Beloved choir teacher, Edwina Hebert, is leaving TJ at the end of this year to further her music education in Creston, Iowa.
Photo by Ed Gloor
Hebert has taught at TJ for five years and has helped produce amazing school musicals for four of those years. She taught Women’s Choir, Men’s Choir, Advanced Choir, Monticello Singers and, new this year, Shiggety Fresh, a five-person jazz vocal group.
Hebert has helped to make great singers out of countless high school students and is much-loved by all of her protégés. “I have loved my time at TJ. It was my first high school job, and it has formed me into the teacher I am today. Working with Mr. Palmieri and Mrs. Fulkerson has been a privilege and a joy. The students have hearts of gold, and I truly do feel like I’m saying goodbye to a huge family of my little sisters and brothers, and not just my students. I am lucky to have been surrounded by such amazing people and do something I love every day for the past five years. I will miss my students dearly,” said Hebert.
Next year, Hebert will be attending the School For Music Vocations (SMV) on the Southwestern Community College campus in Creston, Iowa. She first discovered the school in the summer of 2008, when taking Thomas Jefferson Graduates Mina Bradley and Ky Snow to a camp SMV held at Smoky Hill High School. “I saw how much the camp and the instructors positively affected Mina and Ky as musicians, and I was so overwhelmed with the successes I had myself, that I knew I wanted to be involved with the program as much as possible,” said Hebert. Two summers later, after attending SMV’s camp in Iowa, Hebert hosted a Music Theory Boot camp at TJ, led by the instructors at SMV. The boot camp was specifically geared towards giving teachers the tools they needed to feel more successful in their classrooms. “Music Theory had always been my weak area,” explained Hebert. “I’d even had a professor in college tell me to stop trying, because I was better suited for being ‘just a singer.’ The boot camp changed all of that, and I knew I needed to keep learning more!”
Despite the decision to go back to school being recent, Hebert has known that she wanted to get a graduate degree ever since finishing her undergrad work. It was the discovery of SMV that finalized her decision on what area she wanted to study and where she wanted to go to do so. She has decided to study music theory, jazz piano and jazz singing and plans to audition for a few other graduate programs for jazz performance, as SMV jazz performance groups are a large part of its curriculum. Hebert will also be teaching jazz and classical voice as well as piano classes to help pay for her tuition.
Hebert doesn’t mind the fact that the school is in such a small town. In fact, she prefers it to a large city. “I just have an affinity for corn!” she said, laughing. “The thing about Creston is that you almost have no choice but to practice and get good, because there’s nothing else to do.” However, the school location is immaterial to Hebert. She would attend the school regardless of where it is because it is everything she wants in a school. “The environment is so supportive and they really set out to help everyone be successful and achieve their goals.”
After SMV, Hebert is unsure of what she is going to do. “I could go to more school, I could perform, I could do any number of things! But I know that coming back to TJ is always going to be on my mind,” she said, smiling.
