Last Saturday, Lettie competed in the UIL Music Memory program. Those of you who know me know that I dislike competitions where someone has to win and someone has to lose, however, in this program, there is a standard, and theoretically, everyone can win. All they have to do is know the music, the composers, and how to spell the names of the music and composers.
Lettie actually came in 1st place at the school level, and this was with leaving off 3 of the pieces. Prepping for the District Meet, Lettie listened to the music every night before going to bed, and often as we drove home from school from my iPhone; she knew every one of the pieces and the composers. In the coaching sessions, she told us she was consistently making 100’s, which means that she knew all the names and pieces and spelled them correctly. We even did some research on the composers and found out how they all died, and it was interesting, from Mozart to modern times. For Language Arts, Lettie decided (OK, at my suggestion) to do her biography on the only woman composer in the bunch, Amy Beach. (Turns out, Ms. Beach was quite interesting to Lettie. She had a condition called “synesthesia”- which means she saw colors when she heard certain keys, for example, if she heard a song in G Major, she saw the color red, Ab Major was blue, and so on. Lettie found this very interesting, as did I.)
We didn’t check Lettie’s spelling (OK, sometimes we did ask her to spell Tchaikovsky, Gabrieli, Humperdinck or Zawinul, but we didn’t drill her.) I figured if she wanted to do a good job, she would study them, as she loves spelling and the harder, the better.
After the “test” on Saturday, Lettie told me she forgot the movement on the Hayden 88th Symphony, which surprised me, as she had really studied it and the Handel “Hornpipe,” because she’d been getting them mixed up. I’d played snippets of each of them for her several times, and she’d gotten them both correct, down to the movement. (It is “Alla Hornpipe”, not just “Hornpipe” as I’ve known it for years.:)
When Lettie came in 4th at the district meet, I figured she’d either missed more than just that one piece, although she insisted she didn’t, or misspelled some of the words, which she also insisted she didn’t. It would have been possible for the other children who finished 1-3 to have gotten everything correct and then 2nd & 3rd to have misspelled 1 and 2 words and finished in those places. However, yesterday in the UIL ceremony at her school, they were giving special awards for those who did spell every word correctly in the Art and Music Memory programs, and neither Lettie nor the child who finished in 2nd place got them (the other top finishers were from another school.)
Lettie was so disappointed on Saturday, she thought she’d come in 2nd, for missing that one. We’d told her that to place high for this district meet, she couldn’t miss any, that everyone will have been studying hard and the winner would likely have perfect paper. She insisted she didn’t misspell any words, but since she didn’t get a spelling award, she must have- or her handwriting was so messy they couldn’t read it, which happens more often that we’d like.:(
I used to do floral design competitions, where, rather than an exacting standard of “perfection”, the judging was a lot more subjective. I won some contests I thought I should have lost, and lost some that I thought I should have won. Early on, I came to the conclusion if I was going to do competitions; I had to find the “winning” within myself. My standard of a “successful competition was this:
1. Did I learn something?
2. Did I do my best?
3. Did I have fun?
If all three of those were “yes,” it was a successful competition for me. If I won, that was just icing on the cake.
We’ve tried to instill that into Lettie, too, but at age 10, it is a bit harder of a “sell.” As tears welled up in her eyes Saturday after they posted the results, I reminded her that one of the school’s team didn’t even show up, so she showed courage in just doing that! Somewhere I read that half of success is just showing up, and that was certainly true on Saturday. We told her we were proud of her for having the courage to extend herself and do this competition. She could have played it safe and not done it, but playing it safe is not always the way to have a great adventure, especially in education.:)
I’ve asked her teacher if we can get a copy of Lettie’s test, so that Lettie can see her mistakes and learn from them. While she won’t need to list these pieces from memory any more, learning how to learn is so important. Learning how things are graded is also important. If it was sloppy handwriting, then hopefully she’ll learn that she needs to take more time, if she just outright misspelled some words, then she’ll learn that she needs to practice spelling more, if she missed the names of the music, then hopefully she’ll learn that she needs to work on the big things, too and not to get too cocky or nervous (she was a bit of both on Sat. morning.:). I know she’s only 10, but learning from our mistakes is how we “fail forward,” as Herb Mitchell used to say. We all make mistakes, but the difference is those who learn from them and don’t do them again do better than those who continue to make the same mistakes over and over. At age 10, trying to stop the repetition of mistakes is sometimes a bit of a merry-go-round, but we’ll continue to work on that.
In the meantime, we’re very proud of our daughter- she knows these great pieces of music (one of which she’ll be working on in piano in the spring.) She knows about Amy Beach, who was a remarkable woman, even back in the late 1800’s, when it was pretty difficult to be a “remarkable” woman. Music Memory gave Lettie some knowledge, and hopefully some skills that will help to sustain more learning as we go. Our thanks to Beth Schuman, her music teacher at Rooster Springs, for the time she put in coaching the team for the past 2 months, and to Mollie Tower, who started the Music Memory program many years ago. What a nice gift for our children.
I hope that even with the additional $3.1 cut DSISD will suffer next year, it is possible for the elementary schools in DSISD to still compete in UIL next year, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Looking at the faces of the children called up to the stage for the UIL Awards Ceremony, from those who had “participated” to those who “won," it was clear that each one of them was a winner. That is how education should be.
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