TV in Taiwan—Part II

As promised, the conclusion to my 2004 article: 

"I am a teacher and the school where I teach began as a Montessori school. One of Montessori’s fundamental tenets is to prepare an environment that will stimulate the child’s aptitudes and deepest needs. An inspired Montessori classroom is a joy to observe—the children need little supervision for they are happily working away with materials that keep their fingers busy and their minds alert. Whether counting beads, chopping carrots, building towers or piecing together puzzles, they explore and experiment, discover causes and effects, enjoy both the sensuality and the practical skills of their own hands, find out what their own minds and bodies can do working within the limits of the material world. They are engaged. 

One Montessori tenet is to provide a rich and varied cornucopia of materials carefully chosen by adults. That's our job. Another is to let the child choose what to take from the shelves. That's their job.  Montessori believed that each child has an intuitive blueprint and unspoken knowledge about what he or she needs to be working on. Though adults sometimes gently guide and suggest, mostly they trust that the child will follow what feels right at the moment.

But that inner guide can easily be overpowered by influences outside of the child’s control. Children hungry for sensory involvement and sensation can be seduced by strangers selling candy and forget to eat their vegetables. Responsible adults will provide balanced diets on the dinner table, the classroom shelves and the world at large. But two cardinal truths of the human experience suggest that this might not always happen.

1)    Adults will not always do responsible things.

2)    Given a choice between walking up the stairs and taking the escalator, most of us will take the escalator—even on the way to the gym!

Humans come with a built-in foible. Though everything worthy that we do, think or create comes from a willful effort, there is an alternate program in the system. Evolutionarily speaking, when we crawled out of the sea and began the journey from fins to feet, eggs outside the body to eggs inside, four legs to two legs, each evolutionary advance carried a characteristic of its former self into its new mutation. For example, our brains. Each new layer did not replace the former one, but added on to it. Our brain stem is sometimes called our Reptilian brain because it does what the reptile’s brain does—it reacts instinctively to the world. This function comes for free—that is to say, since it is reactionary and instinctive, no effort is needed to bring it into play. When presented with an alarming stimulus, it is this part of our brain that reacts with flight or fight.

The next layer is often called the mammalian brain and here is where the world of emotion enters. Your pet lizard in its cage will mostly give you the same unchanging stare while the dog at your feet yelps, pleads, whines or barks according to it mood. And the dog part of our brain does as well. But humans have yet another layer, the neo-cortex, the place where conscious thought takes place. Though still connected to—and often at the mercy of—emotion and instinct, this part of the brain has the greatest plasticity (an odd word, since most plastic is solid and rigid, but here it means flexibility and choice). What we experience, what we observe, what we do, what we eat, read, listen to, all make for the unprecedented uniqueness of the human species. The pigeon in Taiwan lives pretty much the same life as the pigeon in San Francisco, but the human beings in each place are made different by their cultural and personal experiences.

Evolution must be trying to tell us something here. “Human beings, embrace your uniqueness, enlarge your brain (or rather, connections in the brain) through conscious effort, bring your instinctive drives up to their higher counterparts—transform food for the body into food for the soul, sexual lust for human love, the outer power of conquering others to the inner power of conquering self. “ Well, that’s easy enough for evolution to say, but we seem to be having some trouble. And it has a lot to do with the fact that our neo-cortex gives us the luxury—and terrifying responsibility of— choice.

 John Steinbeck’s epic novel East of Eden has a remarkable passage about this. Lee, the venerable, wise and eloquent Chinese servant, is discussing a Bible passage with his neighboring Irish farmer friend, Samuel. One translation of the passage has Jehovah telling Cain, “Thus shalt rule over him.” “Him” in this passage is a metaphor for sin. This passage disturbs Lee for it reeks of predestination. If God had ordained “Thou shalt,” then there is no choice or effort on the part of Man. Another translation says, “Do thou rule over him.” This also fails to satisfy Lee, implying that Man need only be obedient, follow rules, do what authority demands without thinking about the deeper reasons for why or how. With the help of Chinese scholars and Hebrew rabbis (a sterling example of the value of multicultural dialogue), they dig deeper and discover the Hebrew word “timshal,” which translates as “Thou mayest.” Lee says:

“’Thou mayest’ gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on man.”

