Four teachers who are new to the profession share their thoughts about the challenges faced by beginning teachers. he need for understanding the issues facing beginning teachers is well documented in the education literature.' Within music education, there is also growing interest in the challenges of the first years and the overall life cycle of a music teacher.2 However, few sources have used the stories of beginning teachers themselves to illustrate the issues.3 This article presents the stories of four beginning music teachers as a way of illustrating new teacher successes and concerns. Jill Jill began her public school teaching career in the fall of 1999 in a small rural district where she taught K-5 elementary general music and high school choral music. In the fall of 2000, Jill moved to a K-5 position in a suburban school.
As I was working in a coloring book with my twin nieces, I real-ized something about music education that I wish I had been told as a student. I know I sound a bit like Forrest Gump, but music education is like a box of crayons. The second color in the name of a crayon such as "Green Blue" or "Orange Red" is the dominant hue on the crayon. "Green Blue" is more blue than green, and crq r0 o li Colleen Conway is associate professor and director of graduate studies in music education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor She can be reached at conwaycm@umich.edu. Erin
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.