Fear of Humiliation, aka. The Day I decided to stop Agency work in Schools

What would you have done?

"Now kids, make sure you do a lot of practice before the concert, you don't want to play a wrong note and look stupid in front of everyone."

And with that, the class teacher sat down. I was dumbfounded. A year of mindful work undone in a single sentence. Music performance explicitly bound to the fear of humiliation, by their teacher, in the last lesson of the year.

It was my turn to speak.

There were 7 weeks until the performance. The school had agreed to 8 weekly sessions for that term, but had messed up, double booked the last 7, so this was our last of the term.

All the work we had done over the year, on mindfulness, on creativity, on compassion, on performing without fear to give people joy through Music.

I had a choice.

"...you don't want to play a wrong note and look stupid in front of everyone."

The words rang in my ears. Everybody was looking at me. I had designed and implemented the curriculum, a prototype of Music is Easy (it wasn't called that yet though), and led a team of 5 tutors to deliver it for the past 18 months at the school.

Our sessions had been amazing, with creativity and composition built into the process of learning - ending up with a free form reggae pallets of lines that each section of instruments could play - similar to a previous Dub workshop I did with another organisation.

We even got singled out in an Ofsted report on the school for the quality of our sessions (this apparently doesn't happen).

"...play a wrong note and look stupid in front of everyone."

My years at music college spiralled back down into my pre-frontal cortex, a cognitive drill I had spent years unwinding.

I had a choice. There's always a choice.

"...look stupid in front of everyone."

And I made my choice. I was already standing. I engaged my diaphragm.

"Don't worry guys, you won't look stupid, and you're definitely going to play a wrong note."

I could feel the air around me tighten.

"Remember, you play best when you are having fun, you've been working so hard all year. Trust yourselves and enjoy it. Give yourselves a round of applause!"

I used the applause as cover, and went into packing up, the team of Tutors and I packed up and left. I couldn't make eye contact with the Teacher. I had just undermined them, explicitly, in front of their entire class.

"Phew." said one when we were outside the gates.

And that was that.

What would you have done?