Opera by Children

So in order to participate in the Utah Festival Opera's program for children you have to go up to Logan for a two day teacher training. I have had friends go to this inservice and they said, "You'll love it!" Remind me to call those friends.

First of all, the inservice started at 7:00 A.M. What?!! Therefore, I had to wake up at 4:00 A.M. so I had time to pick up my two new co-workers and drive up to Logan. We got there at 7:00 and were salivating for a great breakfast that was to be supplied. We instead had a spread of warm yogurt, hard boiled eggs, fruit, and whole milk. Who drinks whole milk other than babies and toddlers? We then sat around for 45 minutes waiting for the inservice to begin. Finally, at 8:00, we were shuffled into an auditorium. Little did we know that the chairs we chose would become our prison for two days. We didn't move from those chairs the entire time except to sing some stupid songs with even stupider hand movements. I'm not sure why, but teacher inservices are the best example of how not to teach. We usually go to inservices to become better teachers. Without fail we get lectures about how we should use visuals and hands-on activities to help our students learn. "Don't make your students sit in their seats listening to you drone on and on," they say So what do the presenters do? They make us sit in our seats for 4 hours at a time watching power point presentations and sharing personal stories that are neither touching nor pertinent to the topic at hand.

There were two ladies in charge of this whole operation. One was a lady with bleach blonde hair, red rimmed glasses, and a love for long drawn out stories that had little to do with anything. She surely was in love with Michael Ballam, the director of the Utah Festival Opera and local Logan celebrity. She even sang us a song on day two that she had written about him. Good times. The other lady was always nice but she too loved to draw things out or beat a dead horse.

We also continued to have whole milk for every meal as our only option for drinking. There was also no chocolate which is pretty much an unspoken rule for inservices. There is also the assumption that there will be good food. Nope.

The best part of the inservice was going on a Michael Ballam hunt. There are pictures of the man everywhere in the building. He is even painted as an angel on one of the walls. No kidding. We also had a good time making fun of the 70's style tight opera t-shirts that the teachers in attendance kept buying and wearing over their original shirts. The logo was in a very bad location on the right boob. We were also able to go to 1776 starring Michael Ballam on Thursday night. It was a wonderful production. The next morning, at 7:00 A.M., Mr. Ballam came in and talked to us for a few minutes and told us why he wanted to teach children how to write and perform an opera. It was a very inspirational story. He should talk to the Legislature about why the arts should be more present in our Utah classrooms. He had some convincing arguments.

We were so tired by the time we got home. Too bad my house was trashed by the rest of the family. Ah!