“My name is Mr. Minard, otherwise known as Jimmy Minard after school hours. I am a student teacher at Palatine High School. I come from NIU and I am studying to be a music educator.”
“I teach lessons outside of school. I do a lot of gigs, especially during the summer. Coming up, I am gonna do some gigging since it is the winter season, like church, those are some good gigs right there. I also collect video games. Sadly I haven’t had time but for those who know, I 100% Breath Of The Wild. I’ve had so many hours in the game. I have every single Nintendo system besides the Game Cube because I’m not paying 500$ for that. I’m a big Xbox gamer. I get everything on Xbox that’s cross platform. I only play PS5 to play exclusives. It is pretty much video games and music. I did a lot of sports back in my day, now I really don’t do much of that stuff since I’m retired. I was a gymnast ye
“Student teaching here has been good. It’s a big difference cause I’m coming from Yorkville Middle School and I was driving an hour every single day. Now I’m driving a 20 minute drive and it’s later in the day which I love. It’s very similar to Yorkville in a sense of the structure of everything. It’s just been good working with the band, Mr. Esquivel, Ms. Samayoa these past few weeks. It was also great since I did marching band over the summer, so I knew the gist coming here. It’s been fun here at PHS.”
“I’m gonna graduate in the future. That’s the big thing coming up like ‘ugh yes graduation’, I get to finally get 2 pieces of paper that say I did something. I’m looking forward to starting my job search. I’m looking at the next few steps I need to take to get a job because I’m on the borderline of being a student and an adult. Finding a full on job, a good income, instead of these part time jobs I’ve had so far. I’m looking forward to that. I wanna end up, hopefully I’m looking for middle school, high school band. That’s what I’ve been applying to. There haven’t been a lot of openings sadly but that’s what I’m mainly looking for. I really wanna stick with band.”
“It’s really weird, my high school music career. I was not a big band kid. I was a boy scout and a gymnast, I did that. I love marching band, pep band, but I didn’t try in concert band a lot. I love telling stories to kids that are borderline staying in band or staying in jazz that I didn’t put my all into. I didn’t put enough as I should have and I regret that.”
“I wasn’t a student leader. Thing is I liked playing music, I just had other priorities in highschool. I wish I prioritized music more cause I was always thinking I was going to become a teacher. I got really into the music world in college. It was the choice between history and music. I just picked music. ‘Let’s see if I like it and if I don’t, I’ll switch to history’, and then I liked it, I like it a lot, and I kept with it. I still did my history stuff and have my endorsements so I could teach history. I was talking to a kid who was borderline gonna sign up for jazz and I told him, ‘you’re a senior, are you gonna pursue music in college?’ And he said no. ‘Just try it, what’s the worst that’s gonna happen? You’re gonna do it for a couple of months and you’re gonna be done,’ I told him. It’s a good activity, and you get to make new friends. You get to learn a new musical style and if you like it, maybe you’ll do it in college. You might not be a full music major, but you might keep going. You don’t know you’ll like it until you try it.”
