Warning: Much snarkiness and ranting ahead.  You’ve been warned.

I’ve been feeling rather snarky since about an hour ago.  The elementary Christmas concert was tonight and we went.  What a disappointment!  If we had sung like that, Mrs. Eckhoff would have had our heads.  And the music!  One song was called Christmas in America and the first lines talked about how “I like shopping at my favorite mall and wrapping presents” and…talk about appalling!  Christmas has become so commercialized that it’s just sickening.  The song briefly mentioned Silent Night, a Christmas classic, but was anyone actually singing it?  NO!

I spent 2/3 of the concert giving my inner critic free reign over those hapless elementary kids.  It’s not their fault they had crappy music to sing; they probably don’t even realize the significance of what they were singing.  But the teachers should know better!  And then when they had a song that featured kids on recorders, they gave the kids the harmony while the melody was barely audible coming from the BOOM BOX ON THE FLOOR.  In my day, someone played the piano and it was a hell of a lot better.  The funniest part is that it’s the same teacher!  Mrs. Eckhoff, you must be feeling the burn-out to have allowed a performance like that.

Okay, I think I’m finished giving voice to my snarky inner critic.  Except that it’s truly alarming to see what’s being done to music programs in our schools.  With declining enrollment (the entire fourth grade had only 15 kids) and budget problems across the board, I’m sure they think this is adequate, but that’s the problem.  It’s not even adequate and to say that this is what passes for adequate is just depressing.  I loved being in music in school (yes, I’m a band geek to the core) and I can’t believe that this is what our school music program has devolved to.  And we used to actually use the auditorium instead of having it IN THE GYM.  It was one thing when we were in high school and you couldn’t fit everyone on the stage in the auditorium, but they would have had more than enough room to fit these kids up there and there would have been more than enough seats to fit the audience.

*shakes head*

*sigh*

If you’ll excuse me, I feel compelled to write a scathing letter to the editor of the newspaper.  I probably won’t actually do it, but I am pretty disappointed in our school right now.  There are no words for how disappointed I am.

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