Rhythm & Blues

About the Book

A former news reporter starts a second career midlife: teaching music, her favorite subject, in a big city school during the early 21st century. Despite her upbeat passion and honest sincerity, she finds herself confronting apathetic students, hostile parents and few supportive administrators. Rhythms & Blues: Teaching Music in the Public Schools is a critical account of real-life experiences, some heartbreaking, others frightening—leaving a dedicated teacher feeling professionally unsuccessful and personally heartbroken. The book offers a list of practical suggestions to save our public schools which exist to educate our nation’s most vulnerable young people, our future.

About the Author

Cherie Bell shares honest accounts teaching elementary and middle school music from 2003 to 2017. She retired and started a nonprofit advocating for journalism and journalists called News Junkies Inc. Before she was a music teacher, Ms. Bell had been an award-winning newspaper reporter. Rhythm & Blues: Trying to Teach Music in the Public Schools is her third memoir. Her hobbies are singing and songwriting. She is a recording artist and Texas native.