What Works

I feel pained that I have neither the skills nor the means to stop this epidemic of hate and violence in this country. But I do know some things about teaching music to kids that actually work. An 8^th grader shared an essay he wrote in his high school application, his answer to the question, “Please write about a time, experience or person that has shaped or changed your life.” Here’s how he began:

I’ve always loved the performing arts; singing, acting, writing and even poetry once or twice. But the one thing I never got excited about was learning to play an instrument. In 4^th grade we were offered the chance to learn a musical instrument at school. I chose the violin, which I hated. It was difficult for me to learn how to play and made terrible screeching sounds no matter what I did. I spent the year ‘forgetting’ to bring my violin to school and refusing to practice. My Mom allowed me to retire the violin on the condition that I choose an instrument I was more excited to learn. This time I chose the guitar.

I soon found out that I hated learning to play guitar only slightly less than the violin. Practicing felt like a punishment issued directly from the ancient Greek gods themselves. It was hard, but not hard in a way that made me feel I was improving. It was like pushing Sisyphus’ boulder: Painful repetition without success. ‘This is music?’ I thought to myself. ‘This is awful!’

Anything in this story sound familiar to you? Choosing an instrument (violin) that brings no pleasure and doesn’t fit the way you’re wired? Then trying something (guitar) you’re more excited about, but the process of learning a torture without enough positive musical feedback that you’re inspired to push through the hard spots? He goes on:

Nothing worked until I graduated from elementary school and headed off to The San Francisco School. There I met the trio who would change my life; my music teachers Doug Goodkin, James Harding and Sofía López-Ibor. From the second I stepped into their classroom I felt different I felt safe and relaxed. Their style of teaching Orff music and their presence were astounding. They gave me a xylophone, played some chords and then taught me a song! It was magically simple to me. Doug’s motto was “Teach all the parts to all the kids all the time.” It was accessible in a way that learning to play musical instruments had never been. They weren’t teaching me how to play an instrument, but instead were teaching me how to play a song and each time I played the song, I gained more information about the instrument, notes, melody and rhythm.

‘Everything is an instrument’ Sofia told me. Once I’d succeeded with the xylophone, I went on to play many other instruments—piano, glockenspiel, guiro, dumbek, drum set and even my own body through hambone. I was also learning about geography, society and culture.

How satisfying that one’s students not only get the benefit of effective teaching, but can so eloquently articulate it. He made three vital points that every music teacher should consider:

1)   Safe and relaxed: Any kind of danger or stress—worrying about hitting the right note, about being embarrassed in front of one’s classmates, about whether the teacher will be mad if you don’t play well the first time—kills the sense of music as fun and something everyone can do and enjoy. When the teacher and students feel safe and relaxed, the music flows.

2)   Everything an instrument: Musical learning always begins in the body and voice and then flows out to an instrument—any instrument.

3)   Teach a song: Focus on the song first rather than instrumental technique or music theory and all the other necessary learnings will flower out of each song.

Music teachers, pay attention to these simple things and pushing the boulder up the mountain will be a fun group venture that will actually get it to the top. And to finish the story, the author of this piece brought down the house in the San Diego Orff Conference with his singing, played a hot snare drum solo in the Spring Concert and ended up learning a little guitar! Listen to his conclusion:

Over three years, three people had given me the confidence to play music, which has shaped my life in an enormous way. I even pulled out my dusty guitar one day and taught myself ‘American Pie.’ I practiced for hours until I could play it through. My Mom was so happy she got out her banjo and we did a duet. She says now we just need a school bus and a manager named Ruben Kincaid. I have no idea what she meant, but we had so much fun that I smiled anyway.”

When the Unthinkable Becomes Commonplace

“We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” 

                                             - Leonard Bernstein after the Kennedy Assassination

What do you do when the unthinkable becomes commonplace? When the next statistic of innocent people shot down is served up with your morning toast next to Steph Curry’s points? When Columbine, Newton, Charleston, San Bernadino and now Orlando become Anytown, U.S.A.? When “tragedy” becomes the norm?

