Parachute Wisdom and Driverless Cars

Two tidbits that arose during our final discussions at the Orff training:

1)    A mind is like a parachute—it only functions when it’s open.

             And note what happens when it doesn’t open—you fall to your death. The countryside is          littered with the bodies of those who refuse to open their mind beyond FOX News    

              brainwashing. 

2)   Teachers who admire you and praise you and sternly remind you to get to work are showing you precisely how they love you. They are the only teachers worth spending time with. Love is the driver of the car of education and without it, we’re stalled. And don’t tell me the driverless car run by computers is a viable substitute. It’s not.

Beyond Teaching

Teaching Orff courses as I do is like a storm on the ocean. The waves are breaking and churning up the sand below. These intense two weeks ended as they should, with thunderous, crashing final chords followed by tender moments of silence interrupted by the sniffles of 100 people weeping. Believe me, people in these courses get exactly what they need in terms of great material to bring to their students, inspired ideas as to how to develop it and new music and movement skills and understanding that improve their own artistic expression. 

But that’s just a start. They also forge lifelong-friendships and connections with those they’ve played, sung and danced with far beyond the norm. The vertical transmission from teacher to student is powerful and meaningful, but the horizontal connections between students is equally a part of the experience. Sometimes I feel, as in New Orleans, that I was the host of an ongoing party interrupted by classes! Though the classes themselves were part of the party and the after-hours party part of the classes. 

Then there’s the deep healing that is real and palpable. People discovering they are more musical than their mean childhood music teacher told them, people feeling that that hole of non-belonging in their soul was finally filled and that the frozen parts of themselves were flowing again, lubricated by day after day of tears. Really, we could charge more money for the combination of therapy and spiritual retreat, but that would cheapen it. This way, everyone gets more than they thought they signed up for and that’s a pleasure.

“Beyond teaching” means that all of this is part and parcel of the kind of education our
kids deserve beyond the skills and facts. But it also means that though that churning ocean dug up lots of ideas and thoughts that deserve to be set down here, I am finally on a serious vacation, combining real beach time with grandkid bonding. I’m coaching Zadie through her Solitaire game, Malik is building with legos and they’re both wearing the shirts I bought them in New Orleans (see photo). Training them to make the right kind of trouble in this world, side by side. 

A summer’s day awaits us, the beckoning lake, the walk up the dune, possible Drive-in Movie tonight. Time for me to take a real break from teaching (6 days) before school starts up again. Let the teaching insights lie unspoken—goodness knows between these blogposts, articles, books and lectures, I’ve said more than enough! The world will go on just fine without it. Off to the lake!

The Pros and Cons of Weeping

“Live close to tears” said Albert Camus and I agree with this thought. But I might add, “Not too close.” There are always tears in these Orff courses and I shed my fair share of them. But this year, there have been more (from me) than usual and at a higher level of intensity. 

On the pro side, tears are like a good rain that wash away the dust, replenish the rivers, water the plants and clear the air. We suffer when things are blocked and tears help unlock our stored grief and get it flowing again. Tears are signs that we’re living honestly, wholly accepting the price of a human incarnation. We will suffer and we will exult and tears are good companions for both. 

On the con side, it’s hard to sing songs when we’re weeping. It’s hard to teach when you can’t squeak a sentence out. And because of mirror neurons, the teacher’s tears will unleash the students’ and the class plans are washed away in collective salty water. But hey, there are more important things in this life than fulfilling one’s class plans. And the ultimate class plan is to remind students that we’re all in the mess together and also all in the joy together, so let it flow!

One more day to go in this most intense of Orff Courses and am thinking I should rent a kayak for the flood of tears that certainly will come. We’ll’ see how it goes. 

The Defiant Ones

There’s a powerful scene in the movie The Defiant Ones with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. They are a black man and a white man who escape from a chain gang chained together and when the one complains about racism, the other answers with “That’s just the way things are. Nothing you can do about it.” And the movie goes on to show him he’s wrong. You always have a choice and each choice that refuses to accept and allow ignorance and hatred to continue brings us one step closer to diminishing its power.

It may seem an odd way to introduce the next sentence, but tonight were the teaching lessons of the 29 students in my Level III class. As has happened repeatedly the past 8 to 10 years, the quality of the lessons touched me to the core—fun, imaginative, musical, energetic, flowing, touching on just about every faculty a good teacher wants to awaken in his or her students. 

Some people think that training like this is not relevant to American music teachers who are required to simply count the beans the school board spills out on the floor, that they need detailed recipes that fulfill pre-ordained standards. But we do not teach to the person we already are. We teach to the person we long to become. We teach to the person we didn’t yet know we are (but always suspected it) and bring our slumbering soul awake and out of hiding. We don’t teach to continue the way things are, but to radically transform them to what they could be. 

And in my considerable experience, when we give out the invitation to our students to dare beyond the norm, when we defy the expectation that the status quo is good enough, when we create the necessary safety that helps people risk, why, the people respond to it. I know all 29 of my students did tonight. And the result was glorious.

On this shrinking planet, we’re all chained together. Let us escape from the prisons we’ve created and be the Defiant Ones.

Advice from Thumper's Mother

I believe Bqmbi was the first movie I ever saw and I do remember being terrified by the forest fire and sad about Bambi’s mother. I also remember a cute little scene in which Thumper the rabbit said something about baby Bambi struggling to walk being clumsy and his mother admonishing him:

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

With a slight shift, that could be a rule for these Blogposts:

“If you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t say anything at all.”

A rule I’ve just broken. 

