New Ten Sleep music teacher brings years of experience

TEN SLEEP – Michael Adams, the new K-12 music teacher for Ten Sleep School brings to the table not only 20 years of teaching experience but a plethora of music knowledge having performed in Austria, Germany and many places around the United States.

Adams stated that during his first year of college at Northwest College in Powell, he had the chance to go to Germany and Austria with the audition choir and to play at University of Northern Colorado --Greeley of which they recorded a video and sent to the International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE). That video impressed the IAJE enough for them to invite the group to play at their international conference that next year. "So the second year that I was in college we went and played in California for the IAJE and Disney land," Adams said.

After finishing his degree in music education K-12 at the University of Wyoming and performing across much of the Rocky Mountains, Adams ended up on Colorado.

In Colorado, Adams worked for two years at a music store, offering private lessons and selling and repairing band and orchestra instruments. "I got to meet Doc Severinsen down there, sold him a mouth piece, that was kind of cool. I played in the Denver Jazz Orchestra and the Lakewood Symphony while I was down there. Our band leader for the jazz band was Sam Bivens and he was friends with Count Basie. We actually played off the original score of "April in Paris," which if you are into the music world, that's a big time jazz standard, absolutely phenomenal song," Adams said.

Adams was raised in Pinedale and learned about his hidden musical talent in the seventh grade. He stated that a friend invited him to join the band at school and it was that year that he learned that he had the ability to learn instruments very quickly. "By the time I was in high school, I was playing in the band - trumpet, baritone, tuba and started French horn - with some degree of success," Adams said.

He also learned that he loved helping younger students. At first he would help the younger students with track and field, teaching them techniques that he had learned. That love and his love of music is the reason he became a music teacher. "It was kind of a happy melding of two things, I really like the little kids and I really like the music and this was the place where I could be a part of both," Adams said.

With the many cut backs that schools are experiencing and have experienced, many schools have phased out programs such as home economics, art and music. When asked how music ties in with learning Adams stated, "Music ties in with learning in many ways. Music is where the rubber hits the road. I mean you can learn all of the English languages, all of the foreign languages that you want, the mathematics and music is where all those are applied. I'm not saying we are doing calculous equations in music but fractions, additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions."

He added that reading is a subject that music seems to help. "Music creates fluency in reading because everything is set to a beat and a rhythm and once the beat is lost, we actually train to follow the beat and so fluency has increase in your vision and response to what you see. We've seen reading scores from kids going into music and actually trying in music, that's the key, they have to actually try, but even some of them that struggle at first, once they start getting better at music, we have noticed a pretty good correlation between that and reading scores starting to go up," Adams said. "There is actually a lot of research going on about how music affects the brain, not just the physiology of the body but also the chemical aspects of the brain. The release of endorphins that music causes, get that sense of euphoria going and it naturally makes people happier and they are more willing to be a part of everything else around them. For education, music is indispensable, in my opinion," he added.

Adams also stated that many people question the correlation between learning and music because music is not something that you can see or touch. "This is an arguable point because it's not something you can tangibly see. Music is something that we can hear, we can feel but we can't put our hands on it. We can put our hands on the instruments but we can't put our hands on the music itself. It reaches into the part of the human psyche that mathematics cannot reach. It creates a bridge from our emotional side to our logical side, in a way that not many other things do. Even with art you can tangibly touch a painting, you can tangibly touch a pot and I think that's one of the reasons why music is hit so hard, is that we don't have a physical, lasting, tangible, touchable thing. We can record our music, we can touch that CD or we can touch that disc or MP3 player or whatever. That's one of the hard selling points that we as music teachers are always bucking.

"This was a discussion that was going on heavy when I was in college and they had numerous artists and neurologists, neuro scientists that were studying the effects of music. There are hundreds of books that deal with how music relates to other aspects of our life. It's not just a release from one person who wrote the song, it could be all about their experiences, helping them through some tough patches or explaining their joyous times or simply stating their opinions on things, that's just one person, but how it affects the people around them, not only does it bridge our emotion side with our physical side, it bridges to other people and creates more of a sense of community and culture," Adams explained.

GOALS

Adams has a few goals for the Ten Sleep School music program and his main goal is to make sure that the school has enough equipment for everyone to take part and that the equipment is in the best possible condition. He also wants to offer at least two performances, once in the winter and once in the spring and for the middle school band to attend a festival. "My middle school band, I would also like to see take on a festival appearance. I also want the middle school band to take part in a larger group ensemble and I have talked with the Worland band director about folding them into his program once in a while so that they can experience that larger sound because that's not something that I, being from Pinedale, that I was able to get a really good idea about until I went to a festival, but not everybody gets to go. Out of a band of 40 you might have five people go to a festival appearance and play with a group of 120 because you are pulling kids from multiple schools. The chances of us having all 17 of my middle school kids go into a festival, that's not realistic because other kids deserve a chance to be in that festival as well," Adams said.

Adams moved here from Wheatland with his wife Julie and his three children and is looking forward to what the future holds at Ten Sleep School.

He is also planning on working towards his Master of Education in the near future.