Making the Perfect Spaghetti Dinner with Octopus Arms: Accepting Your Limitations as a Music Educator

Picture this—one person standing in front of 40 people in the most hormonal and turbulent times of their lives. The person in front of them desires to give them a unique ability that will enrich the rest of their lives. The adult they all stare at (when they feel like looking up) tries to be a multi-talented octopus. One arm flailing in the arm to a beat, the other hand using all of their fingers to pound out a melody the children are mildly interested in, at best. The kids have pieces of paper in their hands that are supposed to tell them what to do, but they haven’t learned what that paper says or even what it means, let alone what it sounds like in their ears. The octopus is highly attuned to the conversations and emotions of these 40 people, noticing that the kids who want to be there are being talked out of being there by the ones who don’t, either because they are frustrated by those kids or care more about what those kids think of them than they do about music. The hardest part for the octopus is the calendar behind them, counting down the days until these hormonal monsters . . . I mean, wonderful young humans . . . will perform the paper they are holding memorized (what?) in front of all their friends and family AND the octopus’ boss.

Have you felt this pressure? Are you the octopus? Does this situation I described make you want to run, screaming, out of the building with your tentacles flailing in the air? Unfortunately, I’ve heard this is what it feels like to be in education today, especially music education. Too many expectations, too many goals, too many judges, and not enough helpers or cheerleaders. How do you even begin to say “no” in an overloaded system where all the weight is placed on the people working with students daily?

This leads me to another illustration—a plate of spaghetti. I am no chef, but a meal I make pretty often in my home consists of spaghetti noodles, a can of sauce, baked meatballs from frozen, and a side of broccoli. Sometimes, my vegetarian daughter doesn’t want the meatballs, and at times, I forget to buy the sauce. More times than I’d like to admit, I don’t have time to clean, cut, and steam the broccoli, so I skip it. What ends up on the plate is a conglomeration of the ingredients I had in the cabinet, the abilities and desires of who is at the table, and what I was able to do in the time given. On top of that, I try to accept I am a limited human being. I cannot create the “perfect” meal all the time, for everyone.

When you have a 48-minute class period and a few months to put together a concert with your students, I bet sometimes it feels like you are expected to create a fancy plate of spaghetti with your octopus arms in order to please all the people you need to be pleasing and create the meal you desire to make. Unfortunately, this is not possible to do constantly. If you don’t recognize this, you’ll end up flailing your octopus arms, exhausted, wondering why you cannot achieve what you thought you could as a music educator.

Accepting Your Limitations

In reality, one class period will rarely look like a full plate of spaghetti. We can, however, put something on the table after every period. Sometimes, it is note-reading; sometimes, it is pitching matching; sometimes, magically, it is pulling a piece of music together. Other times, though, it is only classroom management. Hear that? Sometimes, in a class period, or even an entire day, your dish only consists of one ingredient . . . you managed the chaos. The spaghetti noodles are warm, and THAT is an enormous accomplishment.

In a world where our society expects educators to fix everything, start by radically accepting that you are not an infinite being . No one is. I can cook my meal in 48 minutes when everything synchronizes perfectly. I work the stove, boil water, warm sauce, and steam vegetables with my octopus arms, and it works! This, however, happens rarely, and I definitely cannot do it 5–7 times a day, five days a week, month after month. If my octopus arms were flailing that hard for that long, I would run out of the building screaming. The same is true for you as an educator. In some class periods, gains are made in all the areas you desire. Your students improved in reading music and harmonizing; everyone paid attention and loves singing more after your class. The concert will be fantastic! Other times, you got through one page of music while making mistakes on the keys because there was a distracting kid, and you lost your voice. Who knows what the concert will sound like?

So, allow every period to be whatever it turns out to be. Allow it to change and flex just as the music changes and as the living beings in your room change. They aren’t perfect, and neither are you. Learn to breathe when all you created that day is a basic plate of noodles. The good news is that hormonal teenagers often think they can live off carbohydrates alone! You’ve done the best you could with what you’ve been given.