BETHEL — Being a chorus teacher and band teacher during the pandemic turned out to be exceptionally fun for Telstar teacher Christopher Alberi and his students. As it would be difficult for Alberi to teach his students breath work during the heart of the pandemic, as well as wind instruments, he pivoted towards a different instrument. The first one being a bucket drumming unit. After six weeks when the kids started getting fidgety, Alberi did another pivot.

“I have some experience playing in rock bands and when I was at Crescent Park in Woodstock, we had a modern band unit which is essentially a rock band unit,” explains Alberi. “So I thought maybe this is something that I could scale up, maybe this is something I can take from being five kids in one group to my largest class last year, [which] was 17 kids.

“So I found as many ukuleles as I could, I had three drum kits, three basses to use a [well as a] handful of electric guitars, and electric keyboards. We started playing essentially just rock music as a class. That is what we did all last year, except for the first six weeks.”

The students played a wide variety songs they all picked out including John Denver’s, ‘Take Me Home,’ The Weekend’s, ‘Blinding Lights,’ and Rick Astley’s, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’

The Astley song actually started as joke; however, Alberi describes the sound of as enormous, beautiful, and full. In addition, the students played the theme song to ‘The Office.’

Alberi said it seemed as though his students were relieved to come to his class, as if it were a break from the real world. He also describes how focused they were when the whole symphony came together.

“I think their actions might speak louder than their words, [as] a generation that was raised on smartphones and tablets and has the internet at their fingers,” explains Alberi. “I think sometimes they find it very hard to focus, but when we are performing, I do not have [that] trouble with focus. So I think that that says a lot given the fact that when we’re rehearsing together as a group, they’re not thinking about other things. They’re not looking at their laptop or their phone. They’re engaged. That’s a rare, a rare kind of mental setting for kids these days.”

When Alberi describes 2020 and the challenges he had to overcome, he responds with a positive answer.

“Even though we – all of the staff at Telstar – had to overcome huge challenges, it still felt like a successful school year and that was only because the kids showed up and answered all of those challenges last year,” Alberi says passionately.

“So I learned that it really is the kids that [make] education worth it. That’s one of those things that caricatures say [at] awards acceptance speeches, right? Like you hear it and you’re like, oh, that’s nice, but last year, I really felt that I truly felt that.”

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