Don’t Solve Problems You Don’t Have

It’s 9 p.m., and you’re grading. Well, you’re not really grading. You’re rewriting Thursday’s rehearsal plan around how bad you’re sure the trombones will sound in front of the guest clinician. You’re drafting, in your head, the email you’ll send a parent who hasn’t said anything to you yet (but you know it’s coming). You’re restructuring the winter concert program because you’ve already decided that attendance is going to be thin — three weeks before the concert happens.

None of these problems exist … yet, but many music teachers waste time solving them anyway.

What You Actually Get to Decide

You won’t run out of problems to solve. Neither will the directors who’ve been doing this 20 years longer than you — they’re just pre-solving a different budget line, a different fall. What you must do is figure out which problems are real enough to work on tonight.

Here’s how to identify a real problem: Is there evidence for this right now, or am I only picturing what might happen?

• A flute section that’s sounded thinner for three weeks straight is evidence. You can hear it today, and there’s a fix available today — isolate the passage, check embouchures, move a stronger player into the section. That’s something you can take action on now.
• A parent who hasn’t emailed anything is not evidence. There’s no message to respond to, so there’s nothing to draft. You’re arguing in your head about a conflict that hasn’t happened.
• Winter concert attendance three weeks out, with no ticket count and no RSVP list to check, isn’t evidence either. There’s no program to fix because there’s no problem yet. You’re just worried, so you treat it like it’s real.

Here are a few more you might recognize:

•  A trumpet player misses rehearsal for the second week in a row. You start drafting the conversation where you tell them that they’re not committed enough for first chair. They haven’t quit. They haven’t said anything to you at all. You don’t even know why they missed rehearsal. You’re solving a retention problem that may not exist instead of just asking them what’s going on.
• Someone mentions in the hallway that the district might be cutting a position next year. You spend the evening deciding which of your classes would get cut first, whether band and orchestra would get combined, whether you should start looking for a new job. No budget has been proposed. No meeting has happened. You’re running a staffing crisis built entirely out of a hallway comment.
• Your principal texts, “Can we chat tomorrow?” I would get nervous about this one. For most people seeing this, they’ve spent an hour or two rehearsing a defense of their budget requests and half-convinced themselves they’re getting reassigned to supervising study halls. But you don’t know what the meeting is about. For this one, I would take action and respond right away — “Sure, once I know the agenda. Can you give me some details?”

Write It Down Instead

Keep one running list — notebook, phone, whatever’s already in your pocket. When you catch yourself solving something with no evidence, write one line and close it.

• “Winter concert, worried about turnout.”
• “Principal meeting, worried it’s bad.”
• “Trumpet player, worried about commitment.”

If evidence shows up later — kids start emailing about missing the performance, the meeting really is about the budget, the trumpet player tells you their car broke down — it moves off the list and becomes a real fix. Most of it won’t get that far. In a few weeks, you’ll find that half the list has simply resolved itself without your help.

As a bonus, now you have evidence of problems that never came to fruition.

Why This Changes Tomorrow

A director who spent the night rewriting a rehearsal around an imagined disaster shows up tomorrow already defending against something that isn’t there. A director who wrote it down and closed the notebook shows up able to run the rehearsal that’s in front of him.

Same with the trumpet player. Walk in tomorrow already convinced they don’t care, and you’ll talk to them like someone building a case. Walk in without that story attached, and you might just ask what’s going on — which is the actual fix and takes about 90 seconds.

That’s the return on doing this. A better rehearsal and a better conversation because you spent your energy solving something real instead of something invented.

What This Isn’t

This isn’t ignoring real problems. The flute section still gets worked on tonight. If the parent emails, if the RSVP count comes back low, if the principal meeting really is about your budget, that moves onto today’s list immediately and gets solved for real.

This is just refusing to spend an hour solving a problem that hasn’t happened, at the cost of the one that has.

So, the grade book tonight. Write down those things that you have no evidence for yet. Go to bed.

Tomorrow, spend your energy on the problem that’s actually there.