50 Years

So after a one day turnaround, I’m off again for another two weeks of teaching. This year is  the 40^th Anniversary of the Orff Schulwerk Levels training that my mentor Avon Gillespie started. I was in that first Level 1 class in 1983 and then became a teacher in the course in 1991. And so tomorrow begins my  31^st year (only skipped the pandemic year) passing on the Orff Schulwerk baton. Many people I trained in Orff years ago are now retired— one indicator of how long I’ve been at this!

 

Not to mention the 45 years of teaching at one school. Now three years “retired” from that job but still teaching kids and adults here, there and everywhere, I realized I also taught at different places before I began at The San Francisco School in 1975. Technically, my first part-time teaching jobs through the work/study program at Antioch College began in 1971, but it was 1973 at that last job that I felt I really did some significant teaching. 50 years ago!

 

The school was The Arthur Morgan School, a Quaker boarding school in the mountains of North Carolina. The kids were of middle school age, most only 8 to 10 years younger than me. Inspired by Jim Kweskin albums and my beginning steps into ragtime piano, I started a jug band with 17 of the 30 kids at the school and in February of ’73, alongside three other teachers, rented a big yellow school bus and arranged, without internet or cell phones and me 21 years old, a two-week tour through the South with all 17 kids. I arranged concerts and home stays at alternative schools, community centers, churches and the like and we drove from just north of Asheville to Miami, Florida and back, with stops in Hilton Head Island, John’s Island, Atlanta, select places in Florida and more. We were a rag tag bumch, the music with kazoos, washboards, spoons and the like lively and spirited, but I suspect low on musical virtuosity (we never did make a recording and it would probably have been hilarious to hear now had we done it). We had a repertoire of some 20 songs—Jug Band Music, Somebody Stole My Gal, Richland Woman, Bill Bailey and such. Some 10 years ago, we had a Jug Band Reunion at the school with about eight of the players, now in their late 50’s— and they remembered all the songs and most of the words!

 

How grateful I am that I lived in those times. The thought of a 21-year-old and three other teachers around that age driving 17 middle-school kids on a school bus (no seat belts) through the South — and occasionally picking up hitchhikers!— is beyond human belief in today’s day and age when teaching a few classes at a summer camp requires medical exams, live-scan FBI fingerprinting, sexual abuse training, special driver’s licences, 20 pages of signed waivers and even after all that, any administrator asked to allow a trip like the one we took would certainly say, “Are you out of your mind?”

 

But we did it. And it was glorious—and forever memorable. 

 

That Spring back at Antioch College is when I met Avon and stepped on the path that leads me to tomorrow’s classes. That Fall was when I also moved to San Francisco. A half-century as an SF resident, teacher and Orff teacher. That’s worth noting.

 

And I just did. 

PS And may I add that I still try to keep the spirit of joyful abandon shown in the photo in each and every class with both children and adults. That's something the lawyers can't touch.