A Little Bit of Learning (8/25)

Today I return to the purpose of this trip, traveling-music-teacher theme of this Blog, this unbroken thread that has woven the tapestry of my life. I’m about to teach yet another (how many in my lifetime, I wonder?) Orff Course to some 60 people. Music teachers who have foregone spending the last week of their summer vacation on the beach to challenge themselves to hone their craft and make children yet happier by teaching well. 

 

I hope to speak here on behalf of those children, remind the teachers to throw out all the curriculums and half-baked ideas cooked up by adults impressed by their own clever ideas without ever asking a child whether those ideas are worthy of them. If they did, I believe most children could answer as articulately as this six-year old, whose Mom had been going off each day to an Orff course. When her daughter asked her what she was doing, the Mom replied: “I’m learning how to make music class more fun.” 

 

“Oh,” I know how to do that!” her daughter replied. And sat down and made this list: 

                            

Kids are so smart. But no one is inviting them to the professional development teacher’s meetings, so it is incumbent upon adults to speak on their behalf. And as the poet Yeats said, “to baptize as well as preach.” The Orff workshop is a baptismal font that welcomes the child inside the adult to be re-born and blessed. It is a time to play, with lots of games and inside of it all, a “tiny bit of learning.” And yes, some preaching to make clear the grandmother common sense and neuroscience behind the approach. 

 

We are going to have so much fun!