So back to the Montessori classroom, the hotel room and the foibles of humankind. Choice carries a responsibility, both personal as to what we choose to do and social as to what we choose to lay before others. Given a choice between effortless Reptilian brain activity and conscious neo-cortical effort, the odds are stacked to the Reptilian side—and all the advertisers and corporations know it. Put video games as one of the choices in the Montessori classroom and the materials will lie neglected on the shelves. Equip every hotel room with a TV and the blank journal will remain unmarked. Put a fast-food joint in every town, with commercials on every kids show and the slow pleasures of talk around the home dinner table will suffer. Amp up the volume, increase the action and the rate of image change, load on the artificial flavors and the capacity to appreciate subtlety and nuance will diminish. This is no mere conjecture—it is irrefutable fact.

For those like me who spend sleepless night worrying about this, there are only two solutions and they are the same in Taiwan, Texas or Timbuktoo. The first is to take collective action to impose limits, to tether economic profit-driven freedom to reduce the range of harm. It can be as simple as Iceland once having one night a week with no television being broadcast or Sweden prohibiting advertisers to prey on children under 8 years old or a town in Minnesota deciding to collectively reduce homework, television and after-school activities to give their children the freedom to play without imposed structures. All of this has already been done, with noticeable results.

But let’s not stop here. What if hotel associations agreed to put the TV’s on roll-away carts in closets and blank journals on desks encouraging submissions to their annual poetry contests? First prize—a week’s free stay. What if all the children who didn’t watch TV on a given school night were asked to stand like flight attendants on Eva Air while their classmates applauded. What if all billboards had the world’s greatest short poems on them? What if there was one pop music radio station and 10 jazz stations?

The details are incidental. Once a family or school or neighborhood or culture decides that life is richer when ‘Thou mayest’ is given some support and institutional structure, the ideas will pour forth. And having moved amongst people put to sleep by corporate media and people perpetually awake, I can testify that the effort is well-worth making—the difference is profound.

The second solution—and of course, my no means, exclusive—is to encourage the wise personal choice, hard as that may be. In my Taiwan hotel room, I surfed through the 72 channels twice, lingering just long enough at the soft porn channel to grow disappointed in myself, and finally shut it off and got to work. But even for someone who has enjoyed a lifetime of self-generated activity, reflective thought and creative endeavors, I still find it hard to resist. But that is what choice is—a determination and enough backbone to resist as appropriate. And of course, there are times when there’s no reason to resist and plopping down in front of an old movie on TV in a strange hotel room is just what the soul needs at the moment!

But the fact is that children plugged in early in life to addictive technologies will have no choice. The corporate psychologists know this and now the war cry is, “Get ‘em while they’re young!” Studies show that children hit unawares before three years old become lifelong, loyal product consumers—that means guaranteed profits for the corporation and a guaranteed loss of human health and happiness.

H.G Wells once wrote, “We are in a race between education and catastrophe.” Education here means directed thought, imaginative dreaming and skillful making. Catastrophe means capitulating to our lowest possibilities, giving ourselves over to the dreams (or nightmares) of others. Corporate mentality did not invent this collective, imposed nightmare—we had the church and the state before that—but it is certainly where the action is taking place today. It is armed with enormous money, powerful technologies and a poisonous mind-set of bottom line profit and constant sensation. Keep hitting the food-sex-power nerves and the people won’t even notice that they are no longer themselves. It’s a David and Goliath battle and everyone tells me it’s hopeless—why fight it? But aren’t these precisely the stories we love? David slaying Goliath, the turtle winning the race against the hare, the winning against all odds? And “winning” occurs at many levels—sometimes the effort alone is a victory.

My sleepless night is suddenly a Taiwan dawn. I flick through the channels once more, noting that the porn channel is now a 6 am boxing match—from sex to power without missing a beat. Outside, the trains in the Metro station begin to flow. Taxis pull up, people start to stream into the station. They move with a purpose and an intention—the work day has begun and they are making an effort to contribute. (Or at least to pay the rent.) Behind the station, the river flows at its steady pace, doing its own kind of work in its place. Above the river are the Kuan Yin mountains shrouded in mist, peeking out at the scene in Buddha-like patience. Kuan Yin (Kannon in Japan, Avalokitesvara in India) is the goddess of compassion. What is she thinking as she looks down at the frenetic hustle and bustle?

I’ve moved from the bed to the writing desk and here’s another institutional horror. There’s a huge mirror running it length and against my better instincts, I look up to see the grizzled old face that has surprisingly become my own. Phones, mirrors and TV’s, the narcissistic artifacts of modern life, placed in every available space in every hotel room.

