Teacher in a Strange Land

Best Concert Ever

In his marvelous 1977 book, On Teaching, Herb Kohl suggests that teachers should read the books their students love, and listen seriously to the music that engages the young people they teach.

Teachers, Kohl says, cannot expect students to eagerly embrace the literature and arts their teachers deem classic, beautiful or essential for an educated person, unless teachers return the favor and seriously honor their students' tastes and preferences.

You might argue that Kohl wrote those words before Lady Gaga was even born--and was younger himself in the post-Woodstock era when On Teaching was written. But he has a point. Our aesthetic values and ideals begin forming when we are children, shaped by the arts that surround us. The goal is broad experience, learning to draw knowledge and pleasure from a wide range of artistic sources. If nothing else, listening to the music our students love can be seen as a useful exercise in anthropology.

My late mother-in-law--may she rest in peace--was convinced that my husband was at Woodstock in 1969, and concealed this fact from his parents for decades. It's not true--he was actually in Ann Arbor, safely grinding away at another boring summer job. But in her mind, he was just the kind of rebellious hippie youth who would hitchhike across the country to listen to all that racket. 

Craig Wilson, in USA Today, makes the case that the music at Woodstock was glorified racket, pretty much--the half-a-million-strong experience, the mud and the enthusiasm being the classic and essential parts. Only a handful of the musical performances at Woodstock were truly memorable and lots of musicians turned in marginal work, possibly because rain-induced electrocution was a distinct possibility at any moment.

Wilson goes on to say that few would call Woodstock the best concert ever--and that what makes a live performance unforgettable is probably a combination of arbitrary circumstances, judgment and brilliance, an alignment of the listener's personal stars. In the past 40 years, I have been to literally thousands of concerts. One of my life regrets is not keeping a list of all the concerts I've seen (although a list of all the concerts I've played would certainly be longer and--perhaps surprisingly--less interesting to me). And maybe a meticulously kept list would spoil the spontaneity of a response to this question:

Best concert ever?

For me, as a formally trained musician, the answer would necessarily be divided into two distinct captions--art music and popular music. I've seen most of the major symphony orchestras in the U.S., and a number of Famous Classical Musicians live. For dazzling talent, I would choose Cecilia Bartoli, at Hill Auditorium. For pure listening pleasure, nothing came close to seeing the Empire Brass at the Wharton Center. For artistic excellence and heart-in-the-throat richness of sound, my favorite "classical" ensemble is the Cleveland Symphony (although hearing them in Severance Hall may have something to do with it).

On the popular music side, I offer a top five: Richard Thompson at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, an evening chock-full of irony and artistry. For pure fun, the Subdudes at the Ark in Ann Arbor. Randy Newman, solo at the piano, at the Royal Oak Theatre (we were in the front row, I was nine months pregnant, and I remember hoping fervently that all the research about what babies could hear in the womb was true). First runner-up: a tribute concert for Lowell George, at the L.A. Forum, back in 1979. Nearly all my favorite musicians were on the program, which went on for hours. When I got in line for popcorn, Laraine Newman was ahead of me. I have kept the T-shirt for 30 years, even though it's size x-small.

My all-time favorite concert has to be seeing Stevie Wonder at Cobo Hall in Detroit, back in the 70s. Stevie Wonder is always exciting and fresh, but he was home that night, musically and emotionally. Our seats weren't that great, but I was caught up in the feeling of being part of Stevie's family and his generous passion. Signed, sealed, delivered: best concert ever.

Image: NYC_Comet, Flickr Creative Commons

Bridges Over Troubled Water: Songs for Teacher Leaders

 Help me out here, teachers. When you're weary and feeling small and so on--where do you turn for musical inspiration? What songs and artists ring your good-teacher chimes? If you never use music in this way, preferring chocolate, text-messaging in the lounge, or watching "Freedom Writers" on HBO again, I'd like to suggest that music has tremendous power to leverage personal and systemic change. What music is your personal door to hope and sunshine?

I have painted this verbal picture to my students many times:

Imagine a well-dressed, prosperous man and woman from an earlier generation, he in topcoat and fedora, she in leather gloves and a coat with a fur collar. In this black and white film, they are looking almost rapturously off into the distance. Between them is a little girl, holding their hands, her sweet face framed by a hat, tied with a big bow under her chin. They all appear to be speaking, looking excitedly at something far away. As the camera moves back, we begin to hear the soundtrack. The family of three is singing--and soon we see and hear that they are part of a large throng of people, all of whom are singing with great fervor and pride. The perspective widens; the crowd is massive, and they are all focused on a single man standing on a balcony. 

The man is Adolph Hitler. The song they are singing is Deustschland Uber Alles ("Germany Above All").  Songs are powerful, I tell my students. Songs can unify nations (or 100,000 Michigan fans in the Big House, something that many of them have personally experienced)--or send men willingly into battle. A good song can bring tears to our eyes, stir jubilant memories --or make us get up and dance. Hitler, using cheap crystal radios, effectively turned patriotic music into a terrible and authoritarian social movement. I saw the film clip described above at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

How about a more benign and progressive movement: music to honor and inspire the work of teachers? Music to lift their spirits and help them find their common joys? I will be meeting with a few educators next week to work on a teacher leadership project, and I want to bring them a mix CD of songs for teacher leaders.

