GBH Daily: Music teachers get Grammy nominations

🌥️Partly sunny and very warm, with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 6:23 p.m.

A message to my friends and colleagues who are Yankees fans: Congrats. Happy for you. Nice. 

The Yankees beat the Red Sox 9-2 Wednesday, winning the Wild Card series and knocking Boston out of the playoffs. That ended a season that started abysmally, before making what GBH’s Esteban Bustillos called “a U-turn that would make a U-Haul on Storrow jealous” with 15 straight wins.

“Regardless of all the special things that happened in the summer, and there was quite a few, the goal is to win the World Series, you know?” team manager Chad Tracy said. “And that ended for us tonight, so it’s frustrating. You know, there’s a lot of things you can say, but in the moment right now I think the guys only care that we lost, you know? And it’s going to take some time to get over that.” You can read Bustillos’ recap of the series and the season here. 

And if you’re not a sports person: Culture Show host Jared Bowen has three recommendations for you this weekend. He’s got two movies, “Digger” with Tom Cruise playing an oilman and “Primetime” with Robert Pattinson starring as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen; and one book, “How To Eat An Elephant: One Voter at a Time” by Sarah Longwell.

Four Things to Know

1. Slow moving on the gas tax holiday: Will the Massachusetts legislature approve Gov. Maura Healey’s proposal to temporarily suspend the gas tax? It’s not a done deal. “I don’t want to speculate yet until we do our due diligence on working through the bill,” House Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Michlewitz said. “But I think there’s certainly been skepticism on doing these types of initiatives in the past.”

Healey submitted a proposal to suspend the state’s 24-cent-per-gallon tax for two months. Her opponent in November’s election, Republican Mike Minogue, had suggested doing away with the gas tax any time the price of gas exceeds $4 a gallon.

2. Quabbin conundrum: About 200 people came to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s meeting this week to oppose a proposal to increase by about 10% the amount of water the Quabbin Reservoir in Western Massachusetts pumps daily to cities and towns in the eastern part of the state.

Towns around the Quabbin are legally responsible for keeping the reservoir clean, but most residents around it have to use water from their own wells. The state pays communities around the Quabbin, though local leaders have said it’s not enough. “They get a pittance of consideration for a resource that effectively makes the economy of Eastern Mass go round,” State Rep. Aaron Saunders said.

3. MLK’s son’s GLP-1 advocacy: Martin Luther King III, the son of civil rights leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, was at the Massachusetts State House this week urging lawmakers to restore insurance coverage of GLP-1 medications for all people on MassHealth and for government employees.

“A person with the means to pay out of pocket may have one set of options. A person relying on public coverage may have another,” King said. “When that happens, we risk creating two standards of care: One for those with financial means, and another for those without. That is a health equity issue.” Massachusetts had limited that coverage because officials said the medications were too expensive, though they have said they are open to covering them again once prices go down.

4. A mile in their shoes: Brookline firefighters learned what living with dementia can be like during a specialized training session this week. They tried to go through daily tasks like putting on a scarf and packing a backpack while wearing glasses that dulled their vision, headphones playing garbled voices and gloves that hampered their dexterity.

“A lot of your [senses] are compromised,” said Firefighter Franz von Lambsdorff, whose mother had dementia. “The touch, the feel, the vision, definitely hearing, trying to listen to the instructions while you have background noises — very hard — and trying to move around with all these distractions.”

6 Mass. music teachers named Grammy Music Educator Award semifinalists

Some good news to end your week: Six music teachers in Massachusetts are semifinalists for the Music Educator Award presented by the Recording Academy and Grammy Museum. And Massachusetts is hitting more high notes than any other state.

“What is so special is that there are [six] teachers from Massachusetts who made it to the Top 25; it is truly amazing,” said Marcos Carreras, one of the semifinalists and director of music at the Springfield Conservatory of the Arts grades 6-12.

The semifinalists are: Carreras; Michael Coelho, director of fine arts at Ipswich High School in Ipswich; Rachel Jayson, orchestra director at Lexington High School in Lexington; Stefano Marchese, a music teacher at Boston’s Eliot K-8 Innovation School; Kevin McDonald, choral director at Wellesley High School in Wellesley; and Cameron Siegal, a music teacher at George H. Potter Elementary School in Dartmouth.

“One of my favorite quotes about music, and it’s true for all levels but especially for elementary, is that 'education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire,'” Siegal told GBH’s Marilyn Schairer. “My philosophy is, if I can get students really excited about music and loving it, and concurrently provide a strong foundation, they’re really ready to pursue music — not only in school, but out of school in whatever way they want to, and live musical lives.”

You can read more about the semifinalists here. 

Dig deeper: 

-This small town librarian is mobilizing against big tech

-Watch human-powered sculptures compete across pavement, mud and water in Lowell

-Chains to Change: How much Black history is still hidden in Boston?