Enticing Beginning

What has 41 years of teaching taught me about children and education? What qualities of teaching are virtually foolproof ways to engage and motivate kids? What simple truths would change schools as we know them and make children happier and smarter? Anybody interested in finding out? Read on.

1.     Education is relationship: Without a connection between teacher and student, nothing else matters. When students feel the teacher is interested in them, then they’re more interested in what the teacher has to offer.

2.     Education is context: When students feel some relationship to something they know, something they care about, something that’s interesting to them, they’re eager to explore more.

3.     Education is storytelling: The human brain is built for storytelling. Facts are facts, but when someone begins a story, “So yesterday I was having lunch and…”, we move closer to the edge of our seat to find out what happened and how it turned out.

4.     Education is activity: Talking about something is like the painted cake that will never wholly satisfy hunger. Doing things that awaken the mind and body to discover, figure things out, make sense of experience is the way we actually learn. The poet Hafiz says, “Why just show me God’s menu? We’re all starving. Let’s eat!”

5.     Education is a question: Activity also means activity of thought and nothing moves the mind faster than a question in search of an answer. (I began this blog with this boring sentence “Here are a few non-negotiable truths about effective education” and then took my own advice. Did the opening paragraph hook you more?)

6.     Education is surprise and mystery: Every day is a new opportunity to awaken our sense of wonder about the world and ourselves. When a school lesson tickles our curiosity and leads us by surprising paths to astounding places, we are gifted with the larger lesson that life and learning is a glorious endeavor.

Now imagine the children walking into my music class. They enter energetic and eager and I say to them: “In today’s class, we will learn about quarter notes and eighth notes. You need to be able to read them correctly and also learn how to write something. I will be checking at the end of class to see if you properly learned the lesson.”

Now pass this approach through the six points above and you’ll see it’s 0 for 6. Nothing to let the kids know that I’m more interested in them than the lesson’s objective. Nothing to entice them to consider why they should care about quarter and eighth notes. Nothing that introduces intriguing characters and exciting plots (“Once the world was all quarter notes and one day, one fell and split into two…”). Nothing that gets their bodies immediately moving and doing and then asks them to reflect. Nothing that gets their minds moving and wondering, giving them the answer before the question. Nothing that shows any sign of intrigue—just plain, unadorned and boring fact. O for 6.

And yet some clever people who never taught kids or taught and never liked kids or taught and are seeking revenge on kids decided that beginning lessons with clearly stating objectives and then clearly reviewing them at the end was not only the golden road to great education, but was so important as to be the mandatory way to teach, at risk of your job if you dared to object. This has happened in the United States, in Canada and (much to be great sadness to learn the other day), in Australia. It is an adult fantasy of effective education that blatantly ignores the kid at the other end of the lesson and ensures business as usual, i.e., school as some weird cultural institution that kills curiosity, demands students to merely behave and conform, answers questions before kids ever ask them and reduces the whole enterprise of active exploration and investigation of our fascinating and complex world to merely ticking off lists of disconnected facts and skills. Excuse me for a moment as I step outside.

AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!

I taught eight classes in a row yesterday with kids I never met and each one was a marvel of 100% engagement and excitement and understanding and skill development. Here’s how I began each class, no two alike. (Note: No one introduced me. I didn’t introduce myself. Just jumped in with both feet. At the end of one class, one kid asked “Who are you?” But mostly they didn’t care, because they know I liked to play the way they did and understood what made them tick.)

1.     What did you have for breakfast today? Who can guess what I had for breakfast today? No, not cereal. No, not peanut and butter sandwiches. No, not vegemite. Potatoes? Yes!!! And off we go singing “One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four…”

2.     What holiday is coming up soon? You’re right! Today is Chinese New Year! Gung hay fat choi! But there’s another one soon. Yes, Valentine’s Day. And did you ever get these little heart-shaped candies that said something? When I was your age, I got one from Francine Badalmenti and I kind of liked her, so it made me so happy. And do you know what it said? “Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you!” And off we go for 30 minutes of doing things with that poem.