I defy it all, arranging some pillows on the floor and cross my legs for some Zen meditation, a practice learned in an old boy scout camp in the San Gabriel mountains, the ultimate practice of removing all distracting stimuli and sitting face-to-face with one’s primary self, no intermediaries. Then a shower, breakfast and meet my ride down to Hsin-Yin, ready to teach through the old uniting technologies of hands on skin and bare feet on wood floor. 50 teachers with a translator, trying to find a common ground in drums, recorders, xylophones and our avowed passion to teach children. We indeed are larger than the electronic tools we use. It’s a marvelous world indeed.”

TV in Taiwan

When we last left off in the armchair-gripping drama of “Confessions of a Traveling Music Teacher, “ our hero was headed to the San Francisco Airport at 10:30 at night. (Thanks to the generosity of his daughter Talia beginning to pay him back for all the parental favors on the indebtedness chalkboard by giving him a ride late on a school night). He boarded the plane to Taiwan at 12:30 in the morning and was astounded at his luck. The next best thing to upgrade to First Class? A whole row of seats to himself! 14 hours laters, a delightful mix of time spent with Julia Roberts, reading sitting cross-legged and sleeping horizontally, he arrived to a misty mosity 6:30 am Taiwanese morning. Off to the hotel and some more welcome horizontal sleeping before meeting up with his hosts for lunch.

But in the meantime, a curious look at one of the articles mentioned back in “Title Tease.” The idea for a public traveling journal came long before the technology of this user-friendly blog and so a backlog of stories and observations waiting to be shared— or not. But in this case, why not? It marked the last time I was here in ten years ago in 2004 and always interesting to me to see what still rings true and what has shifted. It’s a long article by blog standards, so I’ll start with Part 1 and see if it merits Part 2. Enjoy!

“You know how it goes. You’ve spent hours preparing the Power Point presentation for your class or workshop, checked and double-checked and at the crucial moment, something goes wrong. You fumble with one switch or another, your family photos appear on the screen, people jump up and gather around like men looking under a car hood and shaking their heads, whatever rhythm had been building is broken, the lights come back up and Plan B is hastily thrown together.

This happens far too often to be mere coincidence. I have a theory that machines are trying to tell us something. They are wreaking some revenge. Or rather, our ancestral spirits are speaking through them, having a bit of fun, saying, “Back in our day, we knew how to discuss ideas or how to sing a song or how to tell a story. The power to animate a room and engage a community of learners was always right at our fingertips. Stop giving all your power over to machines! And if you won’t, we’ll make sure they will break down until you learn your lesson!”

And even when such machines—and here, I speak mainly of TV’s, computers and Power Points— work, they exact a price that is invisible to most. One jet-lagged morning in Taiwan, I thought about this and came up with this thought-provoking alliterative phrase—Convenience without consciousness is a cultural catastrophe.

If we are to capitulate to speed and comfort without it becoming a Faustian bargain, we must consciously compensate for the losses. Or put another way, we can only use the technologies that come our way if we first question their limitations, consider how they will change us and dream a way to hold them in check and compensate ourselves for the losses.

To take one simple example. The TV in the hotel room begs you to animate its blank face with a push of a button. But what if the hotel put a blank book with a pen in its place? You, the restless jet-lagged guest, might begin to fill that page—first with doodles that might blossom into drawings or writing random impressions that might grow into a poem, letter or essay. With the blank paper in front of you, you would be face to face with your own imagination. The imagination might groan at first, resist the call in the same way the body protests before going out for its morning jog. But once it gets moving, takes its first breath of fresh air, feels the pleasure of movement, it never fails to rise to the call and leave you feeling better than when you began. You’ve made an effort. You’ve made a statement. You’ve created something. It might not be ready for a Broadway run or the Sistine Chapel, but you’ve entered into the same artistic stream that Neil Simon and Michelangelo swam in. What’s on that paper is wholly yours, the world filtered through your unique point of view.

But instead of blank paper, the hotel puts in TV’s. When you turn it on, you’ve given up your uniqueness, surrendered to the collective dream of businesspeople trained to tap your innate lust for food, sex and power for their own profit. You’re plugged into the home shopping channel or indulging in the sexy soap opera or feeling powerful by watching The Terminator and just how is this helping you rise to your promise? When you scribble a phrase on the paper, “Lights reflected in the river, mountains hidden in the mist, a California afternoon body swimming across time zones to a Taiwanese 3 am,” the universal eye begins to look through your particular “I”—and both you and the world are refreshed. It won’t win the Pulitzer Prize of Poetry, but it was your effort to look outside the window and inside your mood and cultivate a habit of observation and reflection beyond mindless consumption of other’s efforts.

