Kids in the Zone

Read an education Website, sit in on a Board of Education meeting, take a class on teaching methods and you’ll hear all sorts of interesting words— benchmarks, anticipatory sets, portfolio assessments, zones of proximal development and more. But the most important word is often missing—kids.

If you’re a teacher or thinking about being a teacher, check in with yourself. Do I like kids? Do I enjoy being around them? Do I love them?  If the answer is no, get out fast!

If yes, then get more specific. What ages do I particularly love? And what specifically do I love about them? How can I understand more deeply how they think, what they like, what matters to them? Then build all your teaching choices around that understanding and without being fluent in education-jargon, you’ll have yourself a pretty exciting classroom.

Good teaching begins with useful insights into the nature of kids— the way they both astound us and drive us crazy, the way we can’t wait to be around them and are relieved to have a break from them, the way they give us hope for who we might have been and the way they mirror back to us the worst of who we are, the way they’re so zany and erratic, surprising and volatile, caring and cruel.

It’s not too hard to learn what kids are like. Really, all we have to do is remember. After all, we are all kids once. We were once alive with the wonder of the world, curious about its every nook and cranny. We used to run from place to place in sheer exultation from the excitement of being alive, giggle and laugh without going to the comedy club, spend hours in company with our own fantasy play. We also skinned our knees, felt small and powerless, felt inconsolable grief when our friends were mean to us or we didn’t get the part we wanted in the school play. Good teaching is the place where the kids we were, now grown into adults who remember, and the kids we teach, play together in the zone of proximal development. 

Bulls-eye!

A famous archer traveled the countryside looking for another who had acneived his level of expertise. He defeated opponent after opponent and one day happened upon a barn with multiple targets. Each target had an arrow in the dead-center of the bulls-eye. Eager to meet the archer who had achieved such a feat, he knocked on the farmhouse door. Upon asking to meet the archer, a young girl came out. The archer was astonished.

The archer spoke.“Young lady, tell me the secret of your success. Never have I seen such accuracy in all my days.”

The girl replied, “It’s really quite easy. I take my bow and a quiver of arrows and I shoot each one into the barn wall. Then I go up to each arrow and  draw a target around it.”

This marvelous tale, told to me by storyteller Angela Lloyd, speaks volumes about what good education might be. The way things are, innocent young children walk into the first day of school and are handed a bow and a quiver of arrows. They’re then shown multiple targets called math, language, history, science, music, art, P.E., etc. and told to hit a bulls-eye every time. If they’re lucky, some of their teachers actually teach them good technique— how to string the bow, how to aim, how to fire, how to practice to improve. If they’re not, they have to figure it out on their own.

The maddening thing is that every target is different and requires a different way of shooting. And every teacher has different advice. Every few months, their score is totaled up and sent home. If they fail to hit 100% bulls-eyes, they’re either told they’re not trying hard enough or have no talent or have attention issues that will require drugs and therapy or any number of strategies to fix what’s broken.

In short, the child simply has to mold him or herself to the demands of the school. They may find out they’re good at the game and go through twelve relatively painless years with an Honor Roll bumper sticker on the parents’ car. Or they may discover, as did Charles Dickens, Albert Einstein, Ella Fitzgerald, John Lennon, Steve Jobs and many others, that the game doesn’t suit them and have to develop survival strategies before arriving at the work that changes the world and makes them rich and famous.

Now imagine instead that the kids entering school shoot the arrows into the barn wall of each subject and the teacher builds curricular targets around each, with the arrow in the dead center of the bulls-eye. What a difference that would make! Instead of the child having to rise to the demands of the teacher, the teacher levels down to the needs, interests, talents and procilivities of each child. School culture is built around the way children really are instead of the adult fantasy targets of how we’d like them to be.

On one level, the image speaks for itself and requires no elaboration. But because I’m a teacher myself and by necessity practical, I know that teachers will object to the impossibility of creating a personalized curriculum for each child, will question the suggestion that children shouldn’t rise to accomplish key targets, will criticize the inference that this is an either/or proposition. And they’re right. Good education will include both the child’s stretch towards the bulls-eye of each subject’s key targets and the teacher’s flexibility to keep drawing targets around the child’s particular genius.

