Episode 55: An Educator Who Made An Impact: Lester Fleishman
Interview Episode with Dad from 8/24/20
Transcript:
Melissa Milner 0:09
Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As... podcast will highlight innovative practices and uncommon parallels in education. Well, I never thought I would be back here so soon talking about another important person in my life, who passed away. My dad, Lester Fleishman, passed away on October 16. He lived eighty-six wonderful years and impacted so many lives as a music educator. As a child, I watched him teach. I watched him lead the Pep Band football games, take his bands to competitions, and musical direct the high school shows. I feel he was a huge reason why I became a teacher. I want to pay tribute to my dad in this episode, specifically, to inspire other educators that just like my dad, you do make a difference and an impact in the lives of your students. I did do an episode with my dad on August 24th of 2020. And I'll have a link to that in the episode page. Along with that episode, there were two blog posts that were filled with former students thoughts about my dad. So there'll be links to the blog posts on the episode page as well. It's been a tough year with my husband, Josh, passing in February, and my aunt and my father, my auntie Brenda and my father passing two days from each other. October 14, my auntie Brenda passed away. And again, October 16, my father passed away. Even with all that loss and all that grief in one year, I'm thankful because it reminds me of what's important. And it helps me put everything into perspective. I hope you enjoy this short tribute. I put a request out to two very special people to my dad. One was a student that he had as a private piano student. Later in my dad's life, he did some private piano teaching. And then the other is to John Ford, who was my music teacher in junior high, and he directed a musical that I was in. And he was one of my favorite teachers. He was my dad's student at a young age, and then became my dad's colleague, and lifelong, you know, lifelong friend.. So, Jason Safer, and John Ford are the rest of this episode. Thanks for listening.
Jason Safer 3:11
My name is Jason Safer, and I'd like to talk about the impact that my piano teacher Lester Fleishman had on my life. I've known him as long as I can remember. I first started taking piano lessons when I was seven years old in 1994. And besides some summers, we had weekly piano lessons all the way until I graduated high school in 2005. We still stayed very close and kept in touch all the way till this year 2021. From a very early age, we clicked and Mr. Fleishman always made sure I was having fun learning piano. He never yelled or disciplined me. And as my mom says to this day, she never had to tell me once to practice. I always wanted to make him proud. And I found the piano came naturally to me because I enjoyed it. He instilled in me from an early age the right way to practice breaking down more complicated things, and repeating one small fragment at a time. He trained me to perform as well from an early age. And we would have a recital in my living room and would gather my parents and grandparents and turn on a tape recorder and Mr. Fleishman would announce all the songs. He would always write the dates when assigning new exercises like in the Bastien books and Dozen a Day, and I would get excited when he would show up with a new book or a new piece of music, because it meant I was getting better and was able to move on to bigger things. He always made fun marks on the music like big cartoon eyes to help me remember mistakes that I kept making. In high school I decided I really loved jazz and Mr. Fleishman got me into different jazz pianists such as Peter Nero, Andre Previn, George Shearing, and especially Erroll Garner, who was Mr. Fleishman's favorite. He would bring CDs and I would listen to them all the time. I also got to practicing three or four hours a day to improve my technique and learn classical music as well. Learning Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu, Bach, Beethoven Debussy, and the piece I still haven't mastered, let's Hungarian Rhapsody Number Two. I went on to major in music at Tufts and even taught many piano students myself carrying around a small notebook and using the same books and techniques Mr. Fleishman had used on me. After high school, I was so happy to have continued my friendship with Mr. Fleishman and so happy that he'd get to see me continue to achieve many musical milestones. At Tufts, I memorized and performed Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Tufts Wind Ensemble, and also gave a senior recital of my own arrangements and compositions. He was so proud to see me at that concert and it really felt like the culmination of all the work we had accomplished together. After college, and even in dental school, music still was an important part of my life. And I continued playing gigs, even regularly playing at a restaurant a couple of nights a week. Mr. Fleishman or Les, as I called him in later years, was a teacher friend, and really a third grandfather to me. And as the years went by, we talked less about music, but more about just life in general. And he was proud of me for becoming a dentist and having a family of my own. He never put me down for not making a full time career out of music. And he said I would always be able to do it as a hobby, but still have a different career which inspires me to this day. After college, we continued to meet up for lunch and brunch sometimes, he got to know my wife Alyssa, and after I graduated dental school, and we both lived in Mansfield, Lester and Linda got to come over to my house and meet my daughter Leah. They even gave her her first piano. I am so lucky to have known Mr. Fleishman for so many years and will miss him a great deal. I look forward to dusting off my old beginner music books, and hope I can teach my daughter Leah to love the piano just as Mr. Fleishman did for me.
