Editor's Message - William McDevitt

I have the greatest respect for all of you that are in the classroom right now - dealing with the normal issues and the addition of Covid regulations, adjustments, worries, apathy, and everything else that it brings (I don't think that I would be a very good participant if I were in the same situation). The amount of creativity that has happened over the last 6 months is unbelievable. I have watched in awe as you have adapted teaching to an online format and turned your homes into classrooms.

Our subject is probably one of the most difficult to adapt to on-line learning. We are used to diagnosing and correcting what we see and hear in milliseconds and that does not transfer well to a computer screen and speaker. The amount of learning that happens when as few as two people play or sing together cannot be replaced, and while ensemble video and audio piecing is a great tool, it can never replace sitting next to others, listening and trying to fit in appropriately.

Moreover, we know the special relationship that students have with their music teacher. They know that they can come to us and find an empathetic ear, a kind suggestion, and a realistic feedback on what we hear - something that cannot be supplanted by social media.

I hope that, 20 years from now, somebody looks back on these words with the same amount of respect and empathy with which I write and and agrees with me - "I don't know how they did it".

I was thinking a few days ago, how far we have come. I can't imagine what we would have done during my early years of teaching. "Internet" wasn't a word. "Zoom" was a TV show that aired on PBS in the 70's.

My first experience with a "computer" was my senior year of high school when the course "Computer Math" consisted of 3 "terminals" in the back of the room that dialed into the BOE "computer" using a telephone. It's entire existence was for processing BOE payroll.

At the end of my college years, I purchased a Commodore 128. It had no internal memory. Data was loaded and saved on a cassette recorder. I'm sure that a many of you remember waiting for AOL to load from the dial-up connection. I don't even remember what AOL really did back then but the disc was free!

When I started teaching the Apple IIe became a fixture in education. Apple's plan was to flood schools with a relatively inexpensive desktop computer. The computer's limited capabilities left us watching our colleagues in Math and English soar past us with "Computer Assisted Instruction". I remember seeing a demonstration of the first version of Pyware. It didn't do much but it did print neat charts - much better than the scribbles when we did them by hand.

Thirty years later, you are teaching kids online. While it is not the best of situations, you have adapted to the situation and continued to show the creativity, resiliency, and validity of our profession. You are truly my heroes for what you do.