And so my rallying cry: ”Beware of what is put in front of you. Be aware of what is put in front of you. Take care what you put in front of others.” Especially if those others are children.”

To be continued. 

Goodbye Machu Picchu

My cover photo of Machu Picchu had a good run on this blog— one year since I actually walked those paths in the swirling mist and a lovely reminder each time I signed on. But good to switch it up once in a while and so this photo of a festival in South India.

For those long faithful readers, you may remember my blogs back in February of 2011 (still available to read for those curious). 32 years after a remarkable trip I took with my wife to the state of Kerala, India (and beyond), we returned with our two daughters— which included the elder named Kerala! It was then— and will be always in my lifetime— the most different place on the planet I had ever encountered. Food, dress, music, language, customs, festivals, architecure — nothing was familiar when we arrived.

Take this photo, for example. How often do you see bare-chested men standing on top of elephants waving big pom-poms? If you look carefully, you’ll see some curved horns in the crowd and could you see through the crowd, you’d see three kinds of drums you’ve never seen or heard in your life (the maddalam, idekka and timela , for those musicologists among you) playing music unlike anything you’ve ever heard. The Festival is called Pooram (no relation to the Jewish Purim) and is celebrated on different days in different villages. The size is determined by the number of elephants. Back in 1979, we saw one such festival with 26 elephants!

I write this at Gate 102 at the San Francisco Airport about to board a flight to Taiwan. Though I hope to enjoy some Shabu Shabu hot pot meals and catch some of the Lantern Festival, I will be staying in hotels with wi-fi and a view of Starbucks out the window. A tamer type of travel, to be sure, but still I hope to bring some of the wacky chaos and elemental power of drums, cymbals, horns and elephants into the Orff workshops I’ll be teaching. And some of the mystery of Machu Picchu as well.

But first, 14 hours on a plane!. See you in Asia.

Title Tease

Hmm. The numbers continue to be high on ye ole blog and I wonder if it’s all music teachers looking for some affirmation, support, advice, ideas. And hey, I got lesson plans too! But for that, you’ll have to buy the books.

BBS (Before Blog Spot), I used to spend my Monday mornings off writing articles. Just because. No one commissioned them or asked me to write them, but it was just my way of constantly questioning what the heck I was doing and trying to make it sound good. Or at least connect it to some larger ideas of human experience. After a few years of this, I made a Kinko’s book titled “Reflections on Orff Schulwerk” (snore) and a couple of years after, another collection titled “Further Reflections on Orff Schulwerk”  ( I needed a Hollywood agent to help me with titles). I gifted them to Dr. Herman Regner, former head of the Orff Institut and his enthusiasm encouraged me to use some of the articles in my book “Play, Sing and Dance” and a few more in “The ABC’s of Education.” Still though, some 75 to 100 remain unread and unpublished.

I peeked at a few tonight to see if I could continue the discussion I started here with something I had already written. One article, “The Ideal Orff Classroom” is a perfect companion to yesterday’s posting, but due to my strange karma where the one tune I need to find on my i-Pod out of 5,000 isn’t there even though it is on i-Tunes and should have been automatically uploaded, sure enough, I could only find the PDF version of the article and can’t locate the original Word document which would allow me to cut and paste a bit. (Actually, for those interested, they can download that PDF article from my Website under About Music Education —www.douggoodkin.com).

But as I looked at the various titles of the articles, they seemed intriguing and I read with pleasure a few that I had forgotten about. So instead of excerpting the articles themselves, I’ll tease you with some titles— and maybe someday put them together in a real book with a more interesting title than “Reflections….” Meanwhile, for an extra credit assignment, choose a title, write your own article on the theme, send it to me and I’ll choose a winner to post on the Blog. Sound like fun? Here goes!

• A Perfect Solution               

• A Sign of Hope         

• All Your Answers Will Be Questioned

• Beneath the Radar         

• Carrying the Torch   

• Connecting the Dots

• Cruel and Unusual Punishment          

• The Descartes Effect

• The Future is Now

• How Much is Enough? 

• Moral Intelligence    

• Music as Social Life

• Open and Close             

• Pasta Night               

• The Pitfalls of Professionalism

• The Purpose of Pleasure

• The Pretty-Good Class  

• The Real World

•  Stripping Away the Extraneous

• To Create Anew        

• TV in Taiwan

• The Wind in our Faces  

A 6/8 Vegan Meal

I’m simply astounded by the number of people who viewed my recent blog— “Do Good Work— Or Else!” On a good day, I have some 80 to 90 viewers. If I point people on Facebook towards a blog, I occasionally get 150-200. But this blog attracted over 800 page views!! I guess it hit a nerve.

