If you are reading this, you probably already know who I am. My name is Emily, and by trade I am a music teacher. I am also a writer, an attempted scholar, a popular music and pop culture fanatic, and someone who believes in service to others. I am a mother, a wife, a daughter — living in the same space as my daughter, my husband, and my mother, and my role to each of these people is very different. It can create a little bit of whiplash in my very own home. Sometimes I deal with it by not dealing with it, holing up in my room, on my bed, cranking The Magnetic Fields and writing my day away (which is what I’m doing with the first draft here). It’s really not that dissimilar to long days spent updating my Live Journal multiple times in multiple computer labs across campus in college. Or writing poetry and playing whatever CDs I’d ordered from Columbia House as a middle schooler. 

I believe myself to be a Central Floridian in my bones, and that is a whole separate entry. If you are what you love, as the philosopher Jenny Lewis maintains, then I am Spanish Moss and oak trees and unmatchable cloud patterns and slowly winding brick roads. I am the curve of Aloma into Fairbanks Avenue, right as you catch sight of the Rollins College buildings. I am a natural spring that is always cold, don’t listen to them when they tell you that it feels warm in the winter, but is so beautiful it’s always worth it. Those springs are much more beautiful after a huge storm, and at their most raw, exposed, and gorgeous in the aftermath of a hurricane. I am the smell of the afternoon right before rain:30 in the summer and the feel of air that is so dense with humidity it superfogs your glasses the moment you open your car door. And I love nature, but I’m not a person who finds themselves totally attuned to it, so I need air-conditioning and shopping like most people do. If you need to find me, I’ll either be at the Dinky Dock right near the aforementioned crick on Aloma/Fairbanks or riding the steamboat from Disney’s Port Orleans resort, purposely loitering the day away, looking out at curious treehouses I will never be able to afford to stay in (I’m only there because I could park for free & ride whatever transportation is available to me, and honestly, that’s fine), eating beignets that are surely going to make me sick later.

I’ve also been looking at old pictures of myself lately, and realizing that until I turned about 24, I was turned up to 11 almost all the time. Most of the photos of myself from my adolescence are me with my mouth open and in perpetual motion. As a teenager, I wanted to be more cynical, much like Julia Stiles’s Kat Stratford in 10 Things I Hate About You, or Daria, who everyone compared me to anyway. Now that I am older and more cynical, I miss being on 11 most of the time, damn anyone who wasn’t open to that. 

I love music, that goes without saying, and I have multiple degrees while still working on another, that will be done eventually I’m sure. Describing myself as an attempted scholar is a line that I’m working on, working through my own self-image and fighting against the idea that people don’t want to hear what I have to say. I am finding that as I present and do posters and (hopefully soon) publish, more people take me more seriously where I know they would not have a few years ago. Someone with power in an organization I’m a part of saw me present at the most recent NAfME research conference — NAfME is the primary national music education professional organization, despite that conference being kind of a garbage fire — and said, “Well look at you!” I think she intended it to be a compliment, but I couldn’t help think she had previously seen me as a goofy Ph.D. student who does goofy things, and then saw me snap into a competent researcher. It is a weird transition knowing that people see you as one thing and then recognize that you mean business. How does that change the way they treat you?

The scholarly bit aside, I still teach and I teach elementary music, having taught middle school band (and for a bit, chorus) for so long. There was one day, in the spring of 2023, that solidified my choice to move to elementary. I remember what I was wearing — the purple, plaid, retro-styled shirtdress that I’d bought for my 40th birthday, a black buttonless cardigan, and black sneakers. I was at my current school, and I was using a curriculum-approved version of Woody Guthrie’s “We All Work Together” for a kindergarten lesson. The lesson involved moving while expanding and contracting a circle. For the uninitiated, the song includes a line that says, “With a wiggle and a giggle and a google and a gaggle and a wiggle and a jiggle and a giggle and a grin.” The song seems to move in and out of being a deep song about solidarity and workers rights to being a goofy fun time. As recorded by a bunch of McGraw-Hill staffers, it was perfect for a kindergarten lesson, especially featuring a wild measure of 3/4 thrown in there. As the big “google and a gaggle” line came up, I had instructed the kindergarteners to expand their circle. (Spatial reasoning with COVID babies has been a little bit difficult to reinforce.) Then as that line began, I went immediately from instructive, well-dressed teacher with a highly structured lesson plan to an enormous kid, limp-bodied, weirdly shaking and jumping. The kids laughed, as is my speciality with kindergarteners, and in that moment, I hit at the heart of why I’m teaching elementary music: it makes me feel like the fullest version of myself. For whatever I have to reconcile about what I do, I felt self-actualized in that moment. That and especially at this moment in history, I feel extra special strongly about public education, teacher’s unions, and supporting all learners.

With regards to this newsletter, I intend to write about teaching, about parenting, about pop culture, about music, about life so far, but without a lot of specifics. I’d rather leave the reader with some evocative details about roads and outfits and at most, vague details about my child or my students. More memories, fewer memos. I also don’t intend to write about things I have no expertise on. If I can use my background and my knowledge to comment on a big public discourse topic, I will. If I have nothing to say, I will refrain. 

Thanks for being on this journey with me and giving me a place to empty my brain as all of our other social media sites are driving themselves into the ground. I hope what I’ve got to say adds even a little something to your life.