I stopped and listened to the band rehearse a little while after my morning duty, and I realized how much I love the fact that Hughes has a band. It teaches kids a lot of valuable lessons — above all, teamwork. It is the ultimate group project because no one can slack if it’s to sound right in the end, and unless it’s a concerto or something, there are no stars so to speak. Everyone has their little part to play, and often those things don’t even sound all that good by themselves — a bit plain, a bit boring, a bit repetitive — but in the end, it all comes together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Other benefits: the self-control (one cannot play what one wants as loud as one wants), the discipline (practice, practice, practice!), and the simple value of learning music, which improves cognitive abilities and creativity among many other things.

I played sax in the band in fifth and sixth grade, but once I got to junior high (we didn’t have middle school, just junior high — seventh and eighth grades), I quit. In eighth grade, I talked my folks into letting me sell my sax and use the money to be a CD player. CD players weren’t brand new then, and that’s why my father agreed to let me buy one: it was clear it wasn’t just a fad, something that would disappear in a couple of years like Beta Max tapes did. Still, thirty-some years later (I was in eighth grade in 1986, I guess), they have proven to be little more than a long-lived fad.