Singing Around the School Year
by Jim Edmondson, VFSS member, teacher and school counsellor
I spent my career teaching and counselling in BC elementary schools. Music–singing especially–made all the difference.
I taught grades 4-6 for 7 years and then, for 31 years, was an elementary school counsellor at a dozen, inner-city schools in North Surrey. Here are some reflections on the ways I found to bring singing into my work.
As a teacher with my own classroom at Holly School, one of Surrey most inner-city schools, we did a song or two a day. Then, as a school counsellor, I did singing with any Grade 5 class whose teachers wanted me. The Grade 5s in Surrey didn’t have core music or band, so I filled in and worked with my ‘difficult’ grade 5 kids in situ. Of course, they often became class leaders for 40 minutes, once a week.
By the end of the year, my class (when I was a teacher) and all my schools’ grade fives (when I was a school counsellor) ended up with a wide song repertoire. They experienced 190 ‘teachable moments’ each year. The songs we sang were relevant to the curriculum (mostly in Social Studies), but also leaned towards real lives, social justice and a better world. This use of song helped counterbalance the ways music is used for commercial purposes in the broader culture.
We drew from Phil Thomas’s book, Songs of the Pacific Northwest. We sang “Teaming Up The Cariboo Road” and “Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill.” We sang ghost ballads and spooky songs around Halloween, like the original “Woman of Skin and Bones.” We sang all the great peace songs around Remembrance Day, like “Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield” and “If I had a Hammer.” We sang (and sometimes re-wrote) winter seasonal songs, like “The First Noel* below*.
In January and February, I taught them some good love songs, like Malvina Reynolds’ “If You Love Me**.” Each week we recapped the kids’ favourite songs to date which always included a bunch of Sea Shanties, like “John Kanaka” with the kids pitching in with nursery rhymes for the verses. In March came the Irish folk songs, like the tender “Song for Ireland.” April was the lead up to the End the Arms Race rally, with more peace and social justice songs, and subsequently songs for Earth Day, including many songs from Raffi’s Evergreen Everblue, his environmental record. The final two months of the school year were dedicated to the silly, funny, scary, gross and visionary folk songs that have, forever, in one form of another, been sung around campfires. Now the kids were ready for summer.
In the end, I think the main thing I shared was simply the value and joy of singing together. Folk music provided the singable songs.
I feel good about all this. Education is about the passing on of the past, the world’s history, all our traditions – an essentially conservative role (in the best sense of the word, and nothing to do with the wild, radical, so-called conservatism of contemporary times). Education is also about teaching kids to question everything and learning to act with social purpose. My folk music contributions did both the grounding and the uplifting.
Read on for a couple songs and stories.
*Here’s how we re-wrote The First Noel. The kids loved it.
To spell Santa’s name is easy to do
It goes S-A-N-T and another A too
But no ‘l’ no “l’. Santa’s name has no ‘l’
And he won’’t bring you gifts if you don’t learn to spell
Jack sand Jill went up the hill, some water to fetch
But they couldn’t find the well, so they started to kvetch
“No well! No well! I can’t believe there’s no well
“It’s your fault!” “Yeah right!” And they started to yell
Captain Ahab took his crew, his harpoon and set sail
And he called up to the crows nest “Have ye seen a white whale?”
“No whale, no whale! I ain’t seen no white whale!
Seen a couple of dolphins and a big yellow tail!”
That’s the end of this song and you probably can tell
That we’ve ruined it completely that song you know well
Oh well, oh well, we’ll just say fare thee well
Merry Christmas to all and a joyous Noel.
*A core memory associated with The First Noel Rewrite
In December, every year for 25 years, an always wonderful group of early morning kids at all my schools sang seasonal folk songs and carols with me for half an hour before school. We took over a prominent spot in the hallway. Some kids started in Kindergarten and seven years later were still showing up for these pre-school singing sessions! In my last year of work, at Harold Bishop school, I rented a bus, borrowed some parents and my partner Madeleine. We took our motley but very keen crew of about 30 kids down to Gastown after school, had supper at the Spaghetti Factory and sang at the Yule Duel. This was a Christmas Choir competition and fundraiser event. The Harold Bishop singers were raising money for the Bloom Group and their palliative care program at May’s Place. The initial judging was done democratically by the audience with voting cards walking by our singing spot. We ended up getting chosen by the onlookers as one of two choirs out of about 20 significantly polished groups to sing on the big stage in final ‘sing off’ at the end of the evening. It was a win no matter the final decision of the panel judges. The kids gave a full-hearted rendition of the First Noel Rewrite to the cheers of the crowd. The bus ride back to Surrey was noisy to begin with and then very quiet.
** A core memory of If You Love Me (Malvina Reynolds)
If you love me, if you love, love, love me
Plant a rose for me.
And if you think you’ll love me for a long, long time,
Plant an apple tree.
The sun will shine, the wind will blow
The rain will fall, and the tree will grow
And whether you comes, or whether you goes
I’ll have an apple and I’ll have a rose!
Lovely to bite, nice to my nose,
And every juicy nibble will be
A sweet reminder of the time you loved me, and planted a rose for me–
And an apple tree.
Each year with the kids I usually included my personal story about the singing of “If You Love Me.” I told them how Rika Ruebsaat sang that song at Linda’s and my wedding. Immediately following the song, serendipitously, some other friends presented us with an apple tree sapling in a pot. Within the month, the tree died in the pot. Each year, my North Surrey inner-city kids found that both sad and hilarious. They’d seen it all.
(And yes, we bought a new apple tree.)