And we should keep a particular eye out for the characters like the one in the story. She may have been a lousy archer, but she was a brilliant problem-solver. I can see her hanging out in the company of Charles, Albert, Ella, John and Steve. And just maybe if I’m nice to her in my class, she may buy me that summer home down the road when she’s rich and famous.

Or at least a set of bow and arrows.

Love Affair

I just had the most marvelous meeting with my lover. I came around the corner and there she was, so breathtakingly beautiful that— well, there’s no other way to say it— my heart stood still. The most gentle of “Hi’s” escaped my lips and I just stood there transfixed, lost in a lover’s embrace. We have had a long-standing exquisite affair, but today, I fell in love all over again. Her name? San Francisco.

Truth be told, things had grown stale between us. I was tired of her grey, overcast moods, the way she doesn’t pick up after herself on her streets like Salzburg (one of my other girlfriends), her clogged freeway arteries that hardened her heart and other tired habits. And I’m sure she was tired of me complaining about them.

But I have to take some responsibility. Too much time together and too little time together can both be relationship-killers and these past six months, I’ve hardly been around. And when I have been, it was for weeks on end of her foggy thinking when the calendar dictated some clarity. Of course, there were some high points, when her boys brought home the World Series trophies and her favorite uncle renewed his lease on his big White House. But in terms of a soul connection, the threads between us were frayed.

These last few days have changed all that. Brilliant, sunlit, sparkling days that show her effervescent nature in its fully glory. Dressed up so fine in her holiday clothes and stepping out to party with such zest and flair. I’ve been out again exploring all the nooks and crannies of her most lovely body, admiring her from afar and from close-up and she has never looked so good or felt so fine.

Move over, Tony Bennet. I’m in love all over again.

The Best Report Card

I love all the ages I teach and all the styles of music I teach, but we all have our favorite children in the family and teaching jazz to 8^th graders is mine. Besides the fantastic music and the delicious blend of freedom and structure, jazz is intimately connected with our national identity, our history, our future. As Gershwin so succinctly put it: “Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.”

Much of what I aspire to in teaching the jazz class is the same as in all my classes, but with that extra twist of history and culture and sense of belonging to a vibrant community just outside the school gates and down the road of our history. Amongst my hopes:

• To reveal this great art form through giving children first-hand experiences in playing.

• To play to each child’s strengths while also inviting them to try out new things.

• To move them beyond the known horizon through improvisation.

• To stand them on the shoulders of those who came before, as in teaching part of a Wynton Kelly solo from which they continue on their own.

• To choose great tunes, things like Miles’ Freddie Freeloader and Count Basie’s Shiny Stockings.

• To connect the music with its history, culture and great artists.

• To widen understanding of how jazz developed and its basic theory.

• To bring the group together through collective music-making— music as a means to create community.

• To give memorable classes that will be missed.

Yesterday, I cleaned out a desk drawer and came upon a card from an 8^th grader student from the class of 2007. It was an end-of-the-year note of appreciation. I love that it's handwritten, I love the colorful drawings and artistic composition and I love that the student noticed and valued just about everything from that list above. It’s one of the best report cards I’ve ever gotten and I keep it to cheer me up on a rainy day when all the doubts about what we’re doing and why and whether we’ve done anything worthwhile creep in.

And since my default setting is inspired education for all, it got me thinking beyond my own personal pleasure and imagining what it would be like if we all gave our students a report card like this. Handwritten with colorful drawings of key moments we shared with the student during the year and heartfelt appreciation for what that student gave to us. And the end of each child’s schooling, they could make a giant collage of all the beautiful cards they got each year. I think I’ll suggest it at the next staff meeting. Meanwhile, here’s the model:

In His Own Sweet Way

I was six years old when I began organ lessons and eight when I added the piano. By the time I reached 8^th grade, the last year of my formal lessons, I was playing Bach on the organ, Beethoven on the piano and listening to Tschaikovsky on the record player. The Beatles had appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show the year before and were the soundtrack to my first make-out parties. (Susan Herman, where are you now?) I had played some songs from a Jerome Kern collection and had watched my share of TV variety shows with live big bands, Disney cartoons and old movies with jazz soundtracks, but up to that point in my musical life, jazz was a foreign country where I had never traveled.

