Confessions of a Traveling Music Teacher

Friday, January 23, 2015

Problem Solving

The glory of work is that each day presents a problem to be solved. The mind, that wanderer, must stop its daydreaming and look the issue right in the eye. The brain, that mysterious organ, awakens to the task, flexes its muscles, rolls up it’s neuroned sleeves and shoves aside all distractions; “I got this.” It feels useful and needed and happy that millions of years of evolution leading to this moment are justified. The dog waking up is troubled with no plans for the day beyond “Hey, it’s time for a walk and I wonder if the food bowl is full.” But since some mysterious force in the universe proclaimed that the human brain needed to develop abstract thought, choice and the weird task of deciding how to fill time, we need to step up to the mandate.

In my peculiar case, the question that got me up too early in the morning was, “You have 15 kids coming into your room for 45 minutes. What are you going to do with them?” And it asks that questions five times— one for 6^th graders, one for 8^th, one for kindergarterners, one for 4^th. Well, seven times since just to be ornery and make myself work yet harder, I have two groups of 8^th and 4^th and do different things with each. If we got another miraculous rain day of no school, I would be thrilled. Both because we need the rain and then I could go back to sleep and continue my dream about… well, I don’t remember it, because the executive function took over and rudely erased it from the board. But I’m sure it was more pleasant than sitting in the dark at 5:30 am in my cold house figuring out what the hell I’m going to do with the kids today.

I said “peculiar” before because many teachers simply think, “Page 22 in the textbook, math sheet number five, bars 42-55 in the score.” But the Orff teacher, that bizarre creature, has to weave anew the myriad threads of artistic possibility each class, create a miniature masterpiece with speech, song, gesture, body music, dance, drama, elemental compositions on all sorts of instruments, none of which can be unthinkingly taught through the short-cut of reading notes, but must be meticulously prepared to unleash step-by-step the music in the bodies and minds of children. As appropriate for each age. With an unceasing flow that unrolls like music itself. The room set up differently for each group, the particular combinations of elements dreamed anew for each class. It’s difficult and demanding and that’s what makes it so glorious when it works. And when it doesn’t, no problem, or rather, a new problem for the mind to tackle and roll you out of bed yet earlier the next day.

Can you guess that I should be class planning instead of writing about class planning? The clock is ticking and my first class is two hours away, counting commute time. Oh, the bargains we make in the nether-zone called procrastination.

What would it be like to stop working and never have that tension to rub up against? I don’t know about you, but I need a certain amount of tension to keep me alive and alert. Too little and it’s like a slack string that produces no tone. Too much and the string snaps. It’s an ongoing Holy Grail quest for just the right amount.

Okay, now 6^th grade first…

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Men

Nine men came to my house last night to talk. We didn’t gather around TV to watch football or play poker, but sat in a circle of chairs to talk. The topic was “Who were you in 1990? And who have you become? And who do you think you’re still becoming?”

Why 1990? It was the year our men’s group was formed, inspired by a retreat attended by our founding member. He came back from a week in the woods with 100 men led by Robert Bly, Michael Meade, James Hillman and Malidoma Somé, leaders of the burgeoning men’s movement, and called up ten friends and said; “Let’s face it. We’re alone and lonely and sharing all our tenderness with women. Let’s start to talk to each other and see what happens.”

And so once every two weeks, we convened at each other’s house and sat and talked, reaching higher that “What about those Niners?” and deeper than “Hey, check out that babe!” We began with our life stories and lo and behold, we weren’t alone in our suffering and doubts and insecurities! From there to our relationships with our fathers, eventually our mothers and then wives and work and family and sex and art and what have you. Sometimes we danced or hiked or cooked or shot pool or wrote poetry or recited poetry or did ritual dances with heavy sticks.

