July at Christmas

Got my traveling music teacher hat on again and it’s the straw kind that keeps out the sun. I left San Francisco in jeans, hiking boots and fleece vest, reluctant to forego the cozy winter Christmas scene, but now write this barefoot in shorts and hey, that’s not such a bad thing! I love the summer and instead of Christmas in July, I’m getting July at Christmas. Good deal!

Of course, such gifts don’t come for free. My price was 26 straight hours of travel, the 9 from New York to Rio de Janeiro in a middle seat. But grateful for unlimited movies and Hope Springs, Going the Distance and the Bourne Legacy helped keep me occupied. That and marking up with red pen the Kinko’s copy of my new book (or books). Maybe it’s just my long history with print, but these blogs on the printed page feel different to me than on the screen. And more than once, they came across as something I’d like to read. A good litmus test for an author.

I arrived in Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil, met my contact and while waiting for my ride, had a rough hour trying to keep up convivial conversation with only a few hours of airplane sleep behind me. When my driver and her friend came, they graciously let me stretch out in the back seat while they drove the hour or so north to Caxias do Sul.

A two-hour nap in the hotel and then off to teach on Friday night. I entered the room and was astounded to see that over half of the 40 people attending were men! Very rare in the Orff world. And 90% of them were young teachers or students having their virgin Orff experience. That's an amazing moment for an Orff teacher. I told them:

“I'm going to open the door to this remarkable world and some of you will recognize the house that you’re destined to live in. Others will come in and join in the merrymaking, enjoy a beer and leave. Some may even feel they came to the wrong party. Whichever one is true for you is fine. I’ll do my best to be a gracious host and make you feel comfortable, well-fed and happy to be here.”

And off we went. Two days later, with affectionate hugs and wet eyes, we said goodbye to each other with some 20 more songs, dances and pieces to help us navigate through both the stormy seas and idyllic lakes of this precious life. We left the room carrying the echoes of the energy, laughter, love, deep quiet and exuberant exultation we generated.

After I deliver my promised notes, I have an evening and a morning to wander this town and get a feeling for where I am beyond the room of music teachers. That traveling reporter hat I’ll save to put on for tomorrow.

With sunglasses on.

Enough!

“Just heard the shocking news” opened my last blog about my friend Sue Walton, but that was nothing compared to the latest school killings. What can one say? Amidst the grief and heaviness of the horror, so many of my teacher friends on Facebook are talking about how they continue to fill their school with love, love and yet more love. And music. What else can one do but weep and keep going on with yet more love and compassion?

Amidst the tears, after the shock settles, may I suggest a next step? Bring down the f’—ing NRA’s stranglehold on gun control. Stop listening to the insanity of “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Well, yes, but people with guns kill more people more easily that someone with bare hands, a knife or a baseball bat and that child spared might have been your own. How many more school tragedies will it take before we wake up? Columbine was not an isolated event—it’s becoming a national pattern. We’ve had the statistics at our fingertips forever, comparing the actual murder rates of countries with gun control and those without. The difference is staggering.

Let us honor these innocent children and their inconsolable families by protecting our young as we should. It’s time for serious gun control, side by side with love, love and yet more love. 

Farewell to Wanda Woman

Just heard the shocking news that Sue Walton, my old partner-in-crime for ten years of Holiday plays at the SF School, passed away from complications due to a tooth abscess. I’ve heard rumors of a service sometime in February—her birthday was Valentine’s Day, so perhaps then. But meanwhile, a few words about Sue.

Sue was a large woman in all ways— body (over 6 feet tall), heart and spirit, a memorable character who stood out from the crowd. I first met her at Cazadero Music Camp in 1980. She was the drama teacher in residence, sang blues at every open mike she could and was known by various aliases, of which “Wanda Woman” was my favorite. After a few summers in Cazadero together, I invited Sue to co-direct the Winter Holiday Plays at The San Francisco School with me and so began ten marvelous years together, from 1984-1993.

