Too Much and Too Little

After another uplifting day of singing, dancing and playing with children, I commented to

our Interns: “It’s criminal that I actually get paid for this!” And then quickly added, “And also criminal that I get paid so little for it!” And both are true.

As for the first, we have a notion that work must mean a certain amount of drudgery, forbearance, stoic resolution to show up each day and do the job. If it’s too much fun, something must be wrong. Well, there is a fair share of dragging myself through report card writing, business items at staff meetings, negotiating schedule changes, loading and unloading a van with instruments, looking for the bass bar mallets. It's not all "Yeehaw!" every minute. But still the dominant tone from the moment each class walks through the door to the moment they leave is a sense of wonder that teaching can be so dang fun!

On the other side of the fence, my pleasure in this work comes from an unrelenting dedication that took some twenty thousand hours of study, fifty thousand hours of practicing instruments, sixty thousand hours of teaching. The pleasure grew from a rigorous training every bit as deep and broad as a brain surgeon, but afforded 1/10 the dignity in the greater culture and 1/10 the salary. To simply perform this job, I needed to know about music of all times and many places, some dance, some drama, some poetry, some storytelling, techniques and repertoire for dozens of instruments, a bit of neuroscience, a lot about child development, for starters. To do it well, it helped to study psychology, anthropology, history, culture, myth, ritual and more. And to understand the things that are just right for kids at each age and present it in just the way they’re prepared to understand—and thus, get fantastically musical results performed expertly by happy, free and spontaneously inventive kids—well, that takes yet more of all the above and the ability to find the threads that tie all these disparate fields together. If salary reflects the depth of training, the necessary skill level, the long-term growth of understanding and even wisdom—not too mention the importance of cultivating the intellectual, imaginative and humanitarian promise of the next generation— then it seems clear I am severely underpaid.

But hey, I’d much rather enjoy the payment of life amongst happy children than the big bucks. I’ve managed to earn enough to be reasonably comfortable in an expensive city and though I wouldn’t turn down the offer (that will never come) of back pay for the quality of work I’ve actually done so I can help my kids buy houses in San Francisco and move the grandkids closer, I’ve been fortunate beyond most people’s expectations to love each day of work as much as I do. 

Five days of no school ahead and that will be fine, but I’ll miss the kids! Hooray for that.

Unconscious Incompetence

My go-to lecture for assessment in education is a five-stage model of degrees of competence. It’s based on the idea that we pretty much already know how we’re doing in different areas and without affixing permanent labels of A,B,C,D/ smart, okay, stupid and so on, we can view learning as a continuum and watch ourselves progress through dedicated effort and practice. The five stages are:

1)    Unconscious Incompetence: I can’t do this and don’t even know I can’t do it.

2)    Conscious Incompetence: I can’t do this and am painfully aware that I can’t do it.

3)    Awkward Practice: It feels clumsy still, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

4)    Conscious Competence: With intense focus and concentration, I can do it!

5)    Unconscious Competence: It’s so wholly a part of me that it feels effortless, I don’t even have to think about it.

If you’ve ever taken up skiing or surfing or clarinet or learning to speak Hungarian past the age of 10, you will have been nodding your head, recognizing yourself at each of stages 2 to 5. With this model, learning is always a possibility, a potential, fed through effort, guidance from someone ahead of you and inner motivation to keep improving. Your success is a moving target, constantly in flux. In current education terms, this is called “Growth Mindset” and is a good antidote to letting others brand grades onto our psyche as the main standard of assessment or keep beating ourselves up about how smart our neighbor is compared to us—or unduly praising ourselves over our neighbor in the other direction.

When I’m explaining this in my workshop, the one I have the hardest time describing is Stage 1. Don’t we all know when we can’t do something or don’t understand something? I sometimes give the example of the 3 year old who doesn’t “Freeze” when the music stops and doesn’t even notice that he/she is the only one still moving. It’s a hard stage to work with because when we don’t know that we don’t know, there’s no motivation to improve or move forward.

