Plain Talk

I stumbled on a file card where I had scribbled advice for my Level III students after their Practicum Teach. Part of graduating from our summer Orff Certification Course involves teaching a 15-minute lesson drawing from a piece in one of  Volumes of Music For Children that Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman wrote. I said “advice” above and it could be, but in reality it was a summary of how they actually taught that was so clearly effective. I can give them this list before they teach, but it wouldn’t mean the same as modeling the list in my own teaching with them, naming what seems to make each activity both pleasurable and effective and then letting them loose to teach in their own voice, their own style. The quality of the teaching showed that they got the memo and this summary list was both an affirmation and a reminder.

 

What I like about it is its simplicity, the way it plainly says what it means without spilling into the fancy educational jargon (“the zone of proximal development and scaffolding theory”). I’ve often thought about publishing a small book with these kind of simple suggestions that actually can change your teaching forever— and for the better. Though aimed at Orff Schulwerk music and movement teachers, these suggestions apply to all of teaching. 

 

Here's the list:

·      Have fun. 

·      Teach in your character.

·      Teach from your culture.

·      Begin in the body and voice.

·      Keep the engine running.

·      Leave space for the student’s creative response— you give a ping, they give a pong and the game is on!

·      Have fun.

·      Adapt, change, modify, add, subtract what’s on the page.

·      Make yourself memorable. Make the class memorable. Make the students’ participation memorable. 

·      Have fun. 

 

Conditions for Change

Amidst the photos of breakfast and cute cat videos, sometimes something profound sneaks into Facebook. Like this:

 

What inspires people to change?

 

1.    When they hurt enough that they have to. 

2.     When they see enough that they are inspired to. 

3.   When they learn enough and they want to. 

4.   And when they receive enough and are able to.

 

Yes, yes and again, yes. Life takes care of number one, but education is in charge of the next three. 

 

2.    The teacher is the model for an authentic life—or at least an embodiment of their particular subject that inspires and motivates. I’m thinking of my daughter’s 7^th grade science teacher who had a peculiar passion for the dung beetle and infected his students with his enthusiasm. 

 

Likewise the extraordinary authors, artists, athletes, warriors for social justice who we see whose very accomplishment sends us back to the practice room with renewed vigor and determination. 

 

3.    The teacher is the model, but also the messenger offering the information and knowledge needed to give the students what they need to know to effect change, both in themselves and the world at large. As I say to the young readers of my Jazz, Joy & Justice book, “Now that you know these stories that have been ignored or purposefully hidden, what will you do with this information?”

 

4.    When the teacher looks for the hidden talents and particular genius of each child taught, they offer a strength and courage far beyond mere information. They offer a kind of blessing that helps the students understand that they are worthy and capable and powerful enough to meet the challenges of change. 

 

And then back to number one. All the ways all of us have fallen short, have failed to meet our promise, have given in to brainwashing, addiction, distraction, fitting in at the price of our authentic self, accepted other’s abuse, accepted our own self-abuse— all of these are potential steps to our own renewal when we finally hit rock-bottom and decide “Enough!” No other place to go then up the golden staircase and yes, it’s hard, but nothing’s harder then living in perpetual hurt. 

 

Change in ourselves and change in the greater world are both intimately connected and deeply needed. And so we would do well to consider the above, to reflect on what inspires change and begin to walk towards our better selves. 

 

Thanks to the person who posted this. 

Honoring the Departed

It has been a particularly brutal few months, with some eight people I knew fairly well going on to the Other World. Seems I hear about someone who died or who is seriously ill most every week. Makes sense as the price one pays for longevity— the people you know disappearing like an ongoing game of musical chairs and never knowing who’s next. 

 

I’ve been fortunate to have a life relatively sheltered from death. I believe the first person I knew who left was my grandmother when I was perhaps 8 years old and then my grandfather when I was 12. I never went to a funeral or memorial service until I was 28 or so, when a preschooler I taught had a tragic accident in a hot tub. There were a few big losses like my beloved Orff teacher Avon dying at a too-young 51, me 39 at the time. A suicide from one of my Men’s Group members when I turned 50. Then my parents and my wife’s parents and so on. You know the list. 

 

Some ten years ago, I decided to try to keep track of the people I knew personally who had passed on, partly for a little Day of the Dead project I devised for myself. I divided the list into family, friends, neighbors, people from the school where I worked for so long, people from the Orff world, old classmates from my high school and college. Between working at that school and teaching here, there and everywhere in the Orff world, I know a lot of people and these two lists were the longest of them all— some 65 from school and 55 from the Orff Community. Altogether, there are some 200 people on the list and every November, I read through it again and spend some time remembering them all. 