John Ford 6:30
Hello, my name is John Ford. And I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the man named Lester Fleishman. Had the pleasure of knowing Lester for well over 55 years. Most of those years he was Mr. Fleishman to me until years later, we became colleagues and teachers in the Sharon Public Schools and then he became Lester. But even then it was hard to call him Lester because he is such a mentor to me. And is such an icon of teachers growing up. I first met Lester when I was in seventh grade. And he invited me to join the high school band. I was so excited. When I went to that first band rehearsal, I can remember it like it was yesterday. My entire world opened up suddenly, music, teamwork, commitment, discipline was all the expectation of being part of that group made up of all different grades. And I was in seventh grade and so all the way up to seniors in high school, different people different personalities, but it was just a wonderful experience. I was a bit small for my age, still am actually. But I could I could play trumpet and Lester recognized that early on. And with his encouragement, I grew both as a musician and as a person as well. Throughout the years that I had known Lester. I vividly recall practicing the first couple of songs he gave me for when I joined the band in seventh grade, a song called Exodus and a song called Windjammer practicing those two songs for hours at a time in driving my parents crazy. So the next band rehearsal I could keep up with the big seniors in high school kids that were so seemed like Boston Symphony to me. Anyways, throughout high school I had played in every musical group that Lester had coordinated at Sharon High School and he actually expanded the musical program quite profoundly while he was there. I also took music theory classes from Lester throughout high school. For those that know music, imagine you're a freshman in high school and you're learning such things as a circle of fifths, chord structures, figured bass, modal scales. It's unbelievable when you think about it. Years later, when I was college freshmen at Berklee College of Music, I tested out of numerous classes, due to the courses that we took with Lester in high school. At the time in high school, I didn't quite appreciate that most high school musicians did not have such a gifted teacher like Lester Fleishman. Lester, also introduced musical theater to share in high school and he also opened up the wonder and beauty of this art form to me, and hundreds of other students like myself. Later, again, at Berklee College of Music, I wrote my education thesis on the development of musical theater. And I dedicated it to Lester. Among many things, Lester taught us that band was always a place for any student of any proficiency that was willing to work hard towards the goal of creating music. In those days it in I think back of it, we had such a wonderful smattering of different not only different grades between types of personalities of people. There were the top end of the class was there and there were kids that were struggling to get through every day. I was in the middle of the pack and I I basically went to band came to high school because I wanted to go to band. But what was a unifying element of that was we all learned how to work together, we all learned how to take the weakest members and work with them as colleagues and partners and that was also the direction of Lester. Many years ago, there was a movie that came out Mr. Holland's Opus. And I suspect a lot of music teachers got phone calls, but I get I get quite a few phone calls probably because of my resemblance to a younger Richard Dreyfuss, which when I had hair, I guess, but that movie, as much as I appreciate the compliment, that movie was about Lester. I watched that movie. And from the point of him playing the piano, the crew cut, the glasses, him taking care of those students on a personal level, the clueless bass drummer, that he Lester had to teach them how to play on the beat. That was real life. That was our that was our high school. And that was Lester. So if you ever see that movie, that's Lester Fleishman. Lester wasn't just a teacher of his subjects, he was he was also a performing musician. He was very well respected and a professional who practices crowds throughout the Boston area with many notable other musicians. And for me, that was a connectedness that I saw that was different than my math teacher or my English teacher. He was actually doing what he was teaching. And I think for me, that was a real encouragement to see that there were people like that. To me, Lester was my first true understanding of a man of faith, faith that was culturally different than my Catholic upbringing because he was Jewish. But it was so similar in the tenants of love, care and empathy for others that he taught us. And I kind of chuckle to myself because I, I remember, quite frankly, as a freshman recall, Lester stopping a band rehearsal, and teaching us what the word empathy itself meant. He would frequently teach us things like that, to show the connectedness of things and how it's important that true education was a connection of all things, all disciplines to the human experience. Well, Lester had studied with Leonard Bernstein while he was at University of Lowell. He told us about Bernstein, who passed a Boston Latin School test by answering a particular difficult exam question by writing in about all the things that were not what the question was asking for. It was so intriguing to me. But that was so typical Lester that bring in all these different things about life and about the world, not just about music. It is, in fact, the importance of those connectedness of all those different disciplines that Lester just showed me that as a really, truly well rounded person, look for those connections between math and science and history and music and art and, and that will make you the true person that you can become forever. Lester was faithful to his family. I saw that as a high school student and as a as a colleague, and as a father and grandfather now as myself. He was faithful to his faith. He had mentioned Israel a few times. And I always struck me that you know that there was something bigger than just us and just music. He was faithful to his colleagues, he was always a friend and was willing to listen. And he was faithful to his students and finally was very, very faithful to his art. However, yeah, he won't find a Lester Fleishman record or a CD in your, your local stores, because Lester's legacy was far greater than that. Lester Fleishman recordings live in the hearts of the thousands of young men and women that were touched by his song of life and mine too. It simply be entitled to an album Love, and what what it takes to become a fully rounded person. I'll miss my friend, but I take with him, all those things that he taught me over the years, both as a student, as a colleague, and as a friend and as a fellow sojourner through life, that we should make those connections and we should always be empathetic. I'll miss him. Thank you.
Melissa Milner 13:48
Thank you again for listening. Make sure to check out my website, www.theteacheras.com to hear my interview with my dad from August 24 2020. And check out the blog posts with a lot more students thoughts about my dad, and please remember you do make a difference in the work that you do every day with students. Thank you so much for listening.