All of that changed when I happened on a record album that caught my ear and opened the door to a world that was destined to be one of my home addresses. In an attempt to keep my restless teenage Beatles-opened self continuing with piano lessons, my teacher got me a book of the pieces from the album and put them on my practice list. Those tunes proved to be my passport across the border and the group leader my first guide. The album was called Time Out and the group was The Dave Brubeck Quartet. Yesterday, one day short of his 92^nd birthday, Dave Brubeck left us, took some time out from this earthly life and passed to the other side.

You can read the details of his remarkable life in the obituaries—growing up on a cattle ranch near Concord, studying at University of Pacific (which now hosts The Brubeck Institute) and later at Mills College, forming his famous quartet in 1951 (the year I was born), an integrated group with black bassist Eugene Wright, bringing jazz to the college circuit, getting featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1954, apologizing to Duke Ellington that he got on Time before Duke because of pernicious racism, releasing the first million-selling jazz album, Time Out, in 1959,  expanding jazz’s reach with the use of odd time signatures and continuing to compose, perform and teach up until the last months of his life.

By all accounts, he was a devoted family man, raising six sons, most of whom became performing musicians in their own right, a devout Catholic, a dedicated musician and a sweet man. He was grateful to the black culture and musicians who inspired him and outspoken about racism. Along with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and others, he was one of America’s jazz ambassadors, bringing this beautiful music to countries far and wide and being inspired in turn, like Duke, to write new compositions from the influence of other culture’s music. (Blue Rondo a la Turk is perhaps one of the most famous of those inspired rhythms, combining a Turkish 9/8 meter with a Mozartian rondo form and an American blues middle section).

As mentioned at the beginning, Dave Brubeck opened the door to jazz for me. But I must confess that once I passed through and met Count Basie and Art Tatum and Charlie Parker and Bill Evans and John Coltrane and Miles Davis and on and on, I didn’t listen much more to Dave. But in 2001, I noticed he was performing at the SF Jazz Festival. Serendipitously, I had decided to try Take Five with my 8^th grade students that year and grabbed the opportunity to take the kids to see him at Masonic Auditorium. He was 81 at the time and played a fabulous concert. I had always thought of him as the Alan Watts of jazz, making it palatable and accessible to an uneducated white audience. (For those who don’t know him, Alan Watts did the same for Zen Buddhism). But now I saw that he deserved his place among the best— an innovative, expressive and formidable piano player who kept growing his whole life. His voice was unique and to paraphrase one of his great tunes, he did everything “in his own sweet way.”

After the concert, we waited near the backstage door to see if he would come out to greet us. Fifteen minutes later, when the audience had cleared out, he came back to stage and invited us up. I told him that I was in 8^th grade when he first opened my world and now here I was with my 8^th grade students. He was so appreciative, warm and generous to them—and to me— and his agent later wrote a note saying that Dave had enjoyed the school CD I had given to him.

I’ll close with a reflection from one of those 8^th graders, made more poignant by Mr. Brubeck’s recent passing. I know he leaves us born on the wings of all the love and inspiration he generated in millions worldwide and I imagine him treasuring these words as much as any of the numerous awards he received.

“It’s hard to describe the feeling I felt when I walked downstairs in the morning, and learned that we had 25 tickets to the Dave Brubeck concert. I could immediately picture Mr. Brubeck and his quartet playing Take Five and everyone cheering.

When Dave started to play his first tune, accompanied by the amazing bass player and drummer, and then the saxophone and flute, I was impressed by how beautifully the instruments complemented each other. The concert was great—I was in awe when Dave Brubeck played.

When I am old and have lived for many, many years, I will remember the night when Dave Brubeck’s quartet and my 8^th grade class met. In thirteen years of living, I have never been so lucky as to meet one so famous as Mr. Brubeck. The night of November 2^nd will be in my mind until my soul calls it quits.”   —Nick Makanna

Best of the Blogs

It has been a marvelous Fall, rich with travel, workshops, music and all the things that get me up in the morning with a bounce to my step. But one missing piece has been the thread of an ongoing project to stitch the days together, For me, that means writing another book. The way the schedule worked out, two weeks away, one week back, one week away, two weeks back, made that impossible. I generally need six weeks of chaining myself to the desk to get the next book birthed. And with at least six more waiting in line for the turn, I found myself impatient.

