The Real Deal

The fun-fest continues, as the kids I’m teaching here in Toronto and I romp through the forest of notes on the xylophones and dance joyfully around the campfire. As so many try to squeeze teaching into a paint-by-number method or bend it to fit inside some ill-thought-out dogma or outsource it altogether to machines, those who know what the real deal is engage with children in ways that make them smarter, kinder and happier. The statistics reveal depressed and dispirited students beaten down by toxic practices in the name of “education,” but my own experience is that kids are ready to be wholly themselves on their way to better versions of themselves, led to deeper understandings, more controlled expression in diverse media, more profound connections with their own community of psychic energies and those of people around them. How can we reach them in these ways?

 

It's simple. Replace fear with fun, insult with welcome, blind faith with cultivated thought, ugliness with beauty. The only antidote to a child or adult who is shut down because they understandably are trying to protect some tender part of themselves from the brutal attacks of others, is to bring them into a safe and protected and loving circle, where fun is at the forefront and they are not only allowed but invited to discover the beautiful expressive parts of themselves, in company with adults who affirm, welcome, bless and love them. That’s where real healing begins. That’s where the real deal starts.

 

Saying “yes!” to this requires the insight and courage to say “no!” to scripted lessons made by “experts” who know exactly nothing about what that child in front of you right here, right now, needs. And believe me, it ain’t a script. Say “no” to the mindless testing and the cute videos and the AI catastrophe. Be clear that kids don’t need a curriculum or an i-Pad or a sure-fire kid-tested lesson. They need a relationship with an adult prepared to see them and know them and invite them to discover more about themselves that they even knew before. Relationship, not systems. A relationship that by definition is unpredictable, messy, somewhat uncontrollable and not a problem to be fixed, but a dance to be practiced. That’s where the challenge and the joy equally lie. No 26-step system exists that will solve your classroom challenges any more than it will solve your marriage. 

 

So a word to my fellow Orff teachers. Orff Schulwerk began with an intuition blossomed into a vision. It invited—and invites— us to develop our own artistry, feed our own passion for our art and for teaching our art, bring the music wholly into our own body and voice and gesture and facial expression and communicate directly to the children from vibration to vibration. It asks us to become friendly with our own spontaneity, our own responsiveness, our own attention to what’s going on in this moment right before our eyes and ears and with that quirky little person called a child. That’s where the art and science of teaching meet and that’s where the children can begin to feel safe and nurtured and held in the arms of something that is not only about mastery, but is about community feeling, is about beauty, is about the unequalled joy of creation. 

 

I’m concerned that the success of Orff Schulwerk in American schools is coming at a price. We’re starting to march to the school board’s drummer, use all the ugly-non-poetic words trying to prove that we taught something worthwhile, submitting our lesson plans to people who don’t understand them, teaching with the required Smartboard or formula of blah-blah-blah lesson objectives told to children who don’t care to hear it—they just want to play. Orff began as a radical antidote to all of that. Instead of trying to fit in with the bean-counters program, we need to show them how to grow the garden. 

 

If I had any advice for today’s and future Orff teachers, I’d say “Stay on the edge.” And walk your administrator there to show him or her the view. When we are teaching the way Orff and his descendants proposed, there’s not a single new education-du-jour approach that we’re not already doing—and often much better. Trust that. Art does not thrive in the bland safe middle of normal, the brightly lit shopping mall or sterile classroom with linoleum floors. It seeks out the edge, be it explosive and passionate or tender and intimate. Think the Bible, Shakespeare, Opera. Think Mozart’s Requiem, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, a Gospel church, a dulcimer on an Appalachian front porch, the shimmering sounds of the gamelan on a moonlit verandah in Bali. That’s where we should take the children.

 

And on my way to today’s class, that’s exactly where I intend to go.