Jesus in Preschool

I know Jesus was admired as a great teacher, but I wonder if he ever taught preschool. That’s where his “love your neighbor as yourself” and “turn the other cheek” would be put to the test. I wish I could be a fly on the wall when he told little Matthew:

“Matthew, you shouldn’t be playing with that in your hand during music class. Bring it to me, please.”

Pause.

“Matthew, please bring that over to me.”

No response.

“Matthew, I’ve asked you two times now. I want you bring that to me. Right now.”

Silence.

“Mateo, ven aqui! No, you don’t speak Spanish? I was just wondering, since I’ve asked you three times in your mother tongue of English. Now once more, bring that to me.”

“Matthew?”

“Yoo hoo! I’m over here!”

Matthew!!!!!!!

You get the idea. Later in the class Matthew twirled around on his little carpet square while others were executing the intricate dance figures. Then he got on someone else’s carpet square who pushed him off and Matthew pushed back and I intervened and separated them and then Matthew pushed again and I believe that it was at this moment that I became a lapsed Christian and felt my blood pressure rise as I firmly escorted Matthew out the door.

In my workshops, I always tell teachers that “behavior is the language of children” and our job is to translate. The behavior was clearly saying either “I can’t do what you’re asking” or “ I could do it but I don’t want to” or “It’s much more fun to twirl around by myself and bump into people” or “I am an alien from another planet” or “I’m only five years old! Cut me some slack! I have no idea what’s going on inside my little body and mind!” But indeed it is my job to:

1)    Stop the behavior so the class can proceed harmoniously and the other children can enjoy the experience.

2)    Give clear consequences as to what’s acceptable or not.

3)    Talk it over with the child and another teacher or administrator.

4)    Try to sincerely figure out what’s going on to help that child to participate successfully.

5)    Love that child. But love comes best from understanding and understanding is hard work. Whether a kid is five or fifty-five.

All this is so easy to say and so hard to do. I suspect Jesus would have been a good preschool teacher, but I also bet he would have gotten frustrated and upset a few times. It makes me feel better to think that. On to tomorrow’s class.

Scholarese

“If the tone is not right, nothing’s right.” Poet Mary Oliver said something to that effect and this came to mind as I read the quarterly journal from my field of music education. It seems there’s a move to appear more scholarly and suddenly many articles are strewn with those names and dates in parenthesis that show that the author doesn’t have a single original idea. The texts are riddled with initials describing the latest dry academic concepts so that the reader conveniently can forget we're discussing kids here.  With a few exceptions, there is little of the children being taught and even less of the aesthetic language of our art form. This bothers me. So I tried my hand at revenge by writing my own article. I believe it's worthy of publication and is sure to revolutionize teaching everywhere. As follows:

The Socio-Neurological- Benefits and Overarching-Learning-Outcomes of Succesively Imitated Rhythm Patterns Over Steady Beat Via the Multiple Mediated Paradigm of the Adapted Orff Schulwerk Pedagogy

                                   By Douglas Goodkin: OST, OMG, LSDLOL

Many Music Educational Instructive Technicians (METI) have found great success in applying the Significant Research Discoveries (SRD’s) to corroborate their field study in classrooms nationwide and test their hypothesis that Echo Clapping with Precision (ECIF) increases students’ visual-audio-motor capacities (Michael Jordan 1988), stimulates the phalangic motor response (David Copperfield 1999), notably increases the Mindful Emphathic Syndrome (Oprah Winfrey 2010) while simultaneously producing AAVCR’s (Awesome and Very Cool Rhythms) (Clinkscales 1906) (Hans Hurd 1936) (Ooga Booga 5006 BC).

These strategies also support the CCSSMALIBFTSIRWFABLTC (Common Core State Standards for Musical Arts and Litercay Invented by Failed Teachers Stuck in Rooms with Forced Air, Bad Lighting and Terrible Coffee). The Orff Schulwerk’s mutli-faceted approach has proven especially effective, with its emphasis on going slow, very slow, medium slow, slowish, mediumish, getting faster, fastish, with dynamics that range from pppp,ppp,pp,p,mp,pm,pms,mvp, f, ff, fu, fpfp with multiple techniques—cupped hands, flat hands, slightly curved hand, flattycuppy, cuppyflatty (Reinhard Flatishler 2002) and performed while sitting (long, hook, half-hook, half-long, longingly, hookeywookey, hokeypokey) , standing lying down, downward dogging, storky worky, inner corey and the full range of kinesehtical kinesilogical motorcadish permutations (James Brown 1963). This author believes based on meticulous observation, years of experience, familiarity with the Reflective Observation Therapy (ROT) Method, that every METI should engage in ECIF work to meet the CCSSMALIBFTSIRWFABLTC (while acknowledging in complete transparency that there are other equally valid points of view co-existing within the same wisdom sphere). 