This last weekend, with nothing on the calendar and a raging storm outside, I thought I would finally get down to my favorite procrastinated project— cleaning and organizing my work space. But instead, I picked up a thread I thought about back in September and began re-reading and re-organizing my blogs with the thought of publishing. Get the words off of the ephemeral floating screen onto the solid white page of the book. Organize certain themes around a central theme of Education (not travel—that for a future collection)—Arts Education, Kids, The Craft of Teaching, How We Learn, Culture and Community, Politics and Policies. With over 400 to choose from, be picky and of course, edit and even re-write.

Such decisions are always a courageous step into the dark forest of the unknown and like with all such moments in our lives, best if someone’s there to hold our hand or encourage us to start walking. And so dear Reader, if any of you are inclined to encourage and discourage me (note the word of “courage” in both!), to share any personal favorite blogs, to either give me a word for the title to replace the accurate but ugly “blog” (Confessions of a Traveling Music Teacher: The Education Blogs) or suggest a new title altogether, I would be forever grateful. The easiest would just to use the Comment option (though several folks complain that this doesn’t work for them). Other options include Facebook, Skype,  e-mail (goodkindg@aol.com), phone or floral delivery with message. And of course, if I hear from exactly no one, I’ll probably forge ahead anyway.

Meanwhile, thank you, dear Reader, for taking your valuable time to read as much of these as you have. Coming up to the two-year anniversary of my first posting, these little essays have been a cherished and faithful companion, made all the richer knowing that you are at the other end.

Exile and Redemption

What are the stories that move me? What common threads run through each book or film or real life story that makes me feel a different person at the end than I was at the beginning? What is the thing that stirs my blood and feeds my hope and helps me feel that there indeed is a purpose and meaning, if not to all of life, at least to a few?

I think it begins with a feeling of exile— from one’s parents, friends, lovers, culture, homeland, self. Then comes the adventure, the arduous journey with its missed directions, false paths, moving forward and then sinking back, dodging the arrows of misfortune or engaging the demons on one’s shoulders or opening the doors to the seen and unseen helpers. And finally, the moment or moments of redemption. The reconciliation with the estranged parent or child, the coming to peace with one’s self, the return to the homeland, be it psychological, mythological or literal. Sometimes the moments are like grand symphonic cadences, with trumpets blaring and tympani pounding. Other times, like a quiet consonant chord after much dissonance, a small gesture well timed or brief moment of genuine understanding. The weight of a lifetime lifted, the dark curtains momentarily parted, the crazed laughter of unbearable sorrow transforming into the joyful laughter of acceptance.

On Thanksgiving Day, I had an urge to see the movie Pieces of April again with my daughter’s family. Alas, it was not available on their Netflicks and we settled for Outside Providence, in deference to the place where she and her husband met and where her step-son lives. But today, we found it at the local public library and there it all was, my archetypal plot filmed with such humor, artistry, memorable characters and yes, a beautiful moment of hard-earned redemption. Along with classics like Black Orpheus, The Seven Samurai, It Happened One Night, Some Like It Hot, The Lady Vanishes, The Misfits and yes, why not? It’s a Wonderful Life, the film rose to my top 15 list. If you have never seen  Pieces of April or not seen it for a while, treat yourself. Don’t wait until next Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, the book I just finished, Little Bee, is yet another such tale. Much darker times ten, but exquisitely written and masterfully rendered by author Chris Cleave. And the exile, transformation, redemption theme runs throughout my other favored books as well. Just about all of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, John Steinbeck and also in the living authors like Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Malone and beyond.

Of course, all this began in my childhood with the happy endings of the fairy tales and was also the pattern in musical works from Mozart’s Requiem to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. But alongside these classical archetypal patterns, new sensibilities emerged in literature and film that mirrored “real life.” Endings where no redemption can be found, where the homecoming never happens, where things go from bad to worse and stay there. And growing into the reality checks of aging, I indeed found it rare for the bitter man to suddenly turn to grace at the end, for a lifetime of abusive invective to suddenly—or gradually— change to sweet praise. In my experience, those who cause harm intentionally or unintentionally, who betrayed cruelly or ignorantly, rarely apologized or asked for forgiveness. Actually in my case, never. (But I’m not bitter and forgive them all. Well, sometimes.)

But none of that makes these stories one inch less inspiring or beautiful. And though rare, grace does happen. Sunshine lights up corners kept dark for years, a well-placed hug dissolves decades of anger, the ship comes to port with welcoming people on the dock.

May it happen for you.