But now— sadly, tragically, dangerously— evidence of people stuck in Stage 1 is at an epidemic proportion, drawn out by a businessman who thinks that not losing all of the millions/billions of dollars he inherited qualifies him to be the leader of our nation. And his supporters will say things that an interviewer will correct (see The Daily Show Interviews of Trump supporters) and they don’t even realize the contradiction. Like the woman who said a woman can’t be President because her hormones would cause her to start wars. “Haven’t all the wars been caused by men?” “Yes.” But no light bulb moment ensued.

I’m sure you’re as tired as I am of having to keep talking about this severely unconsciously incompetent delusional man and believe me, I'm tired of having to think and talk about him and his followers. If I’m right that the majority of the American people are better than this, it will all be like awakening from a bad dream in a month or so.

But then our work begins. To move all voters from Stage 1 to at least Stage 2 and keep inching them toward Stage 5. “Because of my habitual practice in rational thought and basic decency, I can see clearly through all this B.S. without much effort.”

May it be so.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

Opinion:  a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

The wild dogs of opinion have been loosed from their cages and are marauding through the country foaming at the mouth. The most basic tenet of civilization is to contain the dangerous animals— leash them, cage them, put them down if they have rabies and are loose. But there they are, snarling and growling and howling and barking on our evening walk through the news and that dangerous world out there has just become yet more dangerous.

We have become a country awash with opinions and become more and more lazy about doing the work of actually thinking deeper than the surface and backing our thoughts up with actual facts and defensible ideas. We seem to be incapable of crafting a point of view and making a distinction between what we casually think is true and what we have concluded after considerable reflection. For a point of view is something larger, deeper and wider, something worked out from a foundation of naming what we value, reading, writing, thinking, discussing, reflecting, adjusting. A point of view comes from the place we stand and is changeable when someone or something moves us to a different vantage point and we see something more clearly that was hidden in the place we stood before.

The most extreme limits of opinion came from interviews with Trump supporters. They were filled to the brim with opinions—Obama is a Muslin terrorist not born in this country, he was mysteriously not in the Oval Office during 9/1, Hillary has AIDS because Bill Clinton slept with Magic Johnson. When confronted with actual facts—no, actually he has gone to a Christian church his whole life and has a birth certificate and probably would not be allowed to be President for two terms if he was on Homeland Security’s terrorist watch list/ hmmm, actually he wasn’t President in 2001/ and “Really?!!!!” the response often was, “Well, that’s what I believe and nothing you say can change my mind.” Words like “horrifying, terrifying, unbelievable” fail to convey the disaster of a population incapable of the most elemental first steps of rational thought, especially when they’re armed with a vote.

But this carefully cultivated incapacity is rampant in all areas of public discourse. In my own  field of Orff Schulwerk, I find people going to one workshop and leaving thinking it was “awesome!” and then going to another polar opposite one thinking that this too was “awesome!!” without any critical distinction or discussion about what worked well and what needed to be better. We’re proud of our ability to equally love—or hate—everything, but it makes us mentally weak and emotionally feeble. I find Europeans much more practiced in conscious critique and able to back up their thoughts with specific examples and clear ideas. Also true with the Canadians, Australians, South Americans, Africans and Asians I’ve worked with. What’s happening to us? Is it too much TV and shopping that has brought us so low?

First step is to get the wild dogs of opinion back in their houses and teach them to sit and heel. Then as we begin to cultivate a point of view, start from conscious reflection of what we value, what ground we stand on. Here I would recommend choosing things that affirm life over those that serve death, things that lead to a genuine freedom of spirit and law over those that oppress, exclude, marginalize, beauty over ugliness, health over money, democracy over dictatorship, communion and connection over brute power and hierarchy.

Those are the black and white issues that name where we stand. Then comes the work of all the gray in-between, the ideas and practices and news items that point one way or another, analyzed and discussed and thought about through informed facts, multiple points of view, time spent thinking. Always with the flexibility to change when new information or perspectives come into view.