Songs that I have considered: If I Were Brave, Have a Little Faith, and One Love (from the Playing for Change CD--where all the songs could be considered germane to teaching, learning, believing in the power of the human spirit to educate). My friend and fellow traveler Mary Tedrow sent a link to Born Again American, a rallying cry if there ever was one. I wonder: is it too political to be included in a CD of songs for teacher leadership? Then I decide that teacher leadership is all about politics.

Help me out here. Please send suggestions for the very best music--a little jazz, a little country, a little rock and roll--for teachers.

 

Thanks to my friend Rosemary Woods for the wonderful image, shot a couple days ago in Tucson.

Imagine There's No...Imagination

Two weeks ago, I spent a Saturday traveling to the century-old District Library in Jackson, Michigan, one of more than 2500 beautiful public libraries--on three continents--funded by industrial magnate and innovative philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The draw was a workshop on using research in writing, plus a luncheon keynote featuring one of my favorite authors, Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon took questions after the workshop and the keynote--and both times, someone in the audience asked her who Jamie (a character running through most of her novels) looks like. As in--which living person, preferably a star, served as model for your hero?

Both times, Gabaldon gently demurred, saying that while she had an image of Jamie, readers should create their own vision. This was not an answer that pleased the audience; there was the sense that they wanted a name--or better yet, a color photo. And at my table, a Gabaldon reader confessed that she starts all books by turning to the last pages--to see (her words) "who died and who got together." Only with that concrete information could she start reading.

There's plenty of evidence that students in this media-saturated world are losing their capacity for rich imagination.  One of my favorite instructional strategies in teaching middle school music is structured role play. Assigning students a character to inhabit-- rock star, entertainment lawyer, singing monk-- is a powerful way to force them to "think different." There's always a subgroup of students who resist, claiming they don't know what to do or say-- "Can't you just write it down, so I can read it?" Explaining divergent thinking--or the endless possibilities for changing one's narrative-- isn't always helpful. They're looking for the right answer.

Turning kids on to different kinds of music--every music teacher's #1 goal--is an exercise in developing the imagination, particularly for band and orchestra teachers who can't use lyrics as a means of illumination.  I remember one stunning moment back in the 80s, rehearsing a sensitive passage with my 8th grade band.  A young man raised his hand and said it might be easier to play the piece if we knew what it was about. I replied that people didn't ask Beethoven what his fifth symphony was about, but he persisted, saying "You know, like on MTV, where you can see what songs are about?"

That comment sent me on an enduring quest to embed the ideas of imagination and inspiration (literally, "drawing breath") into my classroom pedagogy. Musicians use a range of non-visual and non-literary tools to represent emotion, story, purpose and occasion. Part of musical imagination is craftsmanship--having the knowledge and skills to create. But another part is the willingness to be playful, to recombine familiar elements into something new, to take a risk or wait on inspiration. My students had some rudimentary knowledge and skills. What they didn't have was permission to honor or evaluate their own interpretations and images.

As much as I would like to pin my worries about diminished imagination in children on MTV and a thousand other always-on media sources, I can't. Media, whether brilliant or boring, is only the product.  Imagination is a process. A process fed and honed by comprehension and competence--but also the ability to delay gratification, to fool around with ideas. The women at the library who wanted to see the definitive picture of their fictional hero, or know how the story turns out before reading, were lacking the capacity to suspend fulfillment and tinker with possibility. They wanted the answer.

Einstein is famous for  declaring that imagination is more important than knowledge. Here's the rest of that quote: "For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Imagination is a real thing. It belongs in every vision or proposal for what our children should learn, preparing for their 21st century lives.

Twenty Questions (about Education Me)

So yeah, I'm on Facebook now, too, like 90 million other people (no--seriously--it's up to 90 million). And it sure is fun hearing about how everyone is cleaning their garage, hiring a babysitter, or getting a fat-free caramel latte (venti). I admit to succumbing to a couple of those quizzy things--Fifteen Albums that Defined My Life, What is Your Stripper Name?--but only the good ones. Frankly, I don't care where your cell phone is (in one word).

There are things I really would like to know about people, however--and not always the twenty-five "random" things they choose. Since most people who visit the Strange Land are teacher types, I have hereby created Twenty Questions for Educators. I invite you to delete my answers and post your own TQ. If you do, please link back, so I can find you and read your answers. Only number one is demographic--and the rest might require some thinking. Thinking is good

1. Teaching assignments, how long? Mostly K-12 vocal/instrumental music with sojourns in 7th grade math and ESL, 30+ years

2. Favorite Class Taught and Why? Eighth grade Jazz Band, any given year. Always last hour, always heavy on the boys, always loud and crazy--but those kids, given a few weeks of intense instruction, picked up mad skills and loved to play. Sheer exuberance, every day.