Along the way, parents, siblings, spouses died and one of us died too, from suicide. We were estranged from our children or got divorced or fired from work or got caught by depression— the whole catastrophe. We also fell in love, re-connected with loved ones, travelled, felt renewed wonder and pleasure in our lives, the whole marvel. After a while, we didn’t need to choose topics— we became the topic, our lives unfolding like a Dickens serial comedy and tragedy and always with each other as a listening ear and shoulders to help us bear up. Two left the group, two more joined and here’s the miracle:

25 years later, we’re still going!

Seven of the original ten still with us. The youngest was 39 (me) when we started, the oldest is now 75. That’s a lot of life together, a lot of years side-by-side. And in our culture of transience, a glorious longevity. Back then, we were knee-deep in work and family raising. Now six out of nine are retired. The ritual check-in is less likely to be about probing the mythological nature of the deep masculine and more about failing body parts, puttering in the garden and time with the grandchildren. Though our heads are white, all are well-exercised and as trim, if not trimmer, than our 1990’s self. We’re not the most diverse group outwardly— same or similar class, race, sexual preference, political values— but take any nine people around and invite them to disclose and be vulnerable and you will discover that no two alike will negotiate life’s obstacles and invitations the same. And yet we all have suffered and rejoiced in more or less the same things. The big take-away is that we are not alone and yet, we are unique, each of us.

It was fascinating as each threaded the story of who they were back all those years with what they did last week. Mostly threads were unbroken, with a few surprising detours in each story. There are patterns in each of our life whispering (or shouting) to us about why we’re here and what we’re meant to do and when the group hits it right, we help each other reflect on and reveal those patterns so we awake each day with a bit more clarity and purpose. Retirement appears to be a mixed blessing, time to follow deferred interests and beckoning paths and breathe more fully into each day’s promise. But also more time to question and doubt and wonder what’s important and think about mortality. Back then, most of us were too busy to pay those things mind.

So hooray for us, for hanging together in the long haul and though the numbers are against us, still I ended the meeting with “Here’s to the next 25!”

Monday, January 19, 2015

The Story Behind the Story

At the far end of my career as a music teacher, a few folks have begun to interview me and ask (with no dangling prepositions), “To what do you attribute your success?”

My first response is, “How much time do you have?”

If the answer is, “Not much,” I’ll condense it to this:

“I have two great stories that sit behind every moment of every class.

1. All children are musical. My job is to discover, with their help, precisely how they are musical and how much they care about it.

2 • All children hold a humanitarian promise, a potential to be kind and caring and fun

and helpful. Again, our job is to discover together precisely how.

And with 40 years experience of drawing forth that musical potential in child-friendly ways, I can report confidently that all my students leave school with a basic foundation of musicality. That’s the easy one.

The second is a perpetual work-in-progress and the best I can report are the ways in which my fellow teachers and I support the journey and encourage the child and feel our failures. But even kids who came in at 3-years old and left in 8^th grade with low marks in “plays well with other” come back as surprising alumni capable of compassion. And sadly, a few go the other direction as well. No one’s yet discovered the secret of developing the foolproof humanitarian person. And no one ever will.

But the story you tell yourself that lies behind your practice matters. It makes all the difference in the world whether you view a baby as burdened with the guilt of Original Sin or shining with the radiance of an Original True Nature, “trailing clouds of glory.” Whether you see children as filled with beautiful promise looking to blossom into their reason for incarnation or annoying little brats who need to be whipped into shape to obey and take their place on the factory assembly line.

And it was with this in mind that I was disturbed to hear that a colleague getting her PhD in Music Education was asked to discuss the following question:

“How is education like or not like science? Should education become more like medicine so that teachers diagnose, treat, prescribe, and look to ‘cure’ students?”

That worries me. It assumes a story behind the story that our students are “sick” and need to be “diagnosed, treated, prescribed and cured.” And who gets to name the disease? Adults who have lost touch with the nature of children, who have the power to label a healthy distrust and questioning “Authority Defiance Syndrome” or call a natural childlike exuberance or impatience with boring adult teachers “ADD,” to be cured with drugs that will make children docile and obedient.

