BillLindau

Bernadette Montes

Bernadette Montes
East Middle teacher’s career bursting
with educational, artistic achievements
From The Post, Troy, N.C., August 2005
By Bill Lindau
Whoever said those who can’t do, teach, never met Bernadette Montes. This music, dance, dramatics and art teacher at East Montgomery Middle School has done plenty of doing as well as teaching.
This Renaissance woman from the Philippines showed her colleagues in the Montgomery County Schools exactly what she could do last month, when she sang at the Monday, Aug. 23 Convocation at West Montgomery High. She performed a Filipino love song titled “Habil So Iyo” and the theme from the movie “Titanic”, titled “My Heart will Go On.”
Montes did not know she was going to get impressed into service for the Convocation, which this year included entertainment by members of the faculty and staff.
“I was on holiday in the Philippines when I got my notice,” she said. Her husband and three daughters still live in their native country.
Montes has performed and taught all over the world. Her educational track record had included heading up the Department of Expressive Arts at Madang Teachers College, the biggest teachers’ institution in New Guinea. Montes, who has just begun her third academic year at East Middle School under the Visiting International Faculty program, once got the chance to sing for Pope John Paul II. The late pontiff had come to St. Scholastica’s College in Manila, a convent school operated by German Benedictine nuns, when she was teaching in Papua, New Guinea. That school also happens to be her alma mater.
“I started training when I was 10 years old,” Montes said. “When I went on concerts around the world I got offers to stay every place I went. I was also in Australia for awhile.”
Montes had been teaching in England, at Thornton College, when she learned about the position at East Middle School. She learned about it on the Internet, on the VIF Web site.
“I had Ms. Lampros (Sandy) interview me on the phone. I was in England. She asked, ‘Can you come next week?’”
Montes had to finish out her contract with Thornton College. A week after it closed, she came to Biscoe.
In addition to teaching in the public schools, Montes gives private lessons, mainly in vocals and piano. She also sings in the Our Lady of the Americas choir.
Among the students of her private lessons are Eden Holt, an 8-year-old girl who sang during the East Montgomery spring concert, and whom Montes is thinking about getting to do a concert of her own; Jillian Bissette, who will soon sing with the Greensboro All-State Youth Choir (“I trained her and she went to the audition -- she was selected and she sang all over the state,” Montes says); Destiny Jordan, who after three months under Montes’s tutelage played Beethoven’s “Fuer Elise” on piano and passed an audition for Triad Idol; Nikki Hunsucker, who “has a good voice…She trains with me” and Paris Dumas, 10, who plays piano and has already performed in a concert.
Among Montes’ recent achievements as a public-school instructor was her participation in a week’s workshop for the North Carolina Conference for the Advancement of Teachers (NCCAT). Only 24 North Carolina teachers were selected to this program for the January session. The theme for that session was “Young, Black and Male in America”.
For this project, Montes did research on black history and American black culture. When she came back to East Middle, she had her students do performances of rap music.
Lampros has called her and Angel Castro, the other VIF instructor on the East Middle School faculty, “two magnificent ones,” and said Montes was “phenomenal” and “unbelievably amazing.”
Montes hopes the Powers That Be will take those comments and other aspects of her life into consideration when this new academic year, 2005-06, expires. This is her last academic year with the VIF. She says unless she can land a position with the county schools, she will have to leave the States.
As much as she misses her husband and children, she does not want to say goodbye to her life in Biscoe, N.C., U.S.A.
One asset Montes feels she has brought to the school system is her resourcefulness, a trait she grew up with in a part of the world that doesn’t have as great a budget for its schools. “We don’t have as many materials as we have here,” she says.
For her art classes in the Pacific area, she and her students would take the bark from the branches of trees and use it for a medium. Also, “like if I needed paint, I’d get the students to collect clay and mix it with powdered paint. For black, we used charcoal. We use different trees and leaves to get the colours, and we’d use anato seeds.”
“I had to study ethnomusicology to learn traditional music and dance.”
She once came up with an exhibit of tie-dyed materials. She did the same thing for her music classes, making materials from nature, including bamboo.
“I tried to get them to make use of resources,” Montes says. “They can produce instruments from bamboo. I got them to do their national anthem with their instruments, which were mostly percussion.”
Students in New Guinea and other Asian and Pacific nations are just as geographically and ethnically diverse as in the United States. The students from the different provinces of New Guinea “just want to learn their own music. They hare very patriotic,” she says.
“You will be able to recognize them by the different provinces by the face paint and body paint, and by different dances and music,” Montes says.
At East Middle School, Montes teaches not only music and art appreciation; she also teaches students how to play instruments and paint. You wonder how she manages to do so much.
She did not have it any easier closer to home. “For graduation in New Guinea, I had them do Western music,“ she says.
“It was hard to convince them to sing music that’s different from what they sing all their life.
“I gave recordings to their parents. We recorded the performances and then gave them copies.
“At the end of each semester, I made sure they gave a production of music, dance and drama. They would do their own dances and songs and introduce drama. I would have some do an interpretation.”
She said her students in New Guinea spoke 80 different dialects. Her class included Australians and Americans as well.
At East Middle, she has classes of nine weeks apiece. Classical music is her main thing. She starts off her lessons in classical music with symbols, rhythm, then percussion for rhythms. She teaches the value of the notes, and uses graphic notations that they can understand. Her lessons might consists of a box of four squares, with a pair of different notes (quarter, eight, half, whole etc.) in different squares. The students would turn the squares around and come up with different rhythms.
After awhile, when the students got into some complicated rhythms, she would break the class into groups of four or five, and they would start composing rhythms. Later they would get into composing melodies as they formed rhythm ensemble. “I slowly get them into playing,” Montes said.
“Ms. Lampros was very impressed.”
It has not been all fun and games, but sometimes she has seen some unexpected but pleasant results.
“There are some of them (students) who are really difficult,” Montes said. “The children who don’t like music I deal with in a special way.”
Montes, however, has also had some kids who didn’t like music at all to end up getting into it.
“Their parents are astounded, knowing how much their kids didn’t like music.”
She tries to leave her students with something they can remember, recording their performances so that each has a record of what he or she has done.
Her classroom features pictures of different instruments. She says she lets the students hear the sound of different instruments, and when they recognize the sound, they point to the instruments.
Among her other accomplishments were participation and membership in the Opera Workshop of the Philippines; in the Bayanihan Cu Hiwal Dance Troupe, as a singer-dancer in an organization devoted to folk dances and Philippine music; performing on TV, in the St. Jessica’s Church parish choir in England; in St. Mary’s Cathedral choir in Newcastle, England and in the Elmhurst School for Dance and Performing Arts, the first ballet school of England.
Montes has earned praise from students and parents to the school superintendent, Dr. Lindsey Suggs.
This is the sort of thing that makes her feel right at home in the states, along with the pleasure of being a part of the enrichment of so many young lives.

posted by Bill Lindau @ 8:29 PM