The Hall of Shame

I’m thoroughly enjoying a stimulating book called “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It’s calling us to task for our obsession with “Safetyism,” our good intention to protect children from harm backfiring because we are compromising their resilience and weakening their immune system by over-protecting them. Take away all peanuts from a school if one child has an allergy and a few years later, there is a rise in peanut allergies. Put hand sanitizer every ten feet and we get sick more often. Shield children from the realities of life’s hard truths— sickness, old age, death as if they were royal Buddhas (see Buddha’s story)— and they have no strength to face life’s sorrows. A good-hearted person might see a butterfly struggling to leave the cocoon and assist it, but in so doing takes away precisely what the butterfly needs to survive. Kids who eat dirt, get scraped knees, weep mightily when their pet dies are doing precisely what they need to to build strong bodies, immune systems and emotional health. 

But here’s the rub. While we’ve weirdly agreed that one kid falling from a rope swing over the lake means taking down the swing so no children will ever enjoy it, we seem just fine continuing to manufacture and casually sell deadly assault weapons while cutting medical coverage to get help with mental health issues and cutting school programs that might help kids feel valuable and that they belong—like Orff music programs, for example. The things that seriously protect children from assaults that they will never recover from— death by random terrorism—are the things we’re not willing to insist on. And yes, peanut allergies are a real danger to those who have them and we should know what dishes contain them if they ask and train those folks to take care of themselves. But assault weapons are proving to be a real danger to all of us who dare decide to go to a Festival, a movie, a church, a synagogue or a shopping mall. Might we pay just a little bit more attention to this?

There have been three mass shootings in the last 8 days in America. One in Gilroy close to where I’m teaching at the moment, one in Texas close to where another teacher lives and one in Dayton close to the college I attended. It doesn’t really matter whether I have a personal connection with these places, because all shootings are the responsibility of all American citizens to grieve and take action ten thousand times beyond those hypocritical “thoughts and prayers.” Three incidents in 8 days. And the NRA goes merrily on its way and the politicians keep moving gun control that has proven to make a huge difference in actual civilized countries to the back of the line and people get their panties all twisted up about a peanut found in school while blithely excusing the next assault weapon terrorist attack. 

We are all now card-carrying members of the Hall of Shame. Relax about peanuts and get to work on guns. All of us. 

The Doug Tour Lives On!

I love leading music classes, group singing and lectures, but I also love touring visitors around my (still) fair city. Today was especially sweet because my visitors were Fernando and Menchu, two friends from Spain who have been promising to visit—for the last 28 years! And here they were on a day that bounced back and forth between close fog, distant fog and sun and things could not have gone better. Well, except for the fog never lifting from the Golden Gate Bridge so they still haven’t seen it!

We began with a unique Hash Brown sandwich breakfast, a specialty of the Korean cooks at the unique Art’s Café in my neighborhood. Went up the tower of the De Young Museum, sang overtones and performed body percussion in the acoustically live Skyspace in the Museum Garden, dropped in at Amoeba Records to get the DVD of Vertigo that we’ll show at our course tomorrow night. Walked down Haight and then Cole Street marveling at the Victorian architecture, took the N-Judah to the Ferry Building, walked around the Farmer’s Market there and had some ice coffees looking out at the Bay Bridge. 

Walked past the Exploratorium after visiting their shop, dropped into Levi-Strauss Building to learn a bit about the history of blue jeans, ascended the 389 steps to Coit Tower and took in the murals there. On to the best-kept-secret of Jack Early Park, to the house on Lombard Street where Jimmy Stewart took Kim Novak after she jumped into the water, now partially ruined by sour owners blocking the façade with a wall. Walked by a wedding at the North Beach Church where Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dimaggio didn’t actually get married, but pretended they did (look up the story), had lunch at Mario’s Cigar Box Café and coffee at Café Trieste. A quick peek into City Lights bookstore and ready for the next chapter of the tour.

Which brought us to Chinatown, peeking into stores with herbs and food products we had never seen and almost having some puer tea at one (will save it for another time). Then to Washington Square Park, where a woman sang some Chinese songs accompanied by six musicians on Chinese instruments following a numbered notation. Then back up to Grant Street where there was a Lion Dance in front of the Wok Shop. All the drummers and cymbal players were young woman and some of the dancers as well. Yeah!! That was refreshing. Up the hill to the Fairmont Hotel, a look at the apartment building in Vertigo and then up 23 floors to the Crown Room, a room theoretically closed to the public, but the elevator took us there and we had the place to ourselves to look out at the stunning views. A quick peek into the Tonga Room, the bar with its Polynesian décor, pool of water and boat where the musicians play. On to Grace Cathedral, enjoying the sacred indoor space and then walking the labyrinth where so many visitors have walked with me. 

9 hours out in the city, probably some 10 miles of walking, good food and great company. Fernando and Menchu are two of the most cultured and educated people I know and their knowledge mixed with their curiosity brought new dimensions to everything we saw and experienced. Can we Americans finally agree to educate ourselves beyond the bare minimum of pop culture, sports figures, cool aps and movie stars? What a difference that would make. In everything. Politics, aesthetics, level of public discourse, quality of life. 

Tonight we’re off to sing Sea Chanties. Tomorrow, Dim Sum, more Vertigo sights and back down to Carmel Valley. I have loved teaching these 29 Level III students and believe I have given them the usual 150% of myself. But truth be told, this was just the kind of break I needed after almost 30 days of teaching in four courses. Time outdoors, desperately needed exercise, two friends instead of 100 people in close quarters and re-connecting with the city I still love. Just what the doctor ordered!