From my point of view, the sick people in the story are the adults incapable of seeing children for who they are, yet vested with the power to cause real damage. Educational policy makers and the teachers who passively obey them are the ones who need to be “diagnosed, treated, prescribed and cured.” Not with drugs, but with an expanded awareness of children’s nature and how they learn and what they need and how certain remarkable adults understand how to organize their teaching around those needs. I would require them to read Maria Montessori’s The Secret of Childhood, to attend the music classes of Sofia Lopez-Ibor, James Harding, myself and many others, to visit The San Francisco School and witness happy children who also know their times-tables and are improving in spelling.

There is a grain of truth in the medical paradigm— some children display certain pathologies or learning challenges that do need an accurate diagnosis and “treatment” in the form of adjusted classroom practices or expectations. But the medical analogy is particularly dangerous in America, where disease is treated separate from the whole person and mostly with chemical intervention. In holistic medical practices like acupuncture or aryuvedic medicine or shamanic healing, disease is treated as an imbalance of the whole organism with attention to natural flows in the body and mind and many strategies—herbs, music, diet, massage, needles—to restore the balance. Some life-threatening invasive diseases like cancer indeed need to be “cured,” but many others require a constant re-balancing that is always a work-in-progress.

That metaphor might ring true in education. Kids who are passionate and speak out of turn or take up too much air space don’t need to be “cured.” Their passion needs to be recognized and celebrated and nurtured even as they learn to temper it in group discussion. That’s a whole different ball game.

In short, the story we tell about children is not some ideal student who is above average, gets A’s in every subject, is captain of the sports team, plays well with others and listens to the teacher. And everyone who falls short in any of those qualities is diagnosed as “sick” and in need of “curing.” The story we tell is the actual story of quirky, unpredictable, deeply compassionate, terribly cruel, remarkably intelligent in one or two or three ways, remarkably stupid in others— the whole catastrophe of god-and-devilled human beings. Some of the behaviors hurt society and hurt the child him or herself, some contribute wonderfully to both. Like medicine, we aim toward health and balance and harmony and healing, but not by simply swallowing the doctor’s proscribed pills. Mostly, each child and each teacher needs to search for the story behind each behavior, understand how the difficult behaviors are often tied to the child’s genius and how they can be brought into balance (never “cured”) to bring healing to self and community. That’s a story that can revitalize the whole of education.

And one I highly recommend.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Tell the Truth (Guest Blog by Talia Goodkin)

I think I've had a healthy dose of parent pride for my two daughters their whole lives. So it comes as no surprise that my second daughter, Talia, posted a letter to teachers on Facebook that made me think, "Yeah! That's my girl!" {Though she might suggest some sexism there—:-) } So with her permission, I share it here, with (of course) one editorial comment. She teaches 4th grade at my school, an age when they’re right at the developmental cusp of being able to handle some difficult discussion. But as Red-Diaper Babies can testify, too much truth too soon is a delicate matter heaped on the narrow shoulders of young children. There is an art to knowing how much to tell and when and where and why. Emily Dickinson suggested this a long time ago— her poem below and then Talia's letter:

Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.

Too bright for our infirm delight, the Truth’s superb surprise.

As lightning to the children eased, with explanations kind.

The Truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind.

Dear Teachers,

I hope you talked to your students about why we don't have school on Monday. I hope you dedicated the time and thought to Martin Luther King Jr. that he deserves . I hope you didn't just show his "I have a dream" speech and call it a day.  I hope you told them the truth.

I hope you didn't tell them with a sugar-coated smile that "the color of your skin doesn't matter." I hope you corrected that tired and ignorant catch phrase that liberal white people say to ameliorate their own guilt. I hope you told them that race SHOULDN'T matter, at least in terms of how we are treated. I hope you told them it does. I hope you took their hands in yours and told them that unfortunately, it does.