Day Mind/ Night Mind

"Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you."  -Winnie the Pooh

 

I had an interesting talk with a colleague today about curriculum planning and why the usual go-to of scope-and-sequence and grid-calendars fails to account for the way actual human minds work. Or at least mine. I always tell my teacher-students that the way to plan the year is to thoroughly plan the first class. Then teach it and see what’s needed, based entirely on the response of the students and your own excitement about the material. Then you plan your second class.

 

Of course, you should have some idea of the territory you want to explore with the students. In the Orff world, that means making sure you’re opening each of the multitude of doors into the house of music— games, body percussion, speech, song, movement, folk dance, small percussion, Orff ensemble, recorder, drama, for starters, each of which have their own sequence of development from simple to complex. It means limiting material, especially on Orff instruments, to developmentally appropriate conceptual understandings— two-note melodies to three to the five notes of the pentatonic scale, simple drones to moving drone, simple ostinato to more complex ones to begin. Ascending through the grades, moving toward modal pentatonic, transposition, modal diatonic, I-IV-V harmonies, the full variety of meters and tempos and rhythmic grooves, the simple to complex forms.

 

Then you might consider thematic ideas that resonate with you at the moment—certain artists at the museums, cultural heritages, poetic structures, mythologies, the sea or the sky—what have you. The world is your oyster and you might as well savor whatever feels like it belongs on your table at the moment. 

But again, you don’t box yourself in by filling out the grid of the next 20 classes. You plan the first and the dreaming is set in motion, the mind’s search engine is revving up and if you have faith in its mysterious ways, you’ll discover yourself literally night-dreaming the next class— or at least day-dreaming. That’s precisely how I planned my tour-de-force of teaching some 6 classes a day at nine different schools and two different weekend workshop venues. I took it literally one day at a time and as I set down possibilities the evening before for the next day’s classes, the dreamtime mind took over and adjusted as needed. 

 

The grid is a business model, the dream is an artist’s— scientist’s— way. Many an artist will testify that melodies and harmonies and textures arrive unexpectedly in their fervent minds and they have no idea where they come from.  Likewise, scientists grappling with a problem sometimes find solutions in dreams. James Watson of the Watson and Crick team received the image of DNA of two snakes intertwining in an ascending helix in a dream. Rene Descartes, the famous philosopher who idealized abstract thought over imagination, received his famous sentence “I think therefore I am” (ironically) in a dream.

 

I know the idea of planning meticulously and then letting dream take over is hard to grasp for curriculum coordinators, who prefer at least the illusion that we know precisely what to teach and how and when to teach it. But my model of the live ping-pong game holds true for me as the deeper path to effective teaching, spending more time cultivating your ability to respond to the balls the students hit back then controlling precisely where you think they should be hitting them.  And letting the balls bounce back and forth in your dreams. 

That’s real teaching.