Expect perfection

A little girl played Il Silencio, and I thought I was hearing the sound of heaven.  I have never heard such a young girl play a trumpet before.  And to have heard it played so perfectly!  And by a thirteen year old!

She held me spellbound.  I hope she did you too.  Her name is Melissa Vernema and she is playing with Maestro Andre Rieu in Maastricht in the Netherlands.  City officials are said to have sealed off the town square and closed everything down to achieve perfect noise control.

The real point of this post is that it is quite wrong for us adults to assume that the youth of today are all wasters.  I know one or two young Anguillians who put in a similar effort into their activities, and have the high degree of talent shown here.  The question is how do we get more young people to strive to excel?  The answer, it appears, is to expect more of them, to demand more, to never accept second grade.  I know the child psychologists do not approve.  It does not help with the late achievers and the slow starters.  Well, I am sorry, accepting low scores from those who can do better is not good enough if we want to raise their standards.

Victor Frankl said it better than I ever can as far back as the year 1972.

I like the idea of always overestimating the abilities of my students.  I like the idea of not accepting that they will not, cannot, achieve at the highest level.  For the future, I want to see my students surprise all around them with how much they can learn, and how well they can express it when asked.

A propos of nothing, this is the best rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus that I have ever seen and heard.  Sorry for those who don’t like their Handel being messed with.

My High School was at a Benedictine Monk monastery in Trinidad, but we would never have been able to do something as excellent as the Winter Park High School did.