If the top dog of rabid hatred and the lowest level of public discourse in the history of our country ever gets elected, God help us all. We’re done. But even if he doesn’t—and I insist he won’t!—we’re left with the snapshot of the American mind that is deeply disturbing. And it all comes back to an education that nourishes real thought, discourages random opinion and insists on hard data, real facts, multiple sources of information and clearly stated values to build that most precious architectural structure more intricate, beautiful and important than the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral— the functioning human mind.

Off I go to another day of teaching to help do just that.

Doctor Jazz

“Hello Central, give me Doctor Jazz. He’s got just what I need, I’ll say he has.

When the world goes wrong, I got the blues.

He’s the man who make me get out both my dancin’ shoes.

The more I get, the more I want, it seems.

I page old Doctor Jazz in all my dreams.

When I’m trouble-bound and mixed, he’s the guy that gets me fixed.

So hello Central, get me Doctor Jazz.”

Serendipity—“the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way”— is my way of life. Only I don’t believe it comes from random chance. There’s a quality of alertness, an ongoing search for something that you need, a puzzle piece that you’re feeling around for, antenna up to receive a signal, sniffing around to catch the scent. The moment you find it appears to be chance and is indeed out of your willful, conscious hands and mind, but it only appears because you’ve done the necessary preparation.

And so I’m always searching for the next pieces of music to do with my kids and stumbled into this great song about the healing powers of jazz. It was in a book gifted to me by Ben Lubitz, the Holocaust survivor piano player at the Jewish Home for the Aged where I play. When it became too difficult for him to play anymore, he bequeathed his books to me just before he passed away at 100 years old. This was in a book called The Definitive Dixieland Collection and I noticed it while looking for some Jelly Roll Morton tunes. Walter Melrose wrote the words and King Oliver the tune and since I have never done a King Oliver tune with my 8^th graders, but he figures into the developing story of jazz, it felt like a perfect choice.

Especially the words. Just went to see Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez and Brian Blade last night as SF JAZZ Center and though I was feeling great when the concert started, I felt yet greater when it ended. Yep, Doctor Jazz has had just what I need for decades and though sometimes I need a second opinion from Doctors Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy or the Samba Doctors or Gamelan Healers, Dr. Jazz is my ticket to health. 

As for the Jazz History thread, I mentioned yesterday that King Oliver moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1918. I thought it was following the various black folks attracted by work opportunities in the munitions factories of World War I, but it turns out that it was because city officials in New Orleans closed down Storyville and the various saloons and bordellos and he, like many musicians, was out of work.

And then I found out something else surprising. After a couple of years in Chicago, he took his Creole Jazz Band to California and performed in San Francisco and Oakland!!! In 1921!! I need to do more research about how he was received. I’m certain none of the folks here had ever heard music like that! (The photo above is from that trip. I don’t recognize the wall, though!) When he returned to Chicago, they were the house band in Lincoln Gardens and when he sent for young Louis Armstrong to join him, things really began to heat up.

Years later, his story turns tragic. Louis went off to New York and became the world’s most influential jazz musician bar none (or at least up until Charlie Parker), while King Oliver battled with gum disease, went downhill touring with second-rate bands and ended the last ten years of his life as a broken-down janitor in Savannah, Georgia. Doctor Jazz alone wasn’t enough to heal him.

That’s today’s jazz history lesson. Shall we continue?

Life-Changing Cardboard

“This piece of cardboard changed my life.” That’s how I began my 8^th grade jazz history class this week.

Intriguing? “Enticing beginning” is my practice of starting off with something that gets kids' attention, that arouses curiosity, gets the wheels of wonder spinning, pulls them out of “business as usual” into “this is interesting!” The kids had to guess what it was and why it was so important to me.After several amusing answers, someone figured it out it was part of a record cover. (Yes, miraculously, they still know about records!). I then turned the cover over and continued:

“It was Thanksgiving, 1972, at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. My home in New Jersey, 600 miles away and me with no car, was too far for such a short vacation. So I stayed on campus and was invited to a dinner with other homeless students. And somewhere around the cranberry sauce, someone put on a record of a music I had never heard before, but instantly I knew I wanted more of it. The record? The very one lying at my feet.”