If you’re smart and brave and courageous, you would take to the streets with pen in hand and not rest until the millions of petitioned signatures finally shut down the NRA’s stranglehold and their twisted, distorted and shameless idea of “freedom.” You would shout and scream and whisper and talk about places like Australia that changed gun laws after one mass shooting and it never happened again. You would question how hard and expensive it is to ship books across borders, but how easy with guns. You would wonder why every other commercial in the NBA Finals shows men with assault weapons in the next shoot-‘em-up movie, question why we are flooding our children through video games and movies with guns as the norm in day-to-day life even though people like me—and thank goodness—have never seen one in public other than on the police and never held one or shot one or (thank goodness) needed to.

But instead of shutting down the shameless lack of the most simple restrictions buying assault weapons of destruction, we shut down ourselves and go back to posting on Facebook what a great meal we just had. And understandably so. Who can hold in their hearts the thought that people are so crazed and lonely and filled with hate that they can just walk into a room and murder innocent people? Who can fathom the culture’s approval of arming such people so easily? Who can come to grips with the toxic air of our national discourse, with a Presidential candidate spreading a message of hate and exclusion to the wild, cheering crowds? Who is large enough to keep hope and healing and humanitarian caring alive in the midst of every reason to despair?

Not me. But I try anyway. What other choice is there? Martin Williams once wrote of jazz:

“…(Jazz) denies little in human capability—not sadness, not pain, not anger. But it does deny hopelessness and it does deny despair. It leads us to consider our inner complexities and affirms our contradictions and our basic humanity. It tells us that because of that humanity, we will survive. It does not merely make our livers more bearable, it makes them more meaningful.”

I imagine both Leonard Bernstein and Martin Williams would also support sensible gun laws while re-devoting themselves to beauty. And do I.  Won’t you?

Three More Things

                         “I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing…”

– From Evidence:  Mary Oliver

Took a morning walk through the woods with poet Mary Oliver today, through the paged trees of her poetry books stepping on the stones of words so my feet didn’t get wet or muddy. What a fine human being Ms. Oliver is, one who knows her place in the community of living things, who has tasted her share of bitter and still comes up praising the sweetness of the world. And her language— so sparse, so clear, so conversational, but each poem crafted with the 70 hours of work she says it takes her to drag it out into the light.

Like these simple lines above, that don’t wag their finger at you like a stern lecture, but open the window to further thought and consideration. They struck a chord with this fellow mischief-maker striving to be kind and singing about it most every day, usually with a hundred children.  A few of these thoughts:

Kindness: Well, why not? We are all the walking wounded, all at least partly broken by the sledgehammers of life, scratched by the thorns while trying to smell the roses, beaten down by those scrambling to get ahead of us. And so we are the stern judges sentencing without compassion the driver who cut us off in traffic, the colleague who said something hurtful at the meeting, the idiot endorsing political insanity on mainstream TV. Always room for critiquing behavior, but the person who carries it is also deserving of a moment of kindness, especially once you know his or her story.

Mischief:  I love this! Yes, moral, upright citizens are worthy of aspiration, but without some humor and a touch of naughtiness, they’ll be caught in a sleazy hotel. I was a troublemaker in school and paid my dues with detention, but never regretted a single moment! And never wholly stopped.

As a young adult, I sang in a chorus rehearsing at someone’s house. One night, the women practiced their parts in the kitchen, the men in the living room and as we were done first and getting bored, I suggested we take off our clothes and leave them on the chairs like disembodied people and hide in the attic in our underwear. We did and waited restlessly for some thirty minutes before the women finally looked in to see what was going on. They were not impressed. But we had fun!

As a young teacher, I played Sardines with the kids and decided to scoot up a ladder to the roof of the school. When a few kids found me, they followed and soon all of us were clomping around up there. In the room below was an important meeting with the head of school and some possible donors listening to our feet. They were not impressed. But we had fun!

And then a few months ago, I snuck off with a group of kids in our Southern field trip to the Waffle House. We didn’t get into trouble, but we had fun! Hooray for mischief!

Singing: Well, I’d rather sing about singing than talk about it. “A song for every occasion” is our unofficial school motto and that includes songs that we make up on the spot just to release our excess joy.