The Irish have a saying: “After a full belly, it’s all poetry.” We are primed for survival first and leisurely pastimes second and it’s fine that I have the luxury of waxing poetic about “splendor in the grass,” but when folks can’t afford to fix their lawnmower, well, they’re less apt to care.

I think the nerve I hit lurks in the background of every music teacher’s mind—“Will I have a job next year?” People have reported that the article both bolstered their spirits and fired their determination to focus their energy on the children themselves, while still speaking up about political issues of what’s worthy of the taxpayer’s money.

Another part of the talk I gave at the GMEA Conference that I didn’t include in the article was a brief survey of how people felt about their current jobs. So while I perhaps have the attention of music teachers peeking into this blog, here are some of the questions I asked that you might answer for yourself:

“Who is content with…

• Their class size? (Number of kids in each class)

• Their schedule? (Number of classes per day)

• Their space? (Dedicated music room? Large enough for movement? Friendly space?)

• Their budget? (Enough money to buy needed instruments, books, etc?)

• Their support? (From admin? From fellow teachers? From parents? From students?)

• Their salary and benefits? (Salary or paid per hour? Same rate as classroom teacher?)

I’m happy to report that things are not so bad in Georgia music-education-wise, especially compared with California! Still though, many people had 30 to 35 kids in a class, saw them only once a week, had to move from class to class with a cart. In other words, far from an ideal set-up in which teachers can feel they truly can reach into all the corners of their craft with their kids, that they’re doing something more than making do or getting by, that they are given sufficient time, appropriate class size, excellent facilities  and an overall sense that their work is valued and supported. I suppose there are few things so frustrating as spending years training yourself to pass on the heights and depths of your chosen legacy and never getting to discover what you could actually accomplish if you only had what you needed.

In the American Orff scene these days, there seems to be a swing toward University-style research as the mode that will finally bring us a dignified recognition. I disagree. My philosophy is simple— first search and then re-search— and then search again with new information. The search takes place in a class with kids, often seated on a floor or dancing around a room (with a sprung-wood floor, please). All theories about what works mean nothing until they are forged in the fire of the real responses of real children and the observant, attentive teacher. 

So many research things I see (though certainly not all— no intention to offend here!) are long, convoluted paths to “prove” something my grandmother could have told them in five seconds. Some of it borders on the nerd side, long passionate arguments about whether children should be exposed to 6/8 before 3/4 time or vice-versa, questions that might be interesting in a fantasyland where all schools have music 5 times a week for at least an hour a day. But when someone is bleeding on the floor, you don’t ask them whether they think a gluten-free or vegan diet might better balance their biorhythms.

While we’re discussing the fine points of rhythmic development, the really important issues— “Will I have a job? Will my job allow me to really teach in way the children deserve? Will I finally be accorded some dignity in my chosen profession?”— get put on the backburner. If we want to do some really useful research, how about a nationwide survey asking music teachers of all ages and in all situations the questions I asked above? Get a real portrait of the state of music education and get serious about whether it deserves to be fixed. Anyone have the time or inclination? Talk to me and I’ll help put something together.

Then we’ll talk about the 6/8 issue. Over a vegan meal.

Grammy Award

“And this year’s Grammy award goes to…………

The pitter-patter of morning rain out the window after weeks of drought.

No sweeter music to my ears. 

Do Good Work — Or Else!

"A school board met recently in California to discuss the severe budget cuts. Reflecting on their own experiences as schoolchildren and surveying students in the local schools, story after story came out about boring classes, dull worksheets, mean teachers and the feeling that especially in today’s day and age, with machines to instantly do the work,  math was more irrelevant to real life then it had ever been before. And so they cut the math program in every school in the district.

This was the story I told to a group of elementary music teachers as the invited speaker at a recent State Convention. I then asked how many thought it was true. Predictably, most did not. Then I asked them to imagine the same story told substituting music for math. Not only did they believe it, some had lived it. I went on.

“Here’s the shocking news. I don’t blame the decision-makers. If I was on that Board of Education and had to make some hard choices about what was essential and what kids could do without, remembering my own sad and boring music education in elementary school, I’d cut it too without a moment’s hesitation. It’s the shame of our profession that one of life’s most joyous gifts is one of school’s most dreadfully taught subjects. If school boards and the culture at large don’t value music education, we have only ourselves to blame.”

