Confessions of a Traveling Music Teacher

Reflections teaching Orff workshops around the world.

Friday, May 16, 2025

Life Abundant

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There is no finer feeling than coasting on a country road while the world is waking up. The smell of early morning in the air, the birds sin...
Thursday, May 15, 2025

True Retirement

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Beginning by reading  Walden  as an impressionable teen and continuing into my college investigation of yoga and Zen, I began to organize my...

The French Connection: Part III

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My little story below is drawn from some 25,00 to 80,000 English words of French origin.  I found a Website with a list, but with about 1,00...
Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Language Matters

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Words matter. Or at least they used to. Not only in political discourse, honest journalism and proper education, but apparently, they once w...

The Usefulness of Beauty

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“You are always eager to make everything useful, yet here is a useless plot. It would be much better to have salads here than boquets.”   …t...

The French Connection: Part II

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THE FRENCH CONNECTION: Part II   Philosophers Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Foucault   Scientists Louis Pasteur, ...
Tuesday, May 13, 2025

The French Connection

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Well, it worked. The plane brought four of us as promised to Paris, we met our two other riding companions who came on a different flight an...
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About Me

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Doug Goodkin
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” (E.B. White). Early on in my adult life, I was convinced that the world is a mess that needs fixing. But I also sensed that life is short, that miracles and beauty abound and that we would do well to pay attention to them. In a stroke of good fortune, I stumbled on a life that allowed both to happen at once. Teaching music for 45 years at The San Francisco School with children between three and 14 years old guaranteed a fair share of miracles and beauty. The sense that happy children playing, imagining, thinking and creating might help a bit with that improving-the-world side of things made it easy to plan my day. Alongside a half-century of teaching children is a parallel life of traveling and teaching the Orff approach to music education—some 50 countries to date banging on xylophones and slapping our bodies. This blog now in its fifteenth year sharing these experiences. Settle back in your armchair and enjoy!
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