The Beginnings of Thanks

This year we had Grandparents Day before the Thanksgiving break. Usually, it’s in May around Spring Concert time, but Development wisely figured out that it’s better timing in November, just as the school kicks off its Annual Fund Drive. I can’t blame them. Though I’m usually wary of decisions driven by money, Grandparents are a good financial resource, they tend to be around before Thanksgiving and it turned out to be a festive time to have them at school.

It was perfect timing for my two 8^th grade groups, both close to performance-ready pieces and now they had a ready audience as the grandparents arrived. One group played Shoo-Fly Pie, Watermelon Man and So What and the other group Ain’t She Sweet, Doug’s Blues (an original!) and Take Five. They played with a perfect blend of precision and creative zest, took solos with a mere 2 seconds warning and moved effortlessly between instruments in a way that warms my heart and impresses any alert audience members.

Then came the fabulous five-year olds and we simply played through our repertoire of games, songs and dances, again with a stirring combination of competence and pure joy. By the end, they choose an adult partner to bow, swing and do-si- do with and afterwards, one of the grandparents exclaimed, “That’s the most fun I’ve had in years!” On to the Community Center to watch and listen to Sofia work her magic with 3^rd through 5^th grade chorus and James share a fun vegetable song with all (including a blues-inflected solo by 2^nd-grade Sam) and the obligatory Side by Side  with kids and grandparents joined in the  final song to cap off a memorable morning.

Friends, there is so much to be discouraged about and every reason in the world to be disheartened, outraged and cynical. Note the Ferguson verdict last night. Death and disaster, hatred and ignorance, people all over the planet hurting others with their heavy shoulders of power, bullets hurling out of guns sold by people making a profit, cruelty, narrow-mindedness, refusal after refusal to break the cycle of violence and just keep doing the same damn stupid thing time and again. What difference between the Ferguson verdict and the Emmet Till rigged jury half-a-century ago?

And yet. All I experience day after day is winged hope given feet and footed hope given wings in the children I teach. I mean, who is supposed to love 8^th graders, for goodness sake? And yet I do, with a passion! They move me simply because they rise to the bar I set, time and again, and it’s a high bar that requires competence and confidence and a standard of excellence any school board would applaud. But it also requires humor, risk, vulnerability, pleasure, mutual support, hard questions and uneasy answers, all the stuff schools won’t touch because it would require teachers to admit their own frailty. Every class I watch them inch toward mastery and surprise me and their classmates and themselves with their mighty victories, their brave venture onto the dark path of improvisation on xylophone bars and the unexpected gold coins they uncover in their fearless search. When they play in ensemble, they’re listening to each other, connecting with each other, feeling the surge of beauty where each is a small part of the swirling motion of sound brought into clarity by the likes of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Dave Brubeck. Shall I go on? There is more praise and blessing awaiting words worthy of these fine young people, but wait, what about those five year olds and 4^th graders and 6^th graders I’m teaching as well? And the other grades in-between that I sing with daily. And the five fabulous interns who have been with us all Fall to witness, give and partake.

Imagine a cornucopia of Nature’s bounty overflowing with fruits and vegetables ripe with vibrant colors, sensuous textures, enticing smells and tantalizing tastes. That’s been my life teaching school this Fall and the only proper response is to bless it all and feel the blessing of it all, to properly thank everything in my life that led me to these moments of recognizing and releasing the abundant goodness in people, to feel grateful and renew my vows to both speak out against the horror while doing my part of build the bountiful beauty.

An appropriate way to edge toward Thanksgiving, where I have the privilege and pleasure of winging north to Portland (I’m writing this on Southwest Airlines en route to Portland, my daughter on one side, my wife on the other) where I get to see that 3-year old miracle Zadie after a too-long 3-months away from her. And my other radiant daughter and her husband awaiting my ukulele lessons and my teenage step-grandson and my nephew whose birthday is today and more. A bit sad to be away from my sister after having shared this day just about every year my whole life, but she’s opting to stay back with her two other sons. You can’t smell turkey on Skype, but maybe it will help a little bit on this first Thanksgiving without my Mom or Dad on the planet with us.

