For my english class I had to write a compare and contrast essay. The topic I am comparing is Mr. Morrise to Mr. Sessions. I thought I would share it with you guys. I hope I get some comments on this.
Compare and Contrast Essay
Band attend hut! Mark time hut! Forward march! These last two years in band I have heard these commands along with others yelled over and over. But each year two different people yelled them. One yelled with a, you-take-one-more-step-out-of-line-you-will-be-running-laps-all-night tone to his voice, which made me almost afraid to breathe. After practices I came away with a feeling I always get after a good day of practicing. The other yelled with a let-sing-and-hold-hands-while-we-frolic-down-the-street tone that made me loose my concentration and goof off. When coming from practices with him I was left with a feeling of loss that I only get after a bad rehearsal. These two men while they have some similarities they are both very different people. Their attitudes, teaching abilities slash style, and their cool factor.
Mr. Sessions is a very fun loving person. Everybody loves him or likes him, but, of course there are always exceptions. He is a very loving person and you can tell this by the way he wanted to know why you did not make it to a basketball game or some other performance. He would either expect a not from you or even a phone call if you were on your way. If you broke down he would make you call him just so he would know where you were so he would not worry about where you were so he did not think that you were on the side of the road dead or dying. Of course this is also how he would excuse you so your grade did not suffer. He was sometimes considered as a fatherly figure because he cared about every one. He is also a very out going person. He did not only make it to every basketball and football game, create a field show and put it on, woke up early enough to drive from Cedar to be at school for Jazz Band, direct the band for pit, but, he also took the time to perform in the musical Grease. All of those things took place before or after school, which he did not get paid for. He also was extremely adventurous. He took on the task of not only taking the members up to state solo and ensembles, state band, state orchestra members all on an over night bus trip for them to perform except state solo and ensamble which was only a daytime event. But he also took the band members on a band tour for three days. I think he took this as an adventure more than a challenge because it would be a big adventure for someone to take over 80 kids to the zoo.
Mr. Morrise on the other hand is much more serious. During games he was more worried about what song we were going to play and seemed not to get into the games very much. The one game I did see him get really into was when it was raining and we could not play our instruments without ruining them. He also cares too much about offending people. For example the placements in band for what part we are playing. Instead of putting us in order from the best player down to the last chair or the worst player, he just has the best three players put on each part then the rest of us just get placed somewhere. To me if I was told or labeled as the worst player than that would make me work harder to get to where I could improve. But, I think that he is afraid of telling who ever is the worst that they are because it might offend them. Mr. Morrise is also easily distracted. Someone will make a comment or something we do will remind him of something and he will go off on a wild tangent. He will tell stories or he will attempt to make jokes. Most of the time this will take up 20-30 minutes of our class time. Which makes it really hard to get a anything done. Because once this happens hardly anyone is paying attention to anything that is going on.
However, Mr. Morrise is a very superb choir teacher. He is the first teacher that has gotten me interested in singing. (Now if he did not try and push choir onto everyone). When he is singing or teaching he gets a facial expression on which tells me that he is so proud and if I tried to explain it I would not be able to do so. He is also a dang good guitar player. Even though I have not been in his guitar class, I have seen him perform. If he were to make a CD with the songs that I think he wrote, I believe that he could make some big bucks. I have also seen some excellent guitar players who have emerged from his classes. In band, however, in my opinion he is not the best. He can teach us the rhythms correctly and in a way where we could figure them out ourselves later. But because he is a trumpet player he will speak in their key. So if you can not figure out what key he is talking about then you will get lost almost instantly. He also does not believe in tuning before a rehearsal. He thinks that we should just be able to tune while we start playing. That only works if we have all heard the same tuning note. After a year we have more or less gotten him to let us tune as a group before we start to play. It seems to me that he is not as confident about what he does in band then what he does in choir or guitar. Because he is always looking at what works for other bands and tries to figure out if it will work for us. That is good but what he does not realize I think is that some of the things that he looks at would only work on depending on how much money we received from the school and in return how much money we were able to get from our parents.
In contrast Mr. Sessions is a very good band teacher. He not only taught us how to play our rhythms correctly, how to count them correctly, or how to correctly play them in a certain style of music. But he also taught us how to put emotion into what we played. After we got done playing a song he would extend his arms and check for goose bumps. If we succeeded in giving him goose bumps it was then we knew that he was really touched by what we had just played, and that we had put enough or more than enough emotion into out music. If we did not succeed then it would push us the next day to work harder then we had the day before. Mr. Sessions was also good at marching band. He would work us on the same stuff over and over. Some times we would work on something like our gate turns for an entire class period. In the summer when it was hotter than the inside of my grandma’s house he would always be right there telling us to squeeze the sponge and give it all that we had left. Some would only have what would seem to be about 10 minutes left in them but they would squeeze all the strength that they could muster to go for another hour. Mr. Sessions is a very good conductor. He is so good that every year there were more and more people asking him from all over the state to come and conduct for them. Of course every year he would turn them all done. He was good enough in my opinion to become a college professor and be up with the best of them.
Mr. Sessions knew how to have fun. Not only does he get into every game that we pepped at but he also gets us prepared to play. When we do have a game because he lived to far away to drive home and come back he would stay until the game started. While he was there he would play games with most of the percussion and a few others. Mostly he would be playing magic, but every once in a while they would play Lord of the Rings Risk. They would also play during lunchtime at school. In fact they played so much that they ended up putting a table into one of the practice rooms to play in. The room was then called the “Magic Room,” If you could not find him anywhere that was the first place to look for him. Sessions would also tease us but in a way that we knew he was joking. For example he called one of our trumpet players fat and juicy, and if that did not set her off he was get a piece of Styrofoam and would make it squeak. She got mad at him for it but because we could always tell when he was joking she was never mad at him for very long, and of course we knew he did not mean anything by calling her fat and juicy because she is actually really skinny. He also made a joke called the “Wandering Trevor.” There is a kid in band named Trevor who would always get up and started wandering the band room, hence the name “wondering Trevor.” But whenever he or someone else would wander he would yell stop pulling a Trevor or Trevor sit down. When he was trying to get a point across to the band he would do an impersonation of someone. Like last year he was acting like Corneal Sanders when explaining what he thought a judge would say about what we had just played. He did so many different impersonations that I cannot even remember all of the different impersonations that he has done.
Mr. Morrise on the other hand has some really good stories (which we hear when he is distracted). I think the best one that he told us was about how he lost his finger. It was very gruesome, but it was very funny because of the way he told it to us. Because he is missing this finger we have been able to make jokes about it. In pep band we use what I call the missing finger signal for when we play the war chant. We use our right hand and put it across our chest like we were saying the pledge of allegiance and we will bend our ring finger so it is shorter than all of the others. One thing that I thought was extremely cool was that for state solo and ensemble he let some kids who had relatives there come and take us out to lunch or to their houses just to hang out for a little bit. Most teachers are so strict about that so they only let you go if it is your parents and if they are going to be responsible in getting you home.
It is hard for me to understand how two teachers who teach the same subject can teach it so differently. But in fact I have shown how very different that they can be. Today one calls out in his pretend-Hawaiian-accent-saying-aloha. The other asking in-a-respected tone. But even though they are really different they do have one thing in common besides that they taught at the same school. It is that they are both proud to be a Hurricane Tiger.
~Mar-z-pan
