Final Exam (8/29)

I am sitting in the lobby of my hotel in Hangzhou. Outside the revolving door it is over 100 degrees, for the sixth day in a row. Here it is cool. One of those damn delivery robots scoots by and parks in a corner, while upstairs my class of 60 music teachers is doing a run through of their “final exam project.” I’ve left them alone for an hour to figure out how to make a story about the seasons come alive in their own voice. When I walked in to check, there was such a joyful buzz in the room, small groups working out their ideas with so much animation and delight. 

 

This indeed is a perfect model of a final exam. For 4 ½ days, I’ve led them into the games, body percussion pieces, songs, instrumental pieces and more that I know, all with some space for them to contribute— to improvise music, to make up dances, to translate English into Mandarin, to find parallel games from their own background and more. Now I leave it wholly up to them and they feel all the pleasure, the power, the independence to make it their own. 

That moment, be it small or big, of the teacher relinquishing center stage and setting the students loose into the full measure of their new and old knowledge, their own style, their unbounded imagination, is one of teaching greatest pleasures. As the early Orff teacher Wilhelm Keller once said, “A real teacher becomes progressively unnecessary.” Because the point, after all, is to lead students to their own genius, power and beauty. The teacher can be the boat that rows them across the waters to the shore of their deep belonging, but once they’re there, neither boat nor teacher is needed. At least, not in the same way. 

 

In a few minutes, I’ll re-enter the room to the show and I already know that they will all ace the “exam.” They’ll use what they’ve learned—new body percussion techniques, Orff ensemble orchestration ideas, perhaps a few of the games and such. They’ll use what they already knew— a folk song or poem or precise dance style but put it into a new context. And they’ll use what they didn’t know they knew— the kind of surprises the imagination has in store when it’s given permission to freely fly out from its place of hiding. It indeed is the best kind of final exam, reviewing in the most authentic—and delightful— way everything we’ve worked so hard to learn for 6 hours a day and 5 days. 

 

Today is Charlie Parker’s birthday. He would have been 105. He once said something to the effect, “There is no boundary line to art.” I think he would be pleased to witness what I’m about to see.