Save the ones you can
Clicking around the TV landscape a recent weekend, I happened upon the Kevin Costner movie "The Guardian" and a quote from the movie hit home. In case you don't know the premise, Costner is a highly decorated Coast Guard rescue swimmer: he jumps out of helicopters into emergency situations to rescue victims of sea disasters that can be reached no other way - the seas are too rough to get a ship in, or it would take too long, or whatever - the rescue swimmer has to jump in and with cable and winch and basket and horse collar and sheer brute force get that victim in the helicopter.
A young rescue swimmer trainee asks Costner what happens when you can't save them all - that you can only get some of them out safely. The reply hit home:
"I save the ones I can, and the sea takes the others"
I had just read an excellent post on Brian Wis' outstanding blog "Teaching Music in the 21st Century" - Whatever Happened to Liberal Arts? or ... Why Do We Pressure Kids to Specialize So Early? a guest article by Keith Walker, Band Director at Zeeland High School.
After reading Keith's great essay, I once again reflected on how often we all have a tendency to agonize over the students who choose, for whatever reason, to no longer continue in our programs. Do we hate to see kids quit? No way to avoid that! Do we invest time, thought and energy into keeping those kids? Sure we do! The big question for me is "how much time, thought and energy do I put into that effort?"
There was a time several years ago when I had a great band parent come to me and, in the most gentle way possible, offer a friendly rebuke, because while I was so focused on those 2-3 kids deciding to go a different way, there were another 140 or so still there that I should be giving that energy, that time.
We all know that the only way a student is going to benefit from all that our programs have to offer is by being in the program - we can do nothing for the kid that chooses to walk away. The messianic impulse that we can save them all kicks in and we forge ahead, and so often get to the point that we seem to forget that there are other students that ARE in the program. Those should be our focus, the reason we come back every day, the reason we teach music.
Because, ultimately, you have to save the ones you can.
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