 

Does anybody else do this? Just curious. If indeed you believe the Ancestors are always with us and through our remembrance, we keep them at least somewhat alive, then it seems like a good idea. Just a thought to consider.

 

As you might guess, it’s not a list I’m happy to see grow, but of course, it will. Meanwhile, may we all take good care of ourselves as best we can. 

  

Happy Earth Day!

I’m looking forward to the day when some generation would look at this little “rap” I composed in 1984 and wonder, “What the heck was that about? Of course we take care of our precious little planet!”

 

Well, certainly not in my lifetime. But to help nudge us toward that imagined distant day, sing this with your kids today or your neighbors or the people at your workplace. 

 

No Time for Singing

The gap between what is and what could and should be yawned yet wider yesterday. My wife and I had dinner at some ex-neighbor’s house last night, a couple with two girls and in many ways—as they themselves put it— an earlier version of ourselves. We share the experience of two daughters, having lived on 2^nd Avenue (they moved just a 10-minute walk away), have a mutual love and passion for Golden Gate Park (she wrote a kid’s book about the ABC’s of Golden Gate Park and was instrumental in keeping the JFK road car-free), enjoying camping with the family and share a commitment to raise kids as appliance-free-as possible. This was the family that suggested the pandemic neighborhood sing I led and continue to do four years later every few months. 

Their children, now in 2^nd and 5^th grade, go to a lovely alternative public school and some two years ago, I suggested I come to do guest singing in their daughter’s classes. I did and after the 5^th grade class, I got this note from this student that I had never met before and only spent that 30 minutes singing with. 

Of course, that note is not about me, but translates to: “Thanks for giving me something that I needed that made me so happy.”

 

But the last time I was scheduled to sing, the 5^th grade teacher—herself very enthusiastic about my visits and supportive— said that she couldn’t take 30 minutes out of her day because the kids had state tests coming up. Last night, I again suggested to my friends that I could sing tomorrow on Earth Day and was told that again, there was testing and the teacher was stressed out to the maximum and in fact, there wasn’t 30 minutes to spare anytime between now and the end of school. 

 

There you have it. I’m reminded of the joke of the pious man who came every day to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem three times a day for 45 years to pray. When asked what he prayed about, he replied: “That all religions finally understand that they have different names for the same God, that children respect their parents, that parents create a loving home for their children, that we humans stop fouling our environmental nest, that we stop telling the stories that keep the “isms” alive, etc.” When asked how it felt to be praying for those same things over all those years, he was unequivocal:

 

“Like I’m talking to a fuckin’ wall!”

 

All these posts about the schools we could have and should have and for what? This is a progressive school in San Francisco! And the teacher feels under so much pressure she can’t give the kids a 30-minute respite to sing joyfully. (Which, by the way, would be a brilliant strategy to re-charge their system and help prepare them to take any test the state throws their way.) It’s extraordinary to think that the monster of “testing” is still loose in the land, that ferocious beast that has absolutely nothing to do with children learning what they need to know in the way they need to learn it and know it. This good teacher suffering from stress because of people in the state who live and work far away from her children and know nothing about who they are and what they need and care nothing about either— well, that’s not healthy. She will pass that stress on to the kids, who did nothing to deserve it and the stressed kids will bring their anxiety back into their homes and again, it’s a Lose-Lose-Lose situation that we keep doing—for what, exactly?

 

And in case you’re not up on the current research, read Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture to look at the links between chronic stress and autoimmune diseases, depression, inflammation, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and yet more. But we don’t need medical research to tell us that stress debilitates us, leads us into a state of distress, feeds our anxiety, cripples our sense of self-worth and effective functioning. In short, the polar opposite of what singing together offers us.

 

No time to sing? Think again. 

Farewell to Toronto

After three weeks of rain, cold, overcast skies, Toronto finally seriously turned the corner to a sunny, warm and flower-blooming Spring. On my last day! Walking around the neighborhood after the glorious concert and last classes with the kids it felt like a different place entirely. Weather can do that. 

