Teacher feature
Familiar faces can be hard to come by at a new school, and that doesn’t apply just to students.
Robyn Condelli might be a new face at Tracy Area Elementary School, but her transition to a new environment has been made easier because of her relationship with Eli Cole, the new band director at the high school.
“I’ve known Eli forever,” Condelli said. “My husband taught him in marching band in Marshall and taught his sister at Holy Redeemer.
“I’m kind of comforted by the fact that Eli is going into his first real teaching job and we’re going in together. I think it’s going to be easy for collaboration. I’m already comfortable with Eli.”
Condelli was born and raised in Olivia and attended BOLD High School. She studied music at Southwest Minnesota State University, where she got to sing at Carnegie Hall in New York.
She describes the path to her degree as “weird,” because she wasn’t convinced teaching music was something she wanted to do.
“We were getting married that same year … and I ended up going back to school to teach music because I was teaching in Redwood.”
She taught reading intervention in grades six-eight in Redwood Falls for three years, which was a great experience, but her passion for music still burned. Now at TAES, she can combine that with working with young children.
“I love the younger kids, because they’re so receptive to new information, and they get excited about things,” Condelli said. “They are blissfully unaware how the world is sometimes. They just soak everything up like little sponges.”
Condelli wants to take her passion for music and pass it on to her students. Music, she said, inspires her every day, and her goal is to translate that to students who might not otherwise have that influence in their lives.
“We have a very colorful house; we listen to a lot of music,” she said. “It’s just a noisy Italian family — my kids come from that, and I know a lot of kids don’t. I want to bring my love of music and just kind of instill that in the kids that I teach.”
Condelli, who taught band lessons at Samuel Lutheran School in Marshall for almost two years, said her teaching philosophy is centered on building relationships with her students. She said not knowing a child at even the most basic level makes it difficult to reach them in any kind of learning capacity. Being able to connect with them, she has learned, will make them more receptive to her teachings.
“With reading, if I didn’t know them and be able to empathize with them, it was really hard to teach them,” she said. “I’ve always said that everything is secondary to understanding a child, even music.”
Condelli’s educational goal is for her kids to gain musical skills from her classroom, but she wants them to realize there’s more to music than just being a good musician.
“You learn how to collaborate with your friends and work together,” said Condelli, who also taught dance for 15 years. “Music regulates your emotions, which is a big deal for kids. There are so many different things that you can get out of music class. But I want them to have fun, too; I imagine there will be a lot of movement in my classroom.”
Condelli and her husband, Justin, have three children: Lydia (15), Luca (7) and Lynx (5).
