Do we really know our teachers? Mr. Opperman is one of the school’s music teachers and a professional musician outside of school. In this article we will explore the other interests of Mr. Opperman.
Q: What music do you listen to outside school?
A: I listen to a pretty eclectic mix. This summer, I was on a huge Midwest emo kick, and I was into a band called Cliff Divers and Stop Drop Rewind. They’re pretty heavy. Stop Drop Rewind is a little bit more like math rock mixed with heavy rock elements. And then obviously, I’m a saxophone player, so I love listening to anything with saxophones in it. One of my favorite saxophonists of all time, Michael Brecker, he’s probably one of the greatest saxophone players to have ever lived in the last 50 years. Then I’ve been listening to this guy called Matt Carmichael. He’s from Scotland, and he’s got this really unique sound. It’s almost like Celtic jazz. He’s got violins and other acoustic instruments, but then piano, bass drums, which you would typically expect to hear in a jazz quartet combo setting. But then he’ll add in a violin player and do these really crazy fiddle tunes, but he’ll play it on saxophone. It sounds super cool. He’s one that I always keep coming back to. Not a lot of people listen to him, so I like to spread it out when I can.
Q: What got you into playing the saxophone?
A: Some of my friends were in the grade ahead of me, so when I was in fourth grade, they were all starting their instruments as fifth graders. That’s at least the way I perceived it, everybody just did an instrument. As you become a fifth grader, that’s the next cool thing. So I was super psyched to learn an instrument, and one of my cousins had a saxophone. I think my family was like “oh perfect, we’ll just borrow that,” and it kind of worked, so I did borrow it for a little while, but then I think we quickly realized that that saxophone wasn’t the greatest. So my parents rented an also kind of a crappy instrument from the local store, and it got me through high school and through my college auditions. My best friend, his name was Riley, he went to a different elementary school, but we would see each other for the combined band days. Once or twice a year, we’d see each other and be like, “Oh, I’ve just found this new cool thing” then he would try to learn it. Then I would try to learn something better, and we just keep going back and forth. When we got to middle school we were together every day. Throughout our whole middle school, high school career, just kind of a friendly competition, like one up each other, but help each other out.
Q: What are your hobbies outside of school?
A: I’m a bad person to ask about hobbies. My hobbies are also music. If I’m not playing music, I’m trying to compose or record songs that some of my bands were writing and working on. Some organizations have hired me to transcribe pieces of music for them, so I learn it by ear, write it down, put it into the computer, make a professional-looking piece of music, and send that to them. And then whatever time is left is housework. I would like to play video games more, because I do love video games. I just haven’t had time to sit down and devote my time to a video game in a while.
Q: Do you like video games a lot?
A: Yeah, for sure. I used to do it more in high school. Minecraft came out when I was in high school, so we did that quite a bit, and then Call of Duty was big. I went to the midnight release of the 3DS. There were no games for it, I had nothing to play. So my buddies and I, we just chatted on the 3DS because that’s all we could do the first night until a game came out. Now when I do game, I have a PC that I’ll play on. I have a switch so I do, you know, try to keep up with the Zelda as much as I can. And my brother got me a little emulator device from China last year so it can emulate everything from Super Nintendo to the SEGA to Atari arcade games, the Game Boy advance to Game Boy color, regular Game Boy, so I’ve been playing through some like, really obscure JRPGs from on the SNES.
Q: If you weren’t a teacher or working in music, what other career could you see yourself doing.
A: I think it would be cool to work in a coffee shop because I also really like coffee. Especially this summer, I’ve been getting into espresso making and trying to froth milk, just do some simple stuff like that. I’m really not good at it at all, but I like to make espressos. I could see myself enjoying working in a coffee shop and just the chill environment and people coming in, hanging out, working on their Macbooks, writing their novels, having their little latte or whatever, you know, that would be fun. Or a brewery, a restaurant type thing, where people just go to hang out and chill, play some board games and socialize. I think that would be really cool.
Q: Between being a high school student and then now being a teacher. What is the biggest difference you’ve seen?
A: I mean, my point of view has changed. I think how kids behave is probably the same. There are trends and stuff that happen now that I had when I was in high school. I don’t remember them all, but I know there was dumb six sevens and things that we said for a couple weeks and then we forgot about it. So that’s not new. It’s interesting, but it’s the same. It’s just a different scale. Because before it was so local, maybe one person would find this weird YouTube video and share it with their friends, and you’d have your pocket of 20 friends who knew that inside joke, but that was it, and like the rest of the school didn’t know what the heck you’re talking about. But now, literally, every 16 year old in the whole world knows about six seven. That’s just weird to me. I think the school part of things is different, because I would see my teachers or administration, like principals when I was in high school, making decisions or things happening, and it just kind of seemed like, okay, whatever. But now I see the chain of command, and like how much goes into some of these decisions, and how much effort from either the top down or just from the teachers themselves. My social studies teacher in high school, Mr. Goswitz, awesome dude, made that class great. And we did an ancient Rome day, it was like a whole party. We dressed up in togas and we all made food from ancient Rome and we made projects to make our classroom feel like we were in ancient Rome. It was really cool. We were psyched up for it the whole semester, and it finally happened. That was probably a ton of work on his part and the other teachers that put it together. So now on the teacher side, I see that stuff, and I have a new appreciation for what my teachers did for me. And kind of makes me ask myself: am I doing that back? Am I giving that back to the students?
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