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Tiger HI-LINE
Friday, Nov. 17, 2017
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Volume 58 Edition 10
Food drive nets almost 92,000 meals Over the past month, Cedar Falls Schools have worked together in the annual Northeastern Iowa Food Bank Student Food Drive. With competition against Waterloo East and Waterloo West, a goal of 35,000 meals was set, and the food drive efforts took off. Over the month, various events from collecting money at games and concerts, ultimate Frisbee, trunk-or-treat, getting CANNED (toilet in yard), Chick-fil-a, Pizza Ranch, powderpuff volleyball and classroom collections took place, raising over $11,000. Cedar Falls ended up dominating the competition, raising 51,515 meals, over half of the meals in the 91,918 meals collectively raised by eight surrounding participating schools. Not only did Cedar Falls dominate the competition, but it also helped dominate hunger within the community. “There are so many who go
Rachel Schmid Photo
Students delivered all the donations from the food drive to the Northest Iowa Food Bank on Monday, Nov. 13. Cedar Falls contributed 51,515 meals to the collective effort. without food. This event, which only lasts six weeks, has a huge impact on many lives in the Cedar Valley,” counselor Erin Gardner said. This year, the results greatly exceeded recent years.
“Well at least three times as better,” Northeast Iowa Food Bank Creative Communications Coordinator Bryan Helleso said. “It was great. It was much better. It was really fun, and I think we could tell
the level of excitement was there this year, and part of that is just helping the students understand what they are doing. Hunger is kind of an ambiguous word if you don’t necessarily understand how it looks or if you are not experiencing it, so being able to show students what that looks like and explain to them how it happens and what it looks like locally, it definitely encourages them to take action.” Taking action in the community not only benefits the ones that are being helped, but the ones who are helping. “When you are in high school, you are learning a lot about the world around you and are about to go out in the real world,” Helleso said. “It is not all glitz and glam out there, but there are a lot of good things happening, and getting the students involved in those good things can set them up so well for the future. It also obvi-
ously helps us get meals. Over 90,000 meals, that’s insane. That’s a lot for kids who are in high school and busy from 7:30 in the morning until sometimes 7 or 8 at night. That’s really impressive. It builds leadership characteristics and gives them an idea of what it is like to step out of their comfort zones. It is not only something that students can benefit from, but everyone.” With an award of $1,000 to go toward the food drive next year, there are high hopes and larger goals. “I am hoping we continue to push ourselves to do better, but I also hope we continue to push the other schools to do better as well. The more we work, the more we are able to help others in our schools and in our community,” Gardner said. By Co-Editor-in-Chief Rachel
SCHMID
Lincoln teacher reaches Grammy semifinals Michelle Droe, a music educator in her 13th year at Lincoln Elementary, was faced with a tough question from her student after the news was released that she was a semifinalist for the Grammy Award for Music Educator. “A student of mine heard that I was nominated and said, ‘Mrs. Droe, if you win the Grammy, will you ever come back?’ She was worried that I was going to leave. I had to immediately comfort her any way to let her know that nothing would change. Every day my students ask me if I have won. It’s really fun in elementary school,” Droe said. According to the Recording Academy, “For every performer who makes it to the Grammy stage, there was a teacher who played a critical role in getting them there.” Every year the Recording Academy honors one music education teacher with a Grammy Award to represent all of the behind-thescenes work that goes into a musician, and now Droe is on their short list. Out of the 2,300 nominees for this award, 197 quarterfinalists were selected, and they were pared down to the semifinalists, the top 25. The final list of the top 10 nominees will be released in December. “I found out a few weeks ago that I was in the top 25, and I was really shocked,” Droe said. It took one student to nominate Droe and put the spotlight on a teacher.
Michelle Droe, a music educator at Lincoln Elementary School, was nominated for a Grammy award that honors teachers who help young muscicians grow. “There is a student and her family, Eliana Davidson, who is a seventh grader at Holmes this year and her sister is a ninth grader. Her family nominated me, and I hadn’t really heard of the award before, so it was really great that they did that,” Droe said. “I found out in April that I was a quarterfinalist, so that was about 200 people, and so then came the work of having an eight-minute video of my teaching, and four-minute video of an obstacle that I
have overcome, my proudest moments, how I advocate for music education, some student testimonials, a principal testimonial. We acquired footage and then my husband did all of the editing. He is great at that stuff.” Droe hasn’t always been a teacher at Cedar Falls schools. Her dedication to being a music teacher was shown early on as Droe drove two hours round trip every day to her job from Tallahassee, Fla., to Perry, Fla. “My husband [UNI Associate Professor of Music Kevin Droe] was getting his Ph.D at FSU [Florida State University], and so at the time I lived in Tallahassee and drove an hour to Perry every day to teach at the one elementary school in that county to 800 kids in that school only grades third to fifth. It was really different. So I would drive two hours a day, but I was so happy to have a job in that area, in music education, so it was worth it,” Droe said. Droe’s teaching reflects the importance of music in young students’ lives. “I think in the area that I am in at the elementary school is so important that I am teaching every single student, and that it is now at this age that is the last time that they will be required to take music because that is not a requirement in junior high anymore,” Droe said. “I feel like it is still very important that I make sure that I teach what I think is the best quality stuff possible and I listen to the kid’s feedback and I try to teach them
things that they are interested in, but also things that are high quality level,” she said. As a teacher, her approach is to make learning music fun. “The way I teach is through games. The students might not know it. For example, through a certain games, it might include rhythmically a half note, which is what I might introduce to them that day so they are learning games, singing songs, having fun and I might be able to extract that half note out and teach them what it is. It is called a Kodaly method. He was a Hungarian composer. Kodaly didn’t develop this method, he just knows that music is important, so he found the people best in the field and sent them around the world to find important tools. They came up with that singing is your natural instrument and music is for everybody, and kids learn through games,” she said. The Grammy Award for Music Educator recognizes the teachers behind the accomplished musicians. For Droe, the teacher who inspired her success was her father. “My dad was my band director and influenced me a lot,” she said. “I think that I have just always connected to music — it is my way to shine. Everyone has their thing, and music is something that really speaks to me, and I know it can speak to a lot of people,” she said. By Co-Editor-in-Chief Sabine
MARTIN