learned who H.L. Mencken was.

And as the AP exam date drew closer and we all knew that there was more American history than dogged study from September to late-April would let us learn, Mr. McCoy set up voluntary Saturday-morning extra session so we could at least get in the vicinity of the Korean War – and this was in the 1980s, long before Iran-Contra and Operation Desert Storm and 9/11 and Iraq and Obama and the recent unpleasantness – and to those extra Saturday sessions we flocked. Not just because it might be worth knowing all the American history we could, so we could get more than a 1 or 2 on the AP exam … but because a McCoy extra session was going to be worth it.

It was. He was. Again, happily, he still is. And if I post a thought on Facebook about current events or current politics or the state of American things, and Mr. McCoy clicks the “like” button … again, it feels like a trophy to be raised high above my head.

“McCoy graded my paper highly. I am worthy.”

It’s not a coincidence that AP US History was the hardest class I ever loved. There’s a not-insignificant tie for second-place – thank you, Il Professore and Magistra Lowe – but Rex’s benevolent dictatorship was ample preparation for the fight against the actual dictatorships, and for the effort to be a properly functioning, thinking human in the rest of the world.

So that Tweet that I read this morning ended up having one positive and uplifting result, after all … it kicked me into gear, taking advantage of the opportunity (which really is available to me anytime, after all) to salute somebody while they’re still on this good Earth.

Still, or perhaps because of all that, it kills me that somebody is teaching AP US History using “Gone With the Wind”, though.

The battle continues.