Title Tease

Hmm. The numbers continue to be high on ye ole blog and I wonder if it’s all music teachers looking for some affirmation, support, advice, ideas. And hey, I got lesson plans too! But for that, you’ll have to buy the books.

BBS (Before Blog Spot), I used to spend my Monday mornings off writing articles. Just because. No one commissioned them or asked me to write them, but it was just my way of constantly questioning what the heck I was doing and trying to make it sound good. Or at least connect it to some larger ideas of human experience. After a few years of this, I made a Kinko’s book titled “Reflections on Orff Schulwerk” (snore) and a couple of years after, another collection titled “Further Reflections on Orff Schulwerk”  ( I needed a Hollywood agent to help me with titles). I gifted them to Dr. Herman Regner, former head of the Orff Institut and his enthusiasm encouraged me to use some of the articles in my book “Play, Sing and Dance” and a few more in “The ABC’s of Education.” Still though, some 75 to 100 remain unread and unpublished.

I peeked at a few tonight to see if I could continue the discussion I started here with something I had already written. One article, “The Ideal Orff Classroom” is a perfect companion to yesterday’s posting, but due to my strange karma where the one tune I need to find on my i-Pod out of 5,000 isn’t there even though it is on i-Tunes and should have been automatically uploaded, sure enough, I could only find the PDF version of the article and can’t locate the original Word document which would allow me to cut and paste a bit. (Actually, for those interested, they can download that PDF article from my Website under About Music Education —www.douggoodkin.com).

But as I looked at the various titles of the articles, they seemed intriguing and I read with pleasure a few that I had forgotten about. So instead of excerpting the articles themselves, I’ll tease you with some titles— and maybe someday put them together in a real book with a more interesting title than “Reflections….” Meanwhile, for an extra credit assignment, choose a title, write your own article on the theme, send it to me and I’ll choose a winner to post on the Blog. Sound like fun? Here goes!

• A Perfect Solution               

• A Sign of Hope         

• All Your Answers Will Be Questioned

• Beneath the Radar         

• Carrying the Torch   

• Connecting the Dots

• Cruel and Unusual Punishment          

• The Descartes Effect

• The Future is Now

• How Much is Enough? 

• Moral Intelligence    

• Music as Social Life

• Open and Close             

• Pasta Night               

• The Pitfalls of Professionalism

• The Purpose of Pleasure

• The Pretty-Good Class  

• The Real World

•  Stripping Away the Extraneous

• To Create Anew        

• TV in Taiwan

• The Wind in our Faces