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Taking notes

By NATE HUBBARD/Staff

Erik Lutjen may be a rookie teacher, but he already knows just what to do to get middle-schoolers to pay attention.
Bring up guts.
“Ewww, my intestines are moving when I breathe,” Lutjen said to a chorus of giggles as he demonstrated proper breathing techniques to his seventh-grade band students. “When we’re breathing we have to make sure we’re breathing with our stomach, not our chest.”
While Lutjen’s title is simply band director of Rural Retreat’s middle and high schools, it was apparent during his second day of teaching Thursday that the position requires much more than just musical acumen.
Finding his Rhythm
A percussionist by trade, Lutjen wasted no time Thursday in getting his 30-minute session with the seventh-graders started through a series of call-and-response rhythmic claps.
“The first two minutes when they walk in the door is probably the craziest time because they’re just coming from another class, they were just coming down the hall talking about whatever…and then they’re getting in here,” Lutjen said in an interview later in the day.
“[The clapping] gets their attention, but it also works on rhythms and stuff like that.”
After spending the first day of school Wednesday going through a syllabus and class rules, Lutjen was ready Thursday to get down to the business of teaching.
Unlike most classrooms, that meant noise – and lots of it.
Before he allowed any trumpets to toot or flutes to trill, Lutjen willingly turned his classroom into a zoo.
Continuing to work on breathing techniques after his intestines lesson, Lutjen had his students make snakelike hissing sounds that taught them how to properly release air.
“When you hiss, you really need to use your muscles to push out that air,” he explained to the serpentine students.
After having the students sing a few “do” pitches and giving a brief posture lesson, Lutjen finally gave the OK for the instruments to make their first appearance of the year.
As a cacophony of warm-up notes coalesced into a concordant concert B flat at Lutjen’s command, the band director could call the day a success.
Moving West
After growing up in Roanoke, Lutjen headed a few miles west to Virginia Tech for college.
He earned his bachelor’s in music in 2007 and then completed the five-year music education program last spring by earning his master’s in education.
Lutjen got connected to Wythe County through his wife, Kristen, who previously had applied for a music job only to find no openings.
A few months ago, though, Kristen got a message from the school system that a position had become available. When she called back for more information, she found out that there were actually two openings – one at Rural Retreat Elementary School for general music and the band director position for the middle and high schools.
Kristen was more interested in the elementary job and Lutjen ideally wanted to work with older students.
They both applied for their respective first choices and were both hired.
“It worked out pretty much as perfectly as it could,” Lutjen said. “Her at the elementary school, her students are going to feed into my students, which is kind of a neat situation.”
The couple moved to a residence just outside Wytheville at the end of June, and a week later Lutjen began working with the percussionists and color guard in preparation for band camp with the full group the following week.
Although Lutjen’s teaching career is just beginning, he said the program at Virginia Tech prepared him well for the job.
As a Hokie, he served as a student aide at Auburn Elementary School and at a middle school in Dublin.
In addition, he got experience at the high school level through a student teaching gig at William Byrd High School in Vinton.
In order to get his degree, Lutjen also had to take classes on a variety of instruments for a semester each.
So although he served as a percussionist with the Marching Virginians and in various campus ensembles, Lutjen also can play the flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, French horn, trombone and tuba and has had voice lessons.
“At Virginia Tech, they really train us to be able to do everything,” Lutjen said.
Marching to a New Beat
Although Lutjen was meeting most of the seventh-graders for only the second time on Thursday, he’d already spent more than a month with most of his eighth- through 12th-grade students.
Marching band camp began in earnest in mid-July, with the full band practicing for half-days for a week and then for eight- and nine-hour days the next week.
Drum major Lanie Alfaro, the band’s lone senior and in her second year in the position, said Lutjen’s camp prepared the group well for the band’s first performance at Rural Retreat’s Aug. 22 football game.
“He brought a very wide variety of marching techniques and it has definitely helped us on the field,” she said. “At last Friday’s football game, a lot of people came up to us and said we did a great job for it being our first game.”
Lutjen said he and the veteran band members still are getting adjusted to each other, but he said the transition mostly has gone well.