The plane begins its descent, I eagerly await Zadie’s hug and the beginning of tradition renewed and sauces stirred and turkey basted and good feeling in the brisk Portland air.

Nothing more to say but thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. 

Strolling Through the Park

In the first journal I ever kept back in 1973, I found this passage:

“The heart of all cities lies in its parks. I love them. Could easily spend my life sitting on park benches watching the world go by or strolling through them going nowhere in particular. Here is where the old gather at card tables to cure their loneliness, where parents come to watch their children scamper around, where lovers come to fan their flames. Here is where those who know the value of uselessness come and practice their art.”

Interesting thoughts from that 22-year old and prophetic of an adult life spent wandering around Golden Gate Park. Yesterday, I shared that pleasure with the Interns—Pati, Tricia, Zukhra, Melonko, Melanie, along with Pati’s Dad and later our dear friend Jackie— and what a fine time we had! We posed in front of the Keith Haring sculpture duplicating some of the shapes and then sat in that round outdoor room outside the De Young museum and filled the acoustics with improvised choral singing and body percussion. We strolled around Stowe Lake past the paddle-boaters pushing through the water and turtles sunning lazily on a log. We raced leaves on the illusory uphill stream that empties into Lloyd Lake, walked by the guys playing on the hidden Frisbee golf course, stopped to greet the bison sitting Buddha-like contemplating the world. We bounced a ball on the paths while we walked and they sat on a log while I enacted the story of my first meetings with my wife close to the house where it all happened. We gazed out at Seal Rock from the Cliff House and then scampered down the rocks to the beach following Pati’s spontaneous idea to write something on the sand. Using our shoes, we spelled out in large letters

ORFF

INTERNS

2014

and then ran and leapt and danced around and through them while Jackie took videos and photos from above. We lined up behind the “Orff” and did a Can-Can dance until the water unexpectedly caught us from behind and we ran laughing and screaming away.

I like that line I wrote 41 years ago “…those who know the value of uselessness come to practice their art.” That’s indeed what we did, cavorting like little children even as we are supposed to be responsible adults. Besides the sheer fun and healing power of laughter, it struck me that days like this were as much at the heart of this Orff training as observing and teaching kid’s classes. It invited us to remember and reveal our childlike selves, gave us permission to offer spontaneous ideas and then follow them, united us as a bunch of playful lunatics unafraid to show and share our joy in living. Having become little children again, we were now renewed in our appreciation of the actual kids we teach and prepared to enter their marvelous world on their terms while still leading them to adulthood.

Having written two critiques of current educational policy, here is the antidote. I want to take the Common Core authors on a walk through the park and see if I could help unleash their tightly-tamed adult. Then after a day of useless cavorting, let’s sit back down and re-write that document. Or toss it out all together and re-envision a teacher-training that includes a romp through the park.

Anyone on board?

Much Ado About Nothing

I suppose I should be grateful that working at an independent school, I don’t have to jump through the hoops of the next top-down educational policy. But still it hurts my heart to see all the time and energy wasted on something that will accomplish exactly nothing. Teachers suffer, children suffer, culture suffers when we are mandated to adopt someone else’s fantasy of effective education. Even if it’s a good one. I’ve been a crusader for the dynamic, life-changing, child-friendly pedagogy of Orff Schulwerk all my life, but I never would consider that all teachers be required to adopt it to their field and prove it by checking off lists. Anything worth its salt requires hard work, intelligence, vision, none of which can be acquired from the top down.

You can’t legislate intelligence. You can’t mandate creativity. You can’t grow craftsmanship simply by saying what it is. My own field of Orff Schulwerk requires a radical transformation of the teachers earned by years and years of training the body, challenging the mind, unleashing the imagination and opening the heart. It asks for a stripping away of the ignorant, the ineffective, the unnecessary, to remember the shining common core of human intelligence and imagination that gets clouded over by much of our schooling. No transformation occurs by reading a few national standards and trying out a few pre-packaged lesson plans. As Thoreau warned us:

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit?”

Each education fashion that comes hurtling down the pike— now the Common Core—requires teachers to wear new clothes chosen by others without any realistic expectation of the teacher’s own transformation— or practice designed to transform. True Orff practice doesn’t dictate your fashion, in fact, encourages you to choose your own wardrobe. Plain or fancy, bright or earth-tones, none of that matters much as long as there’s an authentic thinking teacher with a beating heart and lively imagination underneath. Anything less than this is just paying the coins to Caesar that rightly belong to God.

A few questions to consider before playing the Common Core game. And if you have to play it, ask these questions of those requiring you to do so.

1.     Tone: Is this respecting my training and intelligence as a teacher? Is it assuming that I know how to craft my lessons, assess my students, understand my field? If it really wants to help me— because we can all use help to be better teachers—shouldn’t I be in conversation with “it” about what help I precisely need?

2.     Language: Why does this sound like a “Teaching for Dummies” manual instead of elevating me with inspired language and poetic insight? Can I read this to my kids? Is it trivializing and demeaning my work by making me check off little boxes labeled MCC 1.2? Is it acknowledging the living, breathing spirit of children in its language or sounding more like directions to make a pre-assembled model airplane?

3.     Assessment: Would I have a carpenter re-build my kitchen and at the end of each work day, have him fill out a sheet like: “Put tools away correctly.” “Hammered the nails straight?” Does any other field of work have these kinds of national standards, making a big deal out of the most common sense practices and simplest forms of knowledge? And speaking of assessment and accountability, where is the test to show that such educational policy is effective in its fantastic hopes that children will now learn everything we teach them? Where is the documentation? What are the standards of measurement? Is there one shred of evidence that any national policy instituted in the past 14 years has effectively improved education? (I can think of thousands of testimonies about the ways it has failed children, destroyed teachers’ enthusiasm and passion, dumbed down schools and more. Anyone out there paying attention to such assessments?)

4.     Time:  Is this a good use of my time as a teacher? Shouldn’t I be using the time to read the great educational thinkers? To be planning lessons that lead children to the edge of discovery? To be furthering my own practice and deepen my understanding in my field? Is any of this stimulating my intelligence? Awakening my creativity? Opening my heart? Guiding my practice with loving attention? Do I emerge refreshed after jumping through these hoops or exhausted?

5.     Qualifications: Though initiated by government bureaucrats far away from the classroom, Common Core did have teachers involved in every step of the review. But who were these teachers? What vision was guiding their work beyond the expectation that every child should know x, y and z? Easy to sit in a room and fantasize about the ideal outcome, but all of us teachers have had a sobering reality check when we enter the classroom and don’t find perfectly behaved children so fascinated with each nugget of knowledge we impart. Fine to have an end-goal of some national standard, but so what? You don’t just put “creativity” up on the board and presto! your kids are creative! Where is there any acknowledgment in the Common Core about the real nature of the beast? Where is there anything that says out loud that this is difficult work and not to be accomplished by paint-by-number pre-packaged lessons? Where is the deep vision that grapples with the true nature of the human being magnified manifold in the innocence of children?

Education is just too damn important to waste our time on anything less than inspired pedagogy. If you agree with H.G. Wells that we’re in “a race between education and catastrophe,” we can’t afford to get distracted by turning down the wrong paths.  Let’s stop fooling ourselves. The Emperor has no clothes. This is much ado about nothing. 

(WL 1.4—Students will understand all literary references.)

Rotten at the Common Core

I just had the most amazing classes with my 5-year olds! We successfully completed Standards AP 1.1, 1.2 and 1.4 and threw in an extra CE 2.3 for good measure! As if that wasn’t enough, we spiced it all up with HCC 3.2 and MCC K.3. You can imagine how proud I was when I discovered that they could Count Forward with Vocal Variety and achieve the Integrated Outcome I had planned for them. And to top it all off, we used a Big Idea (that 5-year-old children could count forward from zero to ten) and just to send the whole lesson through the roof, we spoke, sang, shouted and whispered. You can imagine how I came home beaming with joy and slept the sleep of the good and righteous, knowing that Common Core had led me into the light of pedagogical revelation. And you know the kids were just bustin’ their buttons at carpool as they jumped into the car shouting, “Mom! We aced the HCC 3.2 today!!!”

Before I read through the hundreds of pages of standards and outcomes and scientifically-tested ways to ensure my students were learning everything I taught them and were thoroughly prepared for life in the 21^st century, I was a lost waif wandering aimlessly through the halls of “Uh, gee, I don’t know, kids” education. I used to let my kids play with fingerpaints without ever once testing, measuring and assessing whether “The child successfully dipped the finger in the paint can and applied it to the canvas without sucking on his/her finger, painting his neighbor’s eyeball or writing obscenities. (Standard FU 6.9).” They just had a rollicking good time trying stuff out and we talked about what he painted and what it was and how he thought about it and what he might add. 

I’d let the kids mess around on Orff xylophones and then learn a short pattern and invite them to improvise variations. Apparently, I accidentally did something good here, as Creativity was an acknowledged 21^st Century Skill. But without ticking off the HUH? 6.6 box and proving that the child is now ready to appreciate John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, I was simply wandering in the dark.

Before I saw the light, I used to spend hours remembering how kids think and imagine and explore and built my lessons around that, but now I see that was time better spent making sure that they can “count forward from zero to ten using four different voices.” I used to create opportunities for play within structures that revealed the essence of the ideas and techniques of a particular lesson, watch and observe the kids’ responses, help shape and grow them, ask leading questions, engage in Socratic dialogue or simply leave them alone and prepare myself to be astonished. But no more. Everything now fits inside the neat little boxes prepared by people far away who will never meet my kids.

Before I wrote out my lesson plans to be approved by either living or mechanical robots, I’d spend that time improvising at the piano or playing around with an idea for a class until it came into form or reading brilliant educational thinkers like Whitehead, Montessori, Steiner, Dewey, but now I see the error of my ways. Children should not be left alone to just play, explore, discover, mess around, ask questions, try things out. Adults should not be encouraged to watch them, observe them, gently guide them, inquire alongside of them, celebrate them, praise them, bless them. Without the heroic efforts of the folks who brought us Common Core or any other current jargon coming from the hollowed halls of top-drawer education, we would be left wandering in the dark of our ignorance as to how to pass on our love for our subject, how to offer the necessary techniques, ideas and crafts, how to assess every minute of every class what the child needs next and think about how we can give it to her.

Wait! What’s that? An earthquake?! Or Friedrich Froebel, the visionary who first coined the word “Kindergarten,” rolling over in his grave? 

PS. For those curious, below is a sample of the brilliant lesson I extol above.

Identity: Me and My World: 
How do we use our senses to observe and learn about the world around us?

Kindergarten: Arts Integration with Dance, Music and Mathematics LESSON

3: Counting Forward With Vocal Variety

BIG IDEA: I can us my voice and body to perform counting songs and rhymes. I can count forward from zero to ten using my voice to speak, sing, shout and whisper.


INTEGRATED OUTCOME: With or without guidance and support from an adult, students will participate in a counting song or chant using appropriate voice and movements.Action
Music Elements: Timbre

CALIFORNIA MATHEMATICS STANDARDS

MCC K. 3 Write numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a written numeral 0-20.


MCC K.4 When counting objects, say the number names in the standard order, paring each object with one and only one number name and each number with one and only one object.

 CALIFORNIA MUSIC AND DANCE STANDARDStard

Dance:

AP 1.1 Build the range and capacity to move in a variety of ways.

AP 1.2 Perform basic locomotor skills (e.g., walk, run, gallop, jump, hop and balance).

AP 1.4 Perform simple movements in response to oral instructions (e.g., walk, turn, reach).

CE 2.3 Respond spontaneously to different types of music, rhythms, and sounds.

Music

AP 1.2 Identify and describe basic elements in music (e.g., vocal timbre)

HCC 3.2 Sing and play simple singing games from various cultures.


AV 4.1 Create movement that corresponds to specific music.


AV 4.2 Identify, talk about, sing, or play music written for specific purposes.  Name and perform dances.
Name and play dance games.
Sing songs.

 speak, sing, shout, whisper