I'm just back from the 2016 IMEC, and have decided to post a few photos to the Teague Family Blog with the primary goal of simply sharing some news and images of the weekend with my family members who track my escapades via the blog.
This was my 25th IMEC, and we had a wonderful group of students from DGN selected to participate in the All State Bands, Choirs, and Orchestras. In addition to the 15 performing students we had a student composer (1st Place in his category) and a student selected to the "Future Music Educators Symposium" that runs concurrently with the conference. These 17 students were a joy to travel with and represented our school with professionalism throughout.
On Thursday, the DGN Wind Ensemble bused down to Peoria to perform our student composer's work on the All-State Music Composition Showcase Concert. That program is the one I ran for seven years, and it's near/dear to my heart. It was a lot of fun to have the chance to see and hear our students perform on that beautiful stage, and extra rewarding as a teacher to be back-state as the student conducted the ensemble. (Photos in this post.)
The conference marked the end of my first year serving the association (ILMEA) as the State President-Elect. I have one more year in this role before becoming the State President in January of 2017. My good friend and colleague Mark Cory is the current State President. Association "tradition" places the President, and the President-Elect, in the "Presidential Suite" of the Pere Marquette Hotel. Mark and I have attended Board receptions and events in this space for many years, but it was fun to actually "live" in the suite over the course of the four-day event. We enjoyed posing with some of the oil paintings.
In the weeks leading up to the conference I found myself reflecting on my own "All State" experiences in high school, and remembering that in 1986 my own music teacher (Mr. Patterson) - who was the President of MMEA at the time - invited the Hickman HS students to his Presidential Suite for a reception. That made a big impression on me at the time; I thought it was pretty cool that my teacher … who must have had many more important things to do than entertain my friends and me … made it a point to push the pause button and hold a special event just for us. So on Friday night - 30 years later - I invited our DGN students up to the Presidential Suite for a late-night pizza party and returned the favor to another generation of All-Staters. Maybe I was "paying it forward" as well.