They were still with me, 150%. It’s intriguing to young people that their teachers had—and have—actual lives and that the old man in front of the room was once a bright-eyed college student with hair. (In fact, lots of it back in the hippy-era!)  On I went:

“So I went to a nearby music store and found a collection of Scott Joplin rags. And here’s the first one I played.”

Off to the piano and there I played The Maple Leaf Rag. Live music. (One kid exclaimed, “”How do you just sit down and play that?!!”)

“Who’s ever heard that piece?” A few hands go up. “Anyone know the name? I’ll give you a hint: It starts with Canada’s emblem.” (A few got it.) “How about this piece? Anyone ever heard that? (More hands and exclamations of delighted recognition. Kids are so excited when they know and recognize things!) The name? You got it. The Entertainer. Anyone ever played it on the piano? (Some) Anyone know what movie this was in? (One person—“The Sting!”)

A mysterious piece of cardboard. An intriguing personal story. A short live concert. A little Quiz Show. The class is involved, excited, alive with interest. Now they look at the piece of paper I hand out asking questions about Scott Joplin and fill in the blanks as I narrate the story of his life. Born three years after slavery ended, formal piano lessons with a German piano teacher, encounter with marching music from Italians, Germans, Czechs, but feeling it all from his African mother’s soul and spirit, infusing that plodding marching bass with upbeats to make it dance, the melodies with syncopations, what the newspapers called “ragging the time” (here I demonstrate on the piano). Some historical context—first time the newly freed African-Americans were allowed to play European instruments—guitars, pianos, trumpets—and how they changed the technique and expression of each instrument with their African sensibility.

Then the fact that all entertainment in that time before radios, records, film, TV was live and self-generated. There were 300 makers of pianos by 1900 and sheet music was the coveted means of millions of piano players to enjoy new songs. So when Scott Joplin published The Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 and it went on to sell over one million copies (at a time when our population was much smaller), it was a sign that the mainstream American culture was hungry for something new, something more American than the imported European culture, something that invited the body, so repressed and tightly wrapped by the age of Queen Victoria, to unwind and move. (Victoria died in 1901 and her party-loving son Edward helped move things toward the freedom of the emerging world of jazz).

Was Scott Joplin invited to play in Carnegie Hall? Being so popular, did he have opportunities to tour in the best musical establishments? Of course not! He was black! And so the ragtime piano players mostly gathered in saloons, bars, juke joints and yes, bordellos, houses of prostitution. They were (I believe) all men and without any dignity granted by the white folks, tried to establish their identity with what they could do. So there was an atmosphere of competition and swagger and each trying to outdo the other.

And here I show a clip from a movie about Scott Joplin that has two pianos back-to-back with two players trying to outplay each other. There is a glass on each piano and if the judge comes and turns it over, it means you’re out! Scott Joplin enters such a concert and of course, wins.

And then on to the bio and filling in the sheet. The meeting with his white manager, John Stark, his attempt to produce his opera, Treemonisha, which never got past a staged rehearsal, his commitment to a mental institution in 1916 (some say because of a broken heart from the failure of his opera, but most now recognize that it was dementia caused by syphilis), his death in 1917.

One year after Joplin’s death, King Oliver moved to Chicago and jazz was on its way to something beyond the published piano rags. Scott Joplin was little known in the ensuing years until Joshua Rifkin’s album released in 1970, Treemonisha’s first performance in 1972 and the movie The Sting in 1973 (with Paul Newman and Robert Redford) which featured much of Joplin’s music in the background.

That was the class. 45 minutes long. Add lecture, note-taking, video clips to the other techniques and you have a model of multi-media teaching that is engaging, effective and inspiring. And ready to lead to the next chapter. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog!