Spring Concert

Well I made it through the Spring Concert at MRA & I am still alive to tell the tale. It was rough, and it was exhausting. I mean, I know that I have said things before about how much work it was and everything, but really it was horrible. For starters, I did not exactly agree with the whole thing anyway. Putting on a concert for families is one thing, but Morgan and the teachers and parents put so much pressure on the kids to sing and dance well that it takes the fun out of it. I, on the other hand, just didn’t care.  Sure I “practiced” with my kids, but to be honest, I didn’t even teach them a dance for one of my songs until a week before the concert. I just didn’t feel like it was that important…

For Morgan, the concert seems to be the most important thing in the world, and he uses it to kiss up to parents and “show” parents that their children are learning English. Each class does three songs (two in English and one in Chinese), in addition to a tae kwon do performance by the boys and a dance performance by the girls. Each performance has a different costume.

The dress rehearsals were so stressful to me. Picture this – all of the children cram into a small dance room, and each class takes a turn to perform their songs and dances. While the children perform, Morgan sits on a chair in front of them with a microphone and speaks into the microphone the entire time saying things like, good job Johann, you’re not singing Mary, so cute Sophia… He is really hard on the kids. Then he makes a list of all the kids that are not singing or dancing and makes comments after the performance. First he told me that “You Are My Sunshine” was too fast for my kids (even though it is a kid friendly Veggie Tales song and the kids all sing it and love it). He also told me that my kids’ Chinese performance was really great because it was fun for them because they were silly and got to touch their butts and stuff while dancing… really, that is what makes them cute?

Then on our last rehearsal, just a couple days before the concert, my kids performed “Somewhere Out There” for him. We had practiced singing so much and the dance and I thought they did a fabulous job! However, following the song, Morgan turned to me and said, “Do you think that song is too high for them? None of them were singing on key!” REALLY?? They are FOUR! You can pick any song in the world and they are not going to sing on key! I was sooooo pissed!

So anyway, the day before the concert was madness. We had a full dress rehearsal with the whole school on the stage set outside in front of the school. For starters, it was 85 degrees that day and super humid so it was pretty miserable. All I had that morning was a large coffee so by ten I felt like I was going to pass out. The Chinese teachers made it more stressful for me because they were running around like crazy, yelling at the kids and stuff, and all of the other teachers were cranky and whatnot (as was I). Our entire day was thrown off because we had rehearsal for more than half the day, started lunch super late, so then the kids ended up napping later and whatnot. By the end of that day, I was drained and dreading the actual concert day.

Tuesday night after school, I stayed late sorting through all of our costumes to have everything sorted and ready to go for the following morning. I had made a pile of clothing for each kid with their name on it. Then all of the costume changes were laid out into neat piles – separated into boys and girls, and I prepared the room with activities for in between performances (books, arts, crafts) because we were in an extra empty room. We were ready to go. That night, I barely slept in anticipation.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t wake up until Thursday, so you can imagine how disappointed I was to wake up and realize it was Wednesday, Concert Day! Well I got up, got ready and headed into school. Kids started arriving as usual, along with parents and such. Morgan wanted one last rehearsal of the finale song on stage with the kids before the parents arrived though. After that, the kids got a quick morning snack and then we began getting them dressed and ready to go.

The rest of the day just flew by. I did my own thing with my class. I made sure they were dressed and ready to go when needed and I kept them entertained in between. I was also running around taking pictures and videos when the other classes were performing. Apparently, Morgan yelled at the Courtney’s several times so they were really irritated and whatnot, plus, their kids are younger so they had more kids that were not cooperating or crying for their parents. Morgan never said anything to me, and like I said, I kept my kids out of the way and entertained.

The worst idea ever was to have an intermission with food for the families. For starters, most of the kids were hungry because they had only had a small snack. The table set up with the food was right outside the door from where the nursery and toddler classes were waiting so all of the kids were going crazy crying for their parents. Then parents were sneaking into the room and feeding the kids but when they left, the kids screamed and cried.

By the end of the concert, I was exhausted and so were my kids, but I survived. I could not have been happier that it was over. After all of the families left, it looked like a tornado went through our school and we spent the next hour or so cleaning it up. Less than an hour later, full on thunder storms broke out. Thank God that held off until after… that could have been a nightmare.