We have two main music rooms at Hermann Wesselink College. This is 040, where we keep the keyboards and the acoustic guitars. We refer to this room loosely as the practice room. The keyboards along the two longer side walls make it ideally spaced for classroom keyboard assignments. The students can also sit at the tables in the middle of the room for non-practice, and for guitar lessons. The two walls that are windows give the room a pleasantly open feeling.
I have say that I do really love this room. But that's probably because we had so much less in previous years. We acquired the new space, the keyboards and the guitars all at the same time two years ago. It has all made our jobs 100 times easier and we're able to be much more productive.
Our new space, which used to be an open space under the school, also has our 'theory room', which is 037, plus 5 practice rooms, an instrument storage room, a new office for us, and a booth for the mixing board which looks into the theory room. Our space is not yet perfect so I can’t say that it’s completely ideal, but I and my collegues feel very fortunate to have come so far in recent years.
One reason that it is close to being ideal, is that my collegues and I were able to participate a bit in the design and lay-out options during the architectural drawing fases. We think that we’ve made some good choices in our design and the function of the space works as planned. More would of course always be better, but we are working together constantly to improve, and we do so far have wonderful results.
The best part, besides the two main rooms (040 and 037) where most of the classroom learning takes place, is the practice rooms. To be able to let the students practice in separate groups facilitates a lot of music making. And of course having enough equipment and instruments to let several groups practice at the same time has been a godsend. During an 80 minute class we can actually complete integrated lessons wherein both practice and theory are worked upon. The students can practice away on their own while the instructor goes from room to room asissting the groups. After sometime at work in groups, we come together in the big rooms to share what we’ve done. 
With a short time of attentive practice under my assistance, I can definitely help students to feel success in their musical endeavors. My collegues are all equally adept at promoting a successful experience for the students. It is almost as if we knew all along that we could get such good results, if only we weren’t lacking the facilities, instruments and equipment. Now we have all of those things and our goals are actually being realized. Dare I say that it creates a real feeling of satisfaction.Having said this, which I think is a daring statement, yes I have to admit that I see my own working space as being almost my ideal classroom.
The space works incredibly well when 1 teacher has all of the space at her/his disposal. This happens more frequently than one would think when you consider that we are a staff of four teachers at the school. Then you have six practice rooms, all of the keyboards, all of the guitars and all of the electric instruments and percussion available for your one class to use.
But we do for at least half of the time, not have both rooms for our one class. Furthermore, frequent roster changes cause inconvenient changes in the materials that are available for lessons. One day you can be working on guitar with a class, when a roster change switches the day or time of the class. At that new time of day a colleague may also be working on the guitars with her/his class. Then things have to be rescheduled. We usually are very accommodating to one another, and the teacher with the most pressing case is allowed to continue using the room or equipment. The class who gets to continue then must agree to a time when they will be finished. We try to make that time to be within two weeks.
The roster changes are the greatest hindrance to the flow of our classes. Of course if we had another set of 18 acoustic guitars, or another set of 18 keyboards, then roster changes would not be as much of a problem.The same goes for the pianos. More would of course be great. We have one good upright Yamaha in room 037, so that is the room where we conduct most of our choral classes. But if we had a good piano in room 040 instead of just the keyboards, then we could do more choir work as well in that room. Fortunately we can use the grand piano in the aula often for choir singing, and the big practice rooms attached to 040 both have pianos.
But those two pianos are older and beaten by the use and abuse of thousands of students over the years. More of the great Yamaha uprights would of course be ideal. But the idea of more, as compared to the quality of the reality still give the sense of satisfaction that we're working in an almost ideal situation. Otherwise stated, for the money and the resources that are at our disposal, and as compared to similar programs across this country, it seems that we are a bit ahead of the curve. We feel fortunate and still try to use our resources to the utmost for the education of our students.
My colleagues have been able to inspire me in our quest for the ideal music classroom. Things that I would not have been first on my list of acquisitions have now become cherished necessities of everyday, and of not so everyday lessons. Some things are quite practical like the mixing board and booth in 037, that lets our mixes, especially with the vocals, be optimal for our classroom presentations.
The board and P.A. system have also helped us to make some decent recordings that are now being published by students all over the web.Other acquisitions such as the djembes that our newest colleague has brought from Senegal are perhaps less often used, but I would certainly feel that our program would be weaker without them. I've enjoyed becoming a better djembe player and teacher because of their presence, and it it simply heartwarming and enriching to see how much the students love the lessons.
And perhaps the most special inspiration has been our most senior department member, Mr. Cees Rot. Cees has been the most vigilant and forward thinking for many of the progresses in our classroom. Cees takes care of the audio equipment for us in the aula, (since the installation is still too complicated for the rest of us music teachers), and Cees is super handy with the carpentry skills that add the perfect details to the functionality of our classrooms and equipment.
When we thought up together how we would ideally like to place the keyboards in 040, it was Cees who found the right keyboard tables, and he even figured out a way to keep the tables optimally in place against the walls. Cees procured and figured out a way to stack the tables for our instrument repair storage. It was also Cees' idea to order the better mixing board and PA for 037, and when the equipment did arrive, Cees set it all up and ran the wiring. Lastly, as I've previously mentioned in this blog, Cees is the expert on gamelan music, which is something that I would never be able to impart upon the students. Cees has made the entire school more interesting with our gamelan work. The entire school feels the richness of its presence.I can't say that our classrooms are ideal, but I feel that we are in an ideal situation, and that we are using our capacities ideally. Of course to make things better I would simply want still more space, more practice rooms, more nice pianos, and more equipment such as amplifiers, electric guitars and still another drumset. The most ideal would actually be to have a full pop-instrumentarium in every practice room, and to have 10 such practice rooms. Every room would of course have a grand piano, and a premium PA system with good recording possibilities. And I would want to be able to have a choir room with tiered seating, and I'd like to have a full set of band and orchestra instruments, an orchestra pit that raises and lowers at our aula stage . . . . but that is all about more things. I really think that we are on well on our way, practically speaking, to achieving by way of our own ingenuity, the ideal classroom. That is somehow more fulfilling the not realistic dream of having everything.