A pause here for dramatic effect.

“Still, though, if my school music classes were boring and less engaging than they might have been, so were a lot of my math, history, language arts, science classes. Why isn’t someone giving this talk at a math conference, warning his fellow math teachers that they better do good work or their jobs would be eliminated. Or worse yet, they’d be moved to another job and have to teach (gasp!) music! Never happens. But why not? Look at the list circulating these days about 21^st Century Learning Skills and what’s important— creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, leadership, social responsibility— music wins hands down!

“So let’s say it out loud. IT ISN’T FAIR! Our jobs are hard enough without the constant shadow hanging over us that we are uninvited guests at the banquet of education and can be asked to leave at a moment’s notice when the food runs low. In addition to having to master the complexity of our craft, we have to constantly defend our profession, learn how to advocate for our jobs, keep up on all the studies showing why music is important. No other teacher has to do that! I’ve never heard a reading teacher speak at a parent meeting and spend most the time trying to convince the parents that reading is important for their children. Let’s say it again. IT ISN’T FAIR!

What can we do about it? Here's the bad news. Until such time as music is accepted unquestionably as essential, we have to be extraordinary teachers. We have to make our classes engaging, dynamic, child-friendly, we have to make ourselves indispensable to the children’s daily experience and indispensable to the culture of the school. We can’t ever rest wholly satisfied with what we’re doing, but must relentlessly probe, reach, seek out the next step to do it better. Knowing all the while that even when we are extraordinary, they still can (and do) cut our program.

“And here’s the good news. Until such time as music is accepted unquestionably as essential, we have to be extraordinary teachers. We have to make our classes engaging, dynamic, child-friendly, we have to make ourselves indispensable to the children’s daily experience and indispensable to the culture of the school. We can’t ever rest wholly satisfied with what we’re doing, but must relentlessly probe, reach, seek out the next step to do it better. Knowing that if our work is stellar, we stand a chance that the kids, parents and colleagues will speak up on our behalf when cuts are threatened.

"It isn’t fair that we have to be amazing teachers or else, but hey, if it helps motivate us to reach the children we teach one step wider and deeper, then we can turn it to a good result. And that’s why I imagine all of you are here at this conference, looking for ways to do what you do well even better.

“So here’s the music teachers' three steps to preserving our jobs:

1. Do good work.
2. Do good work.
3. Do good work.

“We can’t wholly control what happens in the halls of political power or effortlessly convince administrators who have never experienced an inspired music class or insure a solid and healthy economy. But when the door to the music room closes and we’re alone with the children, that’s where the pedal hits the medal and we are in control of what happens. Alone with the children, we are free to do good work.(Though I recognize that even here the long arm of ignorance is reaching in and making us dance to someone else’s bad tune, with proscribed keywords and official procedures and machines that must be used just because. That’s another talk.)

“And just what is good work? Ah, there’s a subject. Well, you know it when you see it. Anything that has kids shouting “Can we do it again?” that sends them out humming happily into the hall, that raises a goosebump, that surprises everyone when a child is graced with a breakthrough expressive moment, that lights up the room with “Aha’s!," that leaves both you and the children feeling better at the end of the class than you did when it started. And so, let’s repeat it: 1. Do good work. 2. Do good work. 3. Do good work.

And then one more.

4. Tell about it.

“Yes, it’s not fair that we have to explain to people who haven’t experienced it what good music education looks and feels like, but it’s not their fault that they don’t. We need to educate them. And as W.B. Yeats suggested over a century ago when lamenting the state of the arts in the culture, ‘We need to baptize as well as preach.’ Don’t just tell, but share and show. And don’t just show, but invite the parents and fellow teachers and school boards to participate and feel for themselves on the inside what they can’t understand until they’ve done it. But remember that you can’t invite them into something less than good work. You have to astound them by revealing the hidden music inside of them, show them that quarter notes and sonata form is just the surface stuff that their bad music teachers gave too much weight to, that the real deal begins with simple gestures like clapping the rhythms of their names and then drumming them, conversing with a neighbor using just the first sound of their name, creating an instant dance to a simple song and then choreographing a variation, playing five well-chosen notes on the xylophone over the teacher’s blues piano and astonishing themselves with how cool they sound.

"One more piece of good news. My time to talk is over. Back to the workshop and let’s go play some blues!"