Kindness. Mischief. Singing. A trio to live by.

Three Things

                             “There are three kinds of people in this world; those who are good at math,
                                and those who aren’t.”

I’ve always been a sucker for lists. When listening to a lecture, I always perk up when the speaker says, “There are four essential qualities of…” All the chaos and complexity of the subject gets reduced down to bite-size portions that we can savor and digest. So when someone once said to me that only three things are necessary for happiness, my pen was poised in hand.

1.    Something to do. Work (or play) that is worthy of our attention, that is at once fun and challenging, pleasurable and maddening, simple and complex. Work that both pats us on our shoulder and kicks our butt. Work that not only refreshes us, but gives something worthy to the world, that has a purpose alongside the pleasure.

2.    Someone to share it with. The musician gets pleasure out of playing alone, but it doubles when playing with others and triples when playing for an audience. We are social creatures and from barn-raising to brain-storming, we work better together. The pleasure is multiplied when shared with someone or many others, the pain is subtracted when others help carry some of the weight.

3.    Something to look forward to. In spite of Ram Dass’s injunction to “Be Here Now,” we live with one foot perpetually in the future. Our day carries an extra sparkle when we anticipate the fresh corn and barbecued chicken awaiting us at dinner or the Friday night movie or the next Warriors’ play-off game. (GO WARRIORS!!!) If we’re smart, we start to dream about our vacation in Sicily before we ever arrive and that’s when the vacation actually begins. And makes a difference when we finally set foot on that soil.

And so at the end of a year of worthy work, shared with wife and daughter and brilliant colleagues and vivacious children, I’m starting to look ahead to the upcoming trips to Ghana, Spain, Austria, Italy and beyond. But first the Warrior’s on Monday!!!

Socks and Mayflies

Woke up thinking about the Mayfly today. That’s a sure sign that summer vacation has truly begun. All the class plans and to-do lists that us working teachers carry put up a sign saying “Gone fishing” and that frees up a lot of real estate in the brain for thoughts like “I wonder how long a mayfly lives?” Or “I wonder who invented socks?”

For anyone wondering how these two trains of thoughts arrived at the station, there was a clear departing point for each. Yesterday, my to-do list changed from “craft a ceremony honoring your wife’s 42 years of service, complete with writing and sharing a poem, playing a meaningful piano piece, leading a song and dance for all 50 teachers” to:

1) Buy a toothbrush.

2) Get new playing cards 

3) Purchase new socks.

All of which I can proudly say I accomplished.

So I tried on my new socks this morning and wondered who invented them and when and how they developed to their current state. Still more research to do—I’ll get back to you.

As for the Mayfly, I’m thinking about trying to dive back into finishing a book I wrote three Junes ago. I have seven free days until leaving for Ghana, enough time to kickstart that project and then continue it on long plane rides and leisure time in Africa. It has been frustrating to fill up my dance card with so much that I never make time to get my 9^th—and 10^th and 11^th and more—book that is written in my head (and some on paper) out to the reading public. I’ve managed to keep up the discipline of writing these blogs just fine, but —and here comes the Mayfly—that all is bug-size and ephemeral writing compared to the elephantine accomplishment of a full-blown book nestled between two covers with themes that develop and stick to the ribs.  I just want a larger bite of immortality than these mere Mayfly blogs.

As for this fascinating insect, apparently the shortest-lived Mayfly (Dolania Americana) lives for exactly 5 minutes. 5 minutes. (And most other Mayfly species for 24 hours.) Doesn’t even have a digestive track because there’s not much time to eat, never mind digest. Naturally, mating is high on the agenda and I imagine there’s very little flirting at the Mayfly bar, no word for “foreplay” in the Mayfly dictionary. No time for banter, just get down to business. And if their life flashes before their eyes at their death, that’s a pretty short movie indeed.

Does the Mayfly mind? Perhaps the relation of their lifespan to ours is similar to our life span to a mountain. Does the rock pity our short, ephemeral time on earth? Does the mountain wonder why we wear socks? If the weather turned colder, would Mayflies consider using 30 seconds of their life to put on socks?

These the kind of thoughts I will ponder this summer. Happy June!