By day, Nicola Berlinsky and sisters Lisa Pimentel and Joanie Pimentel are all teachers at the same elementary school in southern California. By night, they're rockers, playing together in a band called No Small Children. It sounds like a lot to balance, but the members say they often find their two careers overlapping.
"I'll see Joanie and Lisa at work, and recess becomes a band meeting," Berlinsky says, "but then we start talking about our students and sharing notes about our students and really living the successes of each other's students — and then we're back at band practice again. They are so intertwined."
Joanie Pimentel says music feels like an ideal outlet given the work they do. "It's much cheaper than therapy," she says, laughing.
And Berlinsky says her students have generally been supportive of the project. "They think it's really funny," she says. "The parents do come to our shows, and so the children end up wearing our band T-shirts to school, which is quite something."
The three members of No Small Children joined NPR's Ailsa Chang to talk about their work in and out of the classroom. Hear their full conversation at the audio link.
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