Each month, Eagle Radio in Great Bend is recognizing groups or individuals that make a big impact on our community. This Appreciation Month is highlighting teachers.
By KEN CARPENTER
Great Bend Post
Teaching music during a pandemic is not an easy job. But for Stephanie Goering, music teacher at Ellinwood Grade School, it has not only been worth the extra effort but essential to the growth of her students.
Goering began playing the piano when she was six years old, and her childhood love for music led to a career as a music teacher. Goering has been teaching children from kindergarten through sixth grade in Ellinwood for the past four years.
“I get to see every student in our school every single day,” Goering said. “I see every class for 25 minutes a day. We do a lot of instrument playing, a lot of music creation. We play drums, we play egg shakers, rhythm sticks. Mostly things are structured. It’s structured chaos some days, but overall, we just love to make music together.
“And I love that I have a room where kids can come and they feel safe to express themselves creatively and make music together, and we all encourage each other to step out of our comfort zones.”
Goering was raised in Ellinwood where she took piano lessons from her elementary music teacher. She was a percussionist in the Ellinwood High School band and also participated in choir. She graduated from high school in 2013.
After spending one year at Barton Community College, she headed off to Kansas State University where she earned a bachelor’s degree and certification to teach K-12 band and vocal music in 2017. At K-State, she learned to play a number of brass, woodwind and string instruments well enough to be able to teach students how to play them.
Goering doesn’t hesitate in explaining why she loves teaching music at the elementary school level.
“I think music, in general, is just based in creativity and self-expression,” Goering said. “It’s so fun with my kindergarten through sixth-graders to see how their own individual musicianship kind of blossoms over their time at the grade school. When they come to school in kindergarten, we’re just learning about a steady beat and having fun and how to be creative. By the time they get into sixth grade, we’re reading music and we’re playing melodies and rhythms. I love the progression of it and seeing how kids grow as they keep doing music.”
Goering has particularly enjoyed observing the growth of the kindergarten students she taught when she arrived at Ellinwood Grade School four years ago. Those children are now in third grade.
“My first year of teaching and I’m trying to figure it all out and they’re trying to figure it all out, too,” Goering recalled. “The relationships that I have now with those kids. They know my expectations. They know every day when we come in here this is a safe place for them where we can have fun, but we also have to work hard.”
The COVID-19 pandemic brought unique challenges for teaching music. Goering could no longer teach in her classroom when schools closed in March of 2020. And when the schools reopened in the fall of 2020, she had to adjust her way of teaching.
“When we came back last year, we were so blessed to be in school, fully masked, everything six feet apart,” Goering explained. “So much of what we did in here is team-building kind of activities. We’re close together, we’re listening to each other, we’re sharing instruments, so I just really changed a lot of the things that I had to do. I had to make things more individualized, not so much team-building focused.”
“It was hard but we did it. All day long you’re saying ‘pull up your mask, pull up your mask.’ It was not easy, but I think it was worth it to be able to see them every day, because once you do remote learning and once you do the online learning, you realize how hard that really is and you’d rather just push through and be in school.”
Goering is still taking precautions to protect her students from the virus. She is still not using musical instruments that require blowing, and she spends a lot of time cleaning the other instruments.
“This year we’re just kind of trying to find the balance between what can we do that still comes back to us working as one big group but still keeping our kids safe,” said Goering. “Because at the end of the day, that is the most important thing...to keep our kids safe and keep our kids at school.”
She credits her family’s support over the years for helping her find a career she loves.
“I think they’ve missed one concert...from my attending kindergarten through graduating college,” Goering remembered. “Everybody has just always been supportive of me and my education, pushing me to go farther, take opportunities when sometimes I thought maybe I didn’t want to, but those opportunities turned out to be big blessings in my life.”
Goering gets the same kind of support from her husband, Ian. They met when his family moved to Ellinwood when he was in eighth grade. She was a seventh-grader. They started dating in high school. They now have a 5-month-old son.
So what kind of music does Goering teach?
“We do everything from country to folk music to rock music, all sorts of things,” Goering said. “My fifth-graders just finished a unit on reggae music. We pretty much cover it all.”
And what does her future hold?
“I love Ellinwood,” Goering remarked. “I love the Ellinwood school district. It’s home to me. It’s home to us. I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.”
Read the previous Appreciation Month stories by clicking HERE.