Frank Caracciolo: Tell me, how do you find the support from the other teachers? Because music, you know, often in other schools – not with you and your energy – but often in other schools like music is an add-on or it’s something that they get like one out of five days or something. So like, how do you and you foster support from your colleagues? Or they just seeing what’s going on? Are they pleasantly surprised at how you’ve interpreted the music curriculum there?

Yan Tsoi Bonnema: And that’s a really good question. Um, this is just it’s difficult for me to answer because every school culture is so different. I think that one of our superpowers as musicians is our ability to define ourselves. My number one classroom rule is the only person who defines you is yourself. So, you are always a good person. You can make good or bad decisions, but I think that when we don’t speak up as artists – because we can just assume that people think that music is important or that it should be important – we don’t necessarily have that conversation to support ourselves. Um, we can be taken over by other people’s opinions of what they think music is.

So, when we come into a school that doesn’t understand what music is, we need to help them understand as artists. And again, that’s a very difficult thing to do, because again, we have every single person in the school have every single personality type.

One of my recommendations to teachers is to ask for more and to ask for more support there’s a book called “I Am Magnetic” and it outlines how artists are often left behind and have to depend on patrons and take on two or three jobs compared to a normal person because we feel that our entire… the epitome of our specialty is we’re givers.
We give things to people and we do it not because we have to, but because we want to and sometimes placing a price on that kind of might even feel like our art forms, whether it’s music or Fine Arts drama is is is less valuable somehow because we’re asking to be to be paid for an art is actually priceless. But we do need that support because the more that the more tools that you have, the more that you can offer the students. And it was striking for me at a different school, where perhaps there might have been less support when you actually ask for what you need, you will be surprised by how much support is is out there.

The parents, for instance, there’s a lot of schools where I see that the parents are not as involved, it’s not because they don’t want to be necessarily. A lot of parents, they love their children with all their hearts. They would do anything for them, and if you ask for help, you are not just asking for help for you asking for help for their children. They want to show their children that they’re there for them, in any capacity and they will support you 200 and 300%.