NOTE: The contents of this article are under the full copyright protection of the Mattress Tag Intellectual Property Agency and all violations will be prosecuted to the full extent of the International Bloggers Society Law.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to submit this to journals worldwide. As soon as I can figure out what it means. 

Thank You

Here are seven words I don’t hear very much from the kids at my school:

“Please.”  “Excuse me.”  “I’m sorry.”  “Thank you.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love these kids. They are wildly imaginative, fiercely expressive, boisterous, energetic, bursting with joie de vivre, insightful, surprising, affectionate, caring, musical and more. But Miss Manners Poster Children they are not.

We’re working on it. While we all recognize that the parent pleading “What do you say, dear?” and the kid hiding behind the legs reluctantly performing with the mandatory “thank you” seems to have a dash of insincerity to it, we understand that it’s important. “We” being my generation, those kids who put up Lenny Bruce and Jimi Hendrix posters on their college walls (but none of Ann Landers and Emily Post) and then finally grew up and realized that etiquette is a social glue that feels good and makes the day more pleasant.

But in the last couple of weeks at school, I’ve noticed more than once that at the end of class, a child will come over, look me in the eye and say “thank you.” I’m talking about a 5- year old, a 4^th grader, an 8^th grader. And because I know that it didn’t come from obligation or habitual good manners, it meant so much more to me. Somehow I helped create an experience that touched them and they felt moved from within to let me know. 

In the increasingly insane educational world of “SLOs, GLEs, paper/pencil, pretest/posttest, video or audio or photo documentation, digital products, checklists and rubrics, report cards and wall charts” (a list I recently saw when a music teacher asked on Facebook how his colleagues assessed their students), a kid saying a sincere thank you after class tops it all. It lets you know that he or she got what they needed and you’ve done your work well.

Permission to Remember

In addition to training teachers when I travel, I sometimes go into their classrooms and work with their kids. I recently received this affirmation from a teacher whose kids I taught:

“I can't express how deeply the experience of you teaching in my classroom has affected my own teaching, and freed me to express and use my musical persona as a potent teaching force. Thematic, improvised warmups have so opened up my teaching practice, and the clarity and focus in your teaching have helped me streamline and toss out much of the bullshit in mine. Thanks for that!”

Talking with the Interns at my school the other day, I outlined the thinking behind the way I plan, structure and teach classes. Easy for me to do in a workshop and appear as a flawless teacher, but these Interns had observed three weeks of classes and could clearly see where my theory and practice merged and where they departed. As I talked about how good an idea it is to end class with a closing circle, asking the kids, “What did we do? How did we do it? How did it feel for you? What might we do next?” I followed with, “Of course, you hardly ever see me do this!” My excuse is that I want to play music up to the last minute, but while talking with them, I vowed that I would start to do it more. And then told them, “So you see, 95% of what I say in a workshop or a book or an article is simply a reminder to myself. And to all of us. Most of us know what good teaching feels like, but we simply constantly forget and need reminders. Just like most of us know what good eating or exercising or loving or living feels like, but we’re put together in such a way that we frequently forget and perpetually need reminders.”

The man who wrote to me clearly already knew how to use his “musical persona as a potent teaching force,” but just needed a reminder. And also permission. I wrote back:

“More and more, I see my role as giving reminders to others (and myself) as to what we've always known and permission to go there (something the universities often discourage). Thanks for sharing the above and congrats on your bravery and determination to re-adjust your teaching to fit yourself better!”

What have we forgotten today? Who has given us permission to remember it? Can we be so brave and bold as to give ourselves permission when no one else will?

Dinosaur in Training

In my 8^th grade Jazz History Class, we’re listening to an impressive list of hit Rock 'n' Roll songs based on the 12-bar Blues. The list of recording artists who owe at least part of their livelihood to the blues guys is striking— Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Beach Boys, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, to name but a few. Without  Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf in one genre, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington in another,  we wouldn't be Rocking around the Clock with Johnny B. Goode and his Hound Dog at the Crossroads of Highway 61 and Route 66. 

When playing Jimi Hendrix, I mentioned his electric, in all senses of that word, performance of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. This was an opportune moment to impress the 8^th graders with my cool factor— an essential ingredient for teacher success. So I told them:

"So just to let you know, I was at Woodstock. (This is true). You can line up for autographs after class.”

One girl jumped up and said, “Wow! That’s so cool! My grandma was there too!!!!”

No comment. 