What a run we had! I imagine most SF School alums will remember some of our classic collaborations—It Could always Be Worse, King Hop, The Christmas Carol, Holly and Ivy, The Day They Outlawed Music (this one was James Harding’s first school play), Lora Lorita, The Month Brothers, The Elders of Chelm and The Golden Goose, to name just a few. Sue often wrote her own songs for her scripts and that last play included her best-selling “Oh, we’re all stuck together and we can’t get loose. We’re all following the Golden Goose.” She also had a great Halloween song and a Cazadero classic “Don’t Let the Bugs Bug You.”

Sue loved to sing and could belt out the blues with the best of them. She was always to the side of the Orff world, but in 1996 came to the Memphis Orff Conference and what a treat it was to hear her grab the mike and sing on Beales Street! We had a couple of songs we liked to do together, me on piano, her on vocals— When Sunny Gets Blue and My Funny Valentine amongst them (Sue’s birthday was on Valentine’s Day.) Every year after the plays were done, Sue would join in at the last singing time of the year with the kids and cap off the group singing with a solo version of Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. I played the song on the piano the day after I heard the news and imagined her by my side.

Once Sue left the school, we still ran into each other here and there. She got some gig at the Lawrence Hall of Science and continued with her freelance work. Talking to the folks who first told me the news, it seems like after some 20 years, she got laid off from her Lawrence Hall gig and was piecing things together the way freelance artists often have to do in this country. Which means no benefits or health insurance. The word on the street is that she had an abscessed tooth which she didn’t take care of— perhaps with no insurance, just trying to save money— and that it kicked off a serious infection that finally reached her heart. It makes me sick to think that if she had been living in Canada, Finland or Cuba, she might still be with us today. Wake up, America.

And so Wanda Woman is now wandering amongst the stars, having left her mark on us remaining mortals. RIP, Sue Walton— you are loved and remembered.

Home for the Holidays

 I’m driving around San Francisco with the radio playing, still infatuated with this most beautiful city. On comes Bing Crosby singing “There’s no place like home for the holidays.” At 61, I’m still game for the out-the-door adventure and don’t yet feel the nesting instinct of the elders to stick close to home.

But I’m with Bing on this one. I really just want to settle into the spirit of the season. Go to the Revels, see the kids’ Holiday Plays at school and the St. George and the Dragon ritual mummer’s play the 8^th grade does and sing with the kids and go ice skating with them and sing with the neighbors at our annual caroling party. I want to go the Posada party and the White Elephant exchange and eat too much and listen to the holiday CD’s and curl up on the couch with some old movies. I want to take out the Christmas decorations from my childhood, work on the family newsletter and yes, even shop and handwrite the envelopes for the Christmas cards.

Instead, I’m back at the airport, about to board a plane to Brazil. A short Orff course, then on to Buenos Aires to help my daughter Talia celebrate the end of her three and a half years as an ex-pat and help her head back home to San Francisco. But first, meet my wife in Cuzco, where thre three of us and two of Talia’s friends will celebrate Christmas. And then start climbing the Inca Trail the next day to Machu Picchu.

When I tell people my plans, they pretend to be envious, but perhaps are secretly thinking “I’m so glad it’s you and not me.”  I know I’ll enjoy it all and be glad I did it, but truth be told, I’d be quite happy just wandering around San Francisco while Bing sings to me. Instead, I guess I’ll just whistle the tune as I ascend the Inca trail.

12/ 12/ 12

     ·      12 months

·      12 Zodiac signs

·      12 clock hours

·      12 Apostles

·      12 Knights of the Round Table

·      12 Members of a Jury

·      12 Gates to the City

·      12 Tribes of Israel

·      12 Days of Christmas

·      12 Steps of AA

·      12 eggs in a carton

·      12 inches in a foot

·      12 dots on a dice

·      12 bars in a blues

·      12/8 West African polyrhythm

·      12 half-steps in an octave

·      12 x 9 =108, sacred number in Hinduism and Buddhism

And so 12/12/12/. Three one’s, three two’s. Only happens once in the entire history of the planet. 

Do something twelve-worthy today.

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.