After a career of living by checklists, my recent retirement has inspired me to construct the best one ever.
Do not:
• Go to summer in-service sessions on any non-musical topic.
• Attend Professional Learning Community meetings on a weekly basis during my prep time instead of doing the 20 other things that must be done the same day.
• Go to morning duty at 7:30 on Monday mornings.
• Drive a school bus in the dead of night on Fridays (or any other day).
• Sell mass quantities of mattresses, beef sticks, chocolate bars, cheesecakes, magazines, or anything else.
• Miss a family event for a band event.
• Have a checklist of over 10 items. (Except this one.)
• Say “yes” to everything I’m asked to do.
• Run a broken sousaphone to a repair technician at the break of dawn on a Saturday morning.
• Complete another unnecessary form of any kind.
• Spend time in the summer heat unless I have a beach chair, umbrella, and huge glass of lemonade.
• Teach another fine arts class to an apathetic general school population.
• Take 100 kids into a fast food restaurant.
• Listen to hundreds of songs for possible performance.
• Measure and line the practice field.
• Correct mistakes made the first time I lined the practice field.
• Stretch my sense of fashion by helping design the color guard uniforms.
• Go to a parade unless I am holding a grandchild who is watching it.
• Worry about a student breaking my heart when he quits.
• Worry about changes in the school schedule.
• Listen to another rendition of Shout It Out, The Horse, Louie Louie, or Seven Nation Army.
• Be a class sponsor.
• Attend the school prom.
• Construct another curriculum map.
• Attend another deafening pep rally.
• Write, rewrite, or adjust any more marching drill.
• Fill out another purchase order.
• Complete another inventory.
• Submit another lesson plan with the latest educational jargon.
• Let my wife evaluate me using a rubric.
I am confident this will be the easiest checklist I have ever completed. Don’t be jealous – your time will come before you know it.
