Coltrane...A love supreme, 

rhapsodical, rising and falling lines, repetition, 

pushing the limits of the instrument and the artist, 

legato, staccato, drums keeping the time within the time.  

The spoken mantra, a love supreme, 

A Love Supreme.  

Piano reflects the spoken mantra,

 and the bass plays this ostinato too..So- Bad Coltrane playing Bad Coltrane?  

Oblivion, ignorance, arrogance.  

The principal wrote to the staff one day, “I am growing accustomed to this clunky schedule.” Clunky, and it reeks of bad Coltrane, playing Bad Coltrane. Oblivion, ignorance, arrogance. Have you heard of a Coltrane Cover quartet? If so, it would resemble our teaching schedule this year.  First period, I am assisting in a classroom where the students are in school and the teacher is piped in from her house.  The students struggle to stay focused, but we manage. Second period I teach an online class of thirty-five students, because this same teacher always teaches from home, so we cannot break them up into smaller online groups.  It works, but it is clunky, unwieldy, flat, I am blowing my saxophone so hard my ears bleed, it’s bad Coltrane playing bad cover quartet, Coltrane. I teach a live class after that, of ten students, and then I take them outside, the whole grade, for forty-five minutes while the teachers inside discuss what they need to discuss.  Glorified babysitting, although we play old-fashioned games, like duck duck goose, and red light, green light.  Bad Coltrane, playing Bad Coltrane.  The rhythm is off, it is unwieldy, complicated, unmusical.  

Wednesdays the students all stay home, we come into school and teach large groups online while they cuddle up on their couches and enjoy the comforts of home and hearth.  That’s just strange; why come into school when we could just as easily teach everyone online at home? Rhythm, music, flow, focus, legato, staccato, depth of sound, pitch held true? None of it is happening in the time of COVID-19, and it is the quintessential bad Coltrane Cover Quartet playing his hardest and most complicated pieces.  

However, I am not one to shy away from a challenge, and years ago I told myself I would never say NO to anything that could move me forward in any way.  So- I carry on, finding new ways to power through, finding new ways to challenge students in person and on-line, and the "clunkiness" just becomes an observation, rather than a criticism.  A pandemic is as a pandemic does, despite the timing being off,  and the oblivion, ignorance, arrogance of the cover quartet just cannot be a part of my responsibility.  I just need to see it as rhapsody, until we turn the corner on this cover quartet.