This quarter, the Salida High School Music and Theater Department had a new edition: student teacher Madelynn Siegrist. Siegrist is currently pursuing a music education degree at Adam State University in Alamosa, Colorado. She has been assisting music teacher André Wilkins with his classes, including Jazz Band, Concert Band, Audition Choir, and Concert Choir. She has also been helping out with the SHS Drama Team’s production of “Miss Holmes,” because in many rural schools, music teachers end up assisting theater productions. She is leaving SHS to student teach at an elementary school in Alamosa after the first week of March, which will allow her to be certified to teach K-12 after graduating. In the future, she hopes to teach either high school or middle school.
“It [teaching elementary school] will be a little bit of a challenge for me because that’s not something I really want to do after I graduate, but I’m really excited to learn. I want to teach high school or middle school. I’d like to teach choir, but I’ve liked teaching band a lot more than I thought I would,” Siegrist said.
Siegrist has always loved music and has been a musician for a long time, especially because she comes from a family of musicians. She has been singing for as long as she can remember, and she took piano and violin lessons as a child. Siegrist’s middle school did not have a choir program, which was the musical medium she was most interested in, so she enrolled in a community based choir. There, she met her future high school choir director, who really inspired her in her life and teaching career.
“When I was in middle school, I went to a little bit of a more underfunded middle school, and there was a really big band program and a really big orchestra program, but there was no choir. I didn’t want to not do music, but I didn’t want to play an instrument, so my parents had found an after school community choir for me to join. The director was the director of the high school I ended up going to. I want to be him when I grow up; he’s really great,” Siegrist said.
As she started to look into furthering her education, her love of music inspired her to pursue music education. She did not consider herself to be a great student in high school, and had a low GPA upon graduating, which caused her to look for schools with higher acceptance rates. After looking, Adams State University was the only college she applied to. After being accepted, she found so many reasons why she loved the university, including the smaller class sizes and ability to build connections.
“I was really lucky it [Adams State University] was the only school I applied for because I realized after I went all the reasons I wanted to be there and why it was the right choice for me like the smaller class size and being able to build connections with my professors and things like that. In high school, I was very in the back, and I made myself get lost, but in a smaller school like that there was nowhere for me to hide,” Siegrist said.
In her sophomore year of college, Siegrist attended an honor band hosted by Adams State University and saw Wilkins teach a clinic. She really enjoyed the way he taught and included everyone in the experience, and she specifically remembered how Wilkins included her in a lesson on conducting, even though she was a beginner and the friends she was with were further along in their education on the subject. This event endeared her to SHS, which led her to choose Salida to student teach, despite having the opportunity to teach in her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado.
“Watching him [Wilkins] work and build connections with the kids and like how he worked and engaged with students was really really exciting to me. Mr. Wilkins has a way of making everyone feel good and making everyone feel comfortable around him, and that was an energy I really wanted to be around,” Siegrist said.
Throughout the years, Siegrist has played and sung a lot of music. Her favorite band song that she’s played is “Legacy Overture” by Randall Standridge, as it was the first challenging band song she played. She didn’t get involved with band until college, when she started to get involved with percussion, and she really enjoyed getting to play a difficult, dramatic snare and bass drum part. For choir, her favorite song is “Choose Something Like a Star,” by Randall Thompson, which is part of a larger piece of work composed of Robert Frost poems set to music.
“‘Choose Something Like a Star’ is really special to me because the entire poem is about like putting your faith in a higher power or putting your faith in something that’s like a higher religion or deity or just something having faith. And that’s something that I try to work on everyday, having faith in something, and it [the song] is a really good reminder.
While here, she has really enjoyed getting to know the students and forming connections with them. She has loved teaching, and her biggest challenges have been surrounding the logistical things outside of teaching, such as organizing tech weeks, which are the two weeks before a show in theater. She has enjoyed being in a more laid-back musical environment.
Siegrist said, “Getting to know you guys [students] has been really fun. Getting to know all the different dynamics, being in a high school environment again is really exciting for me especially after being in like professional music settings and collegiate settings where everything is very serious and very strict. It’s nice to be able to have some fun and not have all of the expectations and all of that. I have especially enjoyed working with the band, especially since that isn’t something I’m as comfortable with. Being able to learn alongside you guys has been really really fun for me.”