I teach students of all levels. As chorus director I work with the salutatorian andwith students in special education whose only class with regular students is chorus. As a result I see a broad spectrum of raw material. Students are not all the same. Every year my students go through an audition with me for placement for the next year. It is a series of skills tests. Everyone has a unique set of responses. Each audition takes about fifteen minutes. It's just me and the student. They sing, they read music, they listen to music and respond. The result is a number. I place the best students in best choirs.

The next year the choirs meet and I observe their behaviors. The best choir has amazingly focused students. They don't all have the best attitude. They are not all among the smartest kids in school. They are however, focused. They have the ability to deny impulsive behavior and work at my direction for long periods of time, fifteen, twenty, or thrity minutes without a pause. They learn. On the other hand, in my weakest choirs, it is difficult to get all the students to work at the same time for any one second. The tendency is to give up and work with as many as you can. There is no way to get them all on task. I probably call students to attention or ask them to change behavior 100 times a day in the weakest class. "Sit up. Look at your music. Check your posture. Stop talking. Turn around." Some students are off task, doing their own thing most of the time. Another odd thing that I notice is that when some of the most physically active students calm down from their whirling dervish behavior, they go to sleep sitting up almost immediately. They are exhausted.

Teachers are made up of those very focused students. I remember that some college classes were not very difficult. People clamored to get those professors. Other classes were bone crushingly hard. The question in these classes was "can you focus enough to master the material?" Advanced level classes tended toward the bone crushingly hard. Doctoral classes were all that way. I don't know how brains work. I observe that brains work differently. I don't see how some of my students pass anything. If you think about it, what we teach in school is not very much. Can focused home schooled kids learn more in less time? Sure. So much time is lost by the disciplined while teachers discipline the undisciplined.

The newspapers complain about output. How many passed the standardized test? How many finished the course or dropped out? There are two problems: expectations and raw material. Some of them can't handle the format. They can't focus and they can't learn the material. The expectation that a successful school can teach certain material to every student is just an uninformed expectation. Do we need another type of program, a real vocational program for those who aren't going to make it in college. Yes. But then how do you get parents to support putting their kids in the non-college track program. At our school, everyone starts out on the college track. I've sat in parent/teacher conferences for 10th grade students who are failing every class and listened to parents say, "She's not going to be like me. She's going to college and be a teacher, or run her own business." What goes through my mind is. "No. She isn't." If there is a way to teach your student, we don't have a format for it here in public school. And they don't have it in the charter schools or parochial schools either. Maybe one on one instruction. But I'm not sure even then.

If you can make A's at our school, you can make A's at Harvard. My best come back to me from everywhere, including MIT and Harvard and say, "It's hard, but I was well prepared and I'm not having a difficult time." Friday the Organic Chemistry major from UGA said just that. "It's tough but I like it." He's in the Glee Club too.