Growing Straight

You’d think with the advent of Google * you could find any quote ever worth quoting. But somewhere sometime I read a quote that fascinated me, but failed to write it down and name the source (I have a vague memory of Chesterton). The quote was something like this:

The beauty is that everything attempts to grow straight, but nothing succeeds in doing so.

All jokes about sexual preference aside, I think about this often. Our deep need for order sets us on the straight and narrow, but the best part of life is lived in the detours, the wrong turns, the unexpected twists in the road. We admire someone and copy their writing style or jazz solo, but even when we play the same notes, it’s the unique us that pushes through to announce ourself. And New Age Californians to the contrary (are these folks still around?), the punch line is not to be yourself and abandon order and discipline and drill and the details of craft. It is in our attempt to grow straight that the delightful curves begin to emerge. Without that attempt, we’re just floppy. (Parents, take note. If you want your kid to be their full possibility, give them something to push up against— routines, expectations, consequences, etc.)

After two days of inspired piano practice, gifted by the Muses with their full blessing, they withdrew it today, probably just to amuse themselves to see what I’d do. I stuck with it, playing the same pieces as yesterday as if baby elephants were attached to my wrists and by the end of a couple of hours, they backed off a bit and let a few good phrases emerge. Then one piece where I first listened to a version by Chick Corea, stole the general shape of a few of his ideas and let my own voice start to whisper. Not that it’s a voice that has paid it’s dues to be heard professionally, but at least it’s one that has been stubbornly persistent and followed Monk’s advice, “Keep on tryin’.” Really, what else can one do?

I imagine Chesterton (or whoever really authored this quote) had the natural world in mind when he spoke those words. Consult your nearest tree or daffodil to note the unique deviations from the template. Kinsey, that famous and infamous sex researcher, began his career as a biologist and observed hundreds of thousands of gall wasps under a microscope. He concluded that even at the low end of evolution's chain, no two were exactly like, that diversity and variation are life's irreducible facts. If that's so for gall wasps, how much more for humans. And yet in school after school, we seek to conform children to some mythical norm, to make sure they fulfill the national standards and be satisfied if they appear to do so.

It's fine and even necessary to aim them for the highest standards in each craft, but with a different end in mind— for them and us to discover precisely where their variation—and thus, their uniqueness lies.
You see how this works? This blog began as a simple comment on my piano practice and following good essay writing, should have begun with a topic sentence, developed the theme and affirmed it at the conclusion. And yet here I am talking about kids and education again after an excursion into Google, jazz solos, gall wasps, lost quotes and two references to sex. So much for the straight and narrow. I better stop before six other themes pop their head in and insist on air time. Good night. 

* I did search far and wide on Google for the original quote, but no luck. If anyone finds the real quote from above, please let me know!

The Avocado in the Bag

Yesterday I grocery shopped with a homemade burrito meal in mind. But alas, the avocados were not ripe! What's a burrito meal without guacamole? I bought them anyway, hoping that perhaps they’d be ready the next day. To urge them along, I put them in a paper bag with an apple. Someone once told me that aided the ripening process.

I’ve been checking them all morning to see how they’re doing. It’s looking like I might have to wait until tomorrow night. Fact is that you can’t hurry ripening. Everything proceeds at its own timetable. When it’s ready,it’s ready. When it’s not, it’s not.

Not too different from the kids I teach. I want them to come to every class perfectly formed and ready to fulfill my fantasy of the ideal student. But day after day, they insist on coming just as they are. And that means some are quite green in my particular subject and will take a long time to ripen. And often without warning. Like the pears in the Eddie Izzard comedy sketch from his show Definite Article: when he talks about how they’re either rock hard or too mushy, ripe for only 15 minutes: “You put them in the bowl at home, and they sit there, going, "No! No! Don't ripen yet, don't ripen yet. Wait til he goes out the room! Ripen! Now now now!" Sometimes kids seem like that—their 15 minutes for ripening in my music class passed when they were in math class.

Well, not quite. First off, we complex humans have hundreds of ripenings, each one specific. We have one “Aha!” moment in science class, a few years later, perhaps another in poetry class. We improvise a great glockenspiel solo one day and then dance with surprising beauty another day. Some ripenings feel like the confluence of several small ones, the moment when we suddenly feel like we fully inhabit our body, are wholly at peace with our particular way of thinking, finally open the heart to its largest dimension.

But the maddening thing as a teacher and as a student is that no one knows quite when it will happen. All we can do is walk the steps that aim toward ripening and hope for the best. Maybe a good teacher will partner us with an apple in a paper bag, but that’s about all the rushing the process allows. A few years ago, after having taught music for some 35 years, I finally decided to call myself a musician. After playing piano for 56 years, I decided today that I am going to claim myself as a pianist. For the first time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to practice some more piano and then check that bag to see if the avocados are ready yet.