Eighth-grader Will Patton, an alto saxophone player who also marched last year, said Lutjen’s sense of humor helps balance his demanding practices.
“It’s been hard to get used to the change, but we’re starting to get used to it now,” Will said.
Despite all his schooling and his work with the students during the summer, Lutjen said the first football game was still a whirlwind experience.
“It’s kind of an adjustment for me because all of a sudden I have to run things during the football game,” he said. “Not only am I trying to think of OK what are we going to do, but I also have to react to things that are going on during the game.”
“We’ve got to make sure that the kids understand when we’re going to go down to the sideline to warm-up, what we’re going to do after we warm-up, lining up, getting on the field, getting off the field, just making sure we get off the field before the football team comes on and runs us over, things like that,” he added.
“That first game, especially never having done this before, was a very kind of, not traumatic, but it was a very exciting and a very nerve-wracking kind of experience. But I had fun and I think the kids had fun.”
On Thursday, Lutjen made another step in winning over his marching band when he unveiled the group’s new T-shirts, which feature an orange and black Batman logo on the front in honor of the group’s halftime show theme and drew cries of “Sweet” and “Awesome” from the students.
Building the Band
Unlike math or English, students taking band have elected to take the class.
While that may make for more enthusiastic students, it also means that a band director has to work to keep his pupils around year after year as they also are free to drop the activity.
“One of the things that every band director faces is trying to maintain involvement through the kids, keeping steady numbers,” Lutjen said. “I think just about every band program you look at there’s always going to be more sixth-graders than seventh-graders, more seventh-graders than eighth-graders, more eighth-graders than ninth-graders and it slowly tapers off.”
Lanie said she’s seen the trend firsthand as most of her peers dropped band as they moved into high school and got busy with other activities.
This year’s numbers also confirm Lutjen and Lanie’s statements.
Lutjen’s seventh-grade class was packed with 27 students in attendance Thursday, while he said the entire high school band consists of just more than 20 students, with around half eighth-graders.
In order to get students to stick with band, Lutjen said it’s important to get them started off on the right foot as beginners – one of the benefits, he said, of getting to work with the middle school students in addition to his high school band duties.
“We try and work with something that the kid’s going to be successful on because that’s going to build confidence,” Lutjen said about helping sixth-graders pick out an instrument. “But we also want them to enjoy what they’re playing. I don’t want to put a kid on saxophone if he’s going to be miserable on saxophone.”
Eighth-grader Will, in his third year of band, said he envisions himself being like Lanie and sticking with the group during his entire high school career.
He said he most enjoys the rush he gets from performing.
“I just like playing the music and being at the football games and getting people excited,” Will said. “Competitions are fun, too.”
Fun Work
While Lutjen kept the classroom atmosphere relaxed Thursday with his well-timed moments of humor, he also kept downtime to a minimum.
“I think the biggest thing is to try and keep the kids engaged in doing something all the time because if you wind up with downtime you’re going to wind up with a lot of things,” he said. “The key is to try and keep things moving forward and keep the kids engaged and that really goes for all the levels.”
After grabbing the students’ attention by beginning class with the rhythmic clapping, Lutjen handed out a letter introducing himself for students to give to their parents and the staple of band instruction: practice sheets.
Lutjen struck a balance on his practice requirements as well, asking the students to practice 75 minutes a week at home but leaving it up to them how they want to spread out their time.
“I’m not going to require you to practice every day,” he told the seventh-graders, although he added “ideally that would be really cool” and told them to shoot for picking up their instruments at least three times a week.
The band director also set up a system for efficiently turning in the practice sheets each Monday.
“I like to try and have a lot of fun, but I also try and have the understanding that we need discipline within the classroom,” Lutjen said about his teaching style. “What that means is not yelling at the kids, ‘Shut up everybody,’ but it means having an understanding that you’re holding them to expectations behavior-wise and participation-wise.”
Lanie said Lutjen does a good job of managing the classroom.
“He’s a really good guy,” she said. “He’s very knowledgeable. He definitely knows what he’s doing.”
Nate Hubbard can be reached at 228-6611 or .