 

Though I’ve come here almost once a year for over twenty years, it’s not easy to get a handle on this big, sprawling city. I got to know a ten-block radius near the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor St. all those years and this year, another ten blocks on Danforth St. in Greektown and then the walk on Lawrence Avenue from the subway stop to the school. Truth be told, it’s a hard city for me to get a handle on. Though known as one of the world’s most multicultural cities, it doesn’t seem to have concentrated neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Chinatown, Japantown, Italian North Beach, Latin Mission St., Russian Hill and such. (Greektown excepted). Maybe that’s a good thing, as the population is more mixed in with each other. The downtown feels like a random assortment of high-rise office buildings and condos, without an easily identifiable skyline and few iconic buildings beyond the CN Tower. I took a morning to try to explore the waterfront, expecting a Fisherman’s Wharf kind of scene, but it was a confusing mix of non-descript buildings. 

 

I’m sure that there are intriguing and enticing neighborhoods I don’t know about and next trip, I’ll ask my friends to tour me through them. One thing I notice is the plethora of brick buildings, hardly any of which we have in San Francisco. I’m quite familiar with them from my New Jersey childhood, but whether there or in Toronto, they feel quite heavy and dark in combination with the overcast skies and I could feel that sinking into my psyche. 

 

None of this is to insult Toronto or the Torontonians who live there. The few hundred I know from all these years of workshops are wonderful people and there’s no question that the restaurant scene certainly reflects that multi-cultural population. And the subways! All praise to this system where taking two trains one-way and then back again for three weeks was consistently a pleasant and extraordinarily efficient experience. I literally never had to wait more than two minutes for the next train. And with each of the ten cars pretty full, meaning that people really use their public transportation. Hurray for that! I noticed that there were less on Monday and Fridays and apparently, in the hybrid work scene those are the days that people work from home. 

 

So farewell to Toronto and I suspect we will keep seeing each other. Until then, may Spring burst fully open, the skies be blue, the weather warm and the trees wholly leaved.  

What I Was Born For

I’m thinking of John Irving’s book A Prayer for Owen Meany. Though I don’t remember the details, Owen had some strange character quirks that finally revealed their purpose in a climactic scene in which he saves a group of children in a way no one else could have done. As if every moment in his life was moving inexorably to that one moment. That sense of “This is what I was born for.”

 

What if today was the epic climax of my own journey? If every beckoning finger that I followed, every fork in the road I took, every choice I made and every choice that seemed to be made for me was just a prelude leading up to today? To this 45-minute performance with eight 4^th to 6^th grade classes and 160 kids that I put together in less than three weeks. If that turned out to be the entire reason for my incarnation, I believe I would accept it gratefully.

 

With no dress rehearsal in the actual space and two or three classes per grade to put it together, the kids came through with flying colors. My Little Suede Shoes, Come Butter Come, Mo Betta Blues, Boom Chick a Boom, Step Back Baby, Humpty Dumpty, Wa-Nyema, representing a wide swath of culture and musical style (Jazz, Mother Goose, games from the U.S., Virgin Islands, Mexico, Japan) and mixing clapping plays, body percussion, songs, dances, drama, Orff Ensemble, just about every box of dynamic and inspired music education and education in general was checked. The head of school commented afterwards, “I had goosebumps almost the whole time” and told me one child sitting next to her said, “My hands hurt from clapping so much,” and another responded, “My face hurts from smiling so much.” 

 

The concert was over by 9:15 and I still had a full day ahead of me. Three more hour-long classes with the 5^th graders. We played a little game where each had to choose one word to describe their feeling before, during or after  the performance and say it on the beat, with everyone echoing. Amongst the choices were “Amazing, fantabulous, joyful, happy, cheerful, proud, nervous, excited, scared, relaxed.”

 

I used some of the time to read more chapters from my Jazz, Joy & Justice book— Nat King Cole, Nina Simone— as well as telling them the story of the time Art Tatum’s sister invited me into the house where Art grew up. They gifted me with the same kind of attentive listening they showed for some previous readings.

 

Finally, we arrived at the closing game, where each in turn gets to go into the middle and “show us your motion” while we sing and clap. A final circle passing a hand-squeeze around and a goodbye hi-five with each, ending the three weeks the way I like, like a piece of music with its satisfying closing chords. Some chose to hug me instead of hi-five and many pleaded, “When are you coming back?” A few minutes after one class ended, a child came back to collect some waterbottles some other kids had left and explained that they sent her to do it because they were out in the hall crying. Finally, I went out to meet the cab and just as I was getting in, I heard this commotion from a window. The kids had gathered for one more goodbye! 

I don’t feel done with my work here on Earth and am in no hurry to see about giving workshops on the other side of the Pearly Gates. But if this day had been destined to be my Swan Song, I would be content. Thank you to all the children, teachers and especially kids at the Havergal College Junior School in Toronto, Canada. It has been a sheer delight.