3. Worst Class Taught and Why? A class inexplicably called Enrichment, where teachers got to send middle school kids who didn't do their homework, pulling them out of their electives. My job: making them do all their homework, via coercion, threats and (very occasionally) instruction. There were usually only 8 or 10 kids present, but it was 55 minutes of resistance hell, and it wasn't my assignments they were resisting.

4. Favorite Class Taken? A graduate class, Futuristics and Education. I learned more about policy options, preferable futures and the purposes of education there than any classes in foundations or policy.

5. Favorite Education Book?   Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman). Why America is an anti-intellectual nation, and how that impacts schooling, big-time.

6. Best Teacher Buddy? Lots of choices here: Daryl Bean, my music-sharing friend--or Kirk Taylor, Most Thoughtful English Teacher Ever--or Janelle Horrocks-Boehmer, the person who taught my personal children sex ed with no-nonsense humor. And many more.

7. Best Administrator? Tom Sparrow. Only my principal one year, but he was the ultimate progressive booster, willing to try any reasonable new idea, and genuinely crazy about the kids.

8. Most Disappointing Experience? Staff meetings. Every one of them. The boredom, the boredom.

9. Most Thrilling Moment? The first time my high school band took top ratings at a festival. I was a young director and went in thinking we were a third-rate group--it was my first year, our instruments were crappy and the music I had chosen was too hard. I had giant holes in any number of sections  and only one french horn. But the kids played their hearts out. I knew, 30 seconds into the performance, that we were OK--and then we came away with the coveted first division. I also won some teaching awards, further along in my career, but that day was pure exhilaration.

10. Funniest Incident in Your Classroom? I once had a kid pee into a trumpet mute, after I said he could wait three minutes until the bell rang to use the restroom. It wasn't funny at the time. Not to me, anyway.

11. Most memorable student? This is a sad one. I had a brilliant 8th grade trombonist who wrote, spoke and thought like a wry but cynical adult. Like having an adolescent Jack Kerouac in class. I swear he was an old soul. There were problems at home. When he was in 9th grade, he took his own life, via self-immolation. That was a dozen years ago , and I'm still haunted.

12. What about unions? Essential but usually unimaginative. To have such power and resources, then regularly squander them on petty, predictable scripts. I see hopeful glimmers that Next Gen teachers will change that.

13. What about charter schools? World-class idea--the devil is in the execution.

14. What about merit pay? Thoughtful pay for performance plans: a hearty yes. Bonuses for raising test scores: dreadful idea.

15. What does "21st century learning" mean? Finally getting some ideas that have been around forever into practice: collaboration, global awareness, innovation, design. 21st century learning is not simply adding more technology or extra math and science. Nor is it incompatible with mastering a strong knowledge base. It's a real thing, however.

16. What makes a teacher "effective?" Ability to engender learning in context--a unique combination of factors that students instantly recognize, and policymakers have trouble quantifying.

17. Most overrated "reform?" Teach for America, or any other program that positions teaching as something anyone can do for two years before moving on to their real careers, rather than a complex professional occupation.

18. Best professional development? National Board Certification. Hands down.

19. Personal education hero? Terry Dozier. 

20. Priorities, if you could spend $5 billion on education?  Better teachers in high-needs schools; innovation grants for creating new kinds of schools; serious teacher development--content knowledge, leadership, instructional improvement; a policy academy where practicing educators and policymakers jointly investigated research and creative options for problem-solving.

We Gather Together

It’s customary to express thanks this week. This is more than a perfunctory, blog-filling exercise—gratitude is learned and must be practiced, as any parent or teacher can testify. I remember many family Thanksgiving dinners where my children, nieces and nephews dutifully recited “what I’m thankful for” as prelude to gorging themselves; mostly these seemed to be politically correct appreciations: my mom and dad, my dog, grandma. All of whom, not coincidentally, were present at the time. Such public credit is mostly about knowing which side of your bread is buttered. Thanks for everything I have—I know I have it better than some kids—and by the way, keep those blessings coming. Amen.

I don’t remember anyone at my Thanksgiving table giving thanks for their wonderful school or hard-working teachers, so that’s probably a good place for me to start in this List of Things I am Thankful For, 2008:

• The Teacher Leaders Network and its on-line Forum, a.k.a. the teachers’ lounge in cyber-heaven. A greater concentration of smart, connected teachers than anywhere else on the planet. And extreme gratitude to the Center for Teaching Quality for hosting the party.
• New teachers everywhere, including the wonderful new teachers we’re e-mentoring in North Carolina. Teaching is hard. Sticking around is harder. Trying to get it right is hardest of all. And November can be a dark month for a novice teacher. Thank you for taking a risk and joining the world’s greatest profession.
• iTunes!  Love the iTunes. Love sampling, love making play lists, love downloading 50 new tunes by 42 artists. Totally addictive, but food for the soul.
• The