3.     Kids, have you ever had a headache? What do you do when you feel sick? Yes, stay in bed. Take some medicine. Where do you get the medicine? The store. Where does the store get the medicine? Ah, the doctor. Well, that’s where old man Mosie went when he felt bad. And off we go singing “Old Man Mosie, sick in the head, called for the doctor and the doctor said…”

4.     Who can guess what’s in my backpack? No, it’s not a kangaroo. No, not lots of money. I’ll give you a hint. (I squeeze the backpack and it makes a sound). A rubber ducky? No, but close. A rubber chicken? Well, let’s see. Slowly and dramatically, the chicken’s head pops out and we start singing “Who fed the chickens?…”

5.     When you feel really, really sick, do you feel like getting in the car and driving a long way to the doctor or the hospital? I didn’t think so. Do you know that in the old days, the doctor used to come to your house? You could just stay in bed and he or she would come to you to see what was wrong. Until one day, something happened to one of the doctors and they stopped coming to houses. His name was Doctor Foster…

There was more, but you get the idea. Each beginning a story, a question, a mystery. Each beginning provides an intriguing context and then springs into activity. The kids are with me with 100% of their attention because I’ve hit the things that make us pay attention. And then we go off to do things that continue to unravel surprise and mystery as we explore variation after variation of the song or text with movement, games, instrumental playing and more.

And the end of the class, I’ll ask “What did we do?” Reflecting and viewing the activities in our mind helps the learning sink in deeper.

“So what? What did it mean to you?” Here the kids get to share their “takeaways,” not guessing what right answer I want for them to show I taught the perfect lesson, but the actual thing they learned in the experience. That can vary from “I really want to buy a rubber chicken” to “I really liked working with this partner who I usually don’t play with” to “Doing that game helped me really understand how the last phrase was different from the first three” to “ I did a good job playing the drum, but I had some trouble with the guiro.” Real assessment. Meaningful assessment. Not just playing the game of pleasing the adult and showing you learned what you think they wanted you to learn.

“Now what? What will we do next? What will you do with the information?” “We need more practice on the woodblock part.” “Maybe some could play the instruments and some do the dance.” “Let’s make up new words to the chicken song.” The seeds are planted to anticipate and look forward to the next class. Engagement. Involvement. Motivation. The real deal.

So many of us teachers—and our students—are suffering from the constraints of narrow-minded education bureaucrats trying to stifle our own imaginative way of crafting our lessons. Please invite me to a debate with the people promoting the “Mandatory Way to Begin and End Lessons” and let the sparks fly. My opponent will teach a class with his/her method and I’ll teach one with mine and let the children decide the winner.

Seriously.

The Lobster and the Butterfly

Though my workshop teaching continues to offer fun activities, logical sequences of development, quality material and sound pedagogy, more and more I find myself talking on behalf of children, the child in the adult and music as a means to awaken soul and spirit. While teaching here in Brisbane, I saw a short Youtube about lobsters and lunching with one of the participants, was reminded of a story about butterflies. Both are perfect little parables and metaphors that illuminate the kinds of things I talk about in-between the activities.

How do lobsters grow? Apparently, the young lobster has a hard, rigid shell to protect it. But as its soft body grows, the hard shell stays the same. So the lobster reaches a point of noticeable discomfort and finds a safe place to hide. There is sheds its shell and stays hidden until it grows a new one. After a time, the new one is too small for the growing body and it repeats the process—retreating, shedding, growing a new one.

I often talk about the Orff workshop asking folks to grow comfortable with discomfort, to feel the discomfort as the growing pain that announces you have outgrown your shell. New Age Californians (are they still around?) would look down on the idea of the shell and just ask you to tell a stranger what you feel, but those of us who tried it soon learned that the shells of persona we wear are vital for the protection of our tender psyches. I constantly trumpet the glories of the open heart, but recognize that it’s a dangerous proposition if not done carefully.

So let us learn from the lobster. Feel the discomfort, don’t rush to mask it with prescription or outlaw drugs, don’t rush to fix it. Instead, find a safe haven to retreat to where one can shed the shell and start to grow the next one that fits our changing self. I think the Orff workshop, along with some time in nature, a Zen retreat or in company with trusted friends, can be the place to slough off the too-small covering, feel safe while the new one develops, away from the jeers and laughter and taunting of the cruel world. And shouldn’t school be the same for the children?

Then the butterfly. A compassionate person comes upon a butterfly struggling to break out of its chrysalis and thinking he’s performed a good Samaritan act, opens the casing to let the butterfly out. In so doing, he robs the butterfly of the struggle needed to gain the proper wing strength to fly and the butterfly cannot fly.

So do we do the same when we think we’re helping kids by interfering too soon while they’re trying to figure something out. Teachers are notorious micro-managers, eager to do things for children to be nice or jumping in out of frustration with the child’s stumbling efforts. But turns out that’s indeed how kids learn anything worthwhile, through the difficult encounter with things that are hard and building their muscles of perseverance. So I encourage teachers to leave kids alone for a while, as long as they’re genuinely engaged trying to figure out, in their own way, how to master a given activity. Regardless of how good your teaching material, how much you like the kids, you will need to understand when to interfere and when to let them figure things out and all the shades of grey in-between.

The lobster and the butterfly. Good reminders for us all.

On Its Own Terms: Part III

(This is the final section of my talk for Music Advocacy in Brisbane, Australia)

I’m well aware that I’m preaching to the choir here, but hopefully giving you some tools to talk with your parents, your administrators, your school boards and in different language, to the kids. I’m encouraging you to come from a position of strength, to not accept the notion that we need to defend something so essential to our humanity, to stop begging for a place at the table of education and offer to wash the dishes if they’ll let you sit down. To make skillful aikido moves that turn the questions around and ask the people listening to talk about their own relationship to music and how it might have changed their life to have been expertly led to their own musicality—or how it may already have changed their life if they’ve been so fortunate as to have had an inspired and caring music teacher.

I also highly recommend taking time to ask the kids to write down or speak about why music is important to them and keep them on file. If you’re doing good work (see number 1 at the beginning of my talk), the kids—of all ages—will amaze you with what they understand about their own love for music and say it in their own inspired kid-talk that penetrates deeper than mere scientific or sociological facts and statistics.

I have many such testimonies tucked away, but none more remarkable, articulate, poetic and moving than one I received from an alum who came to the San Diego concert the kids gave. She is around 40 years old, left school at ten to move to Iowa, had never come back to visit the school and I hadn’t seen her for some thirty years. It was a great joy to briefly touch base after the concert and swap stories, but nothing could have prepared me for her eloquence, heart and soul in the letter she later sent. I’ll close with her extraordinary words.

Doug, I write to you from Mexico under a sky the color of faded bedsheets.  At some point the stars will come out shivering, and the waning moon in all of her steadiness, will rise. I will be sitting here, watching the fire I built in my chimney, listening to music: Herbie Mann, At the Village Gate, playing "Comin' Home Baby.' It's a piece I can listen to over and over again, and never quite in the same way, which I guess - just like with a good poem - is one of the most beautiful things about music. You know, for some time - maybe years - I have been wanting to write you. In part, to share moments where I've been so deeply moved by a piece of music...those moments like when I heard Beethoven's violin concertos for the first time in an old bookstore, and had to sit down because it was too much for me...or when I first heard Ben Webster and the visceral, almost choking moan of the sax...or how driving home one night and hearing a stream of Stefan Grappelli on the radio I realized he must have died - and so I stayed up into the early morning, drinking tea, listening to that violin across the airwaves playing tribute, and to Django with his distorted hand moving sound.

Doug, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for body music, for having to be barefoot, for the wooden floors of the music room, for samba, for the surprise I felt first listening to the bellow of the conga, for song...for songs that Jasmine and I, when I see her, still sing together. I want to thank you for that moment at the end of music class of "absolute control," where we lay on our backs, eyes closed, chests pulsing from the heat of dance, catching our breaths. I want to thank you for that anticipated moment of release to recess, figured in the touch of a toe. As this year ends, the most devastating year of my life, I play "Comin' Home Baby" for a few reasons. I play it for the slow build...not so dissimilar from another of my favorites, but my Charles Mingus - Better Git it in Your Soul. I play it for the throb of bass, for the playfulness of the flute.

I play this piece for my mom, who came to visit me in California this May to celebrate my birthday. She had moved to Mexico, which is where her family is from. I remember her asking me where I considered home...Mexico? San Francisco? Iowa? I've lived so many places, in different countries in between. I remember telling her that I didn't know....that I guess it was where she is. Home, not being fixed to place. During her visit, my mom died. And for a moment there, I had no notion anymore of home...

I write to you tonight, Doug, to share this. When I heard students from the SF school in San Diego playing songs like those that I once played, I felt a wonderful curiosity, joy, rhythm, and a deep connection transmitted through sound, and energy, and love. It was for me, an utterly poignant moment of reconnection to a past self, to a present and future self. It was a re/connection that transcended space, and place, and time in this exquisitely beautiful moment, where I felt like I was coming home.

Where I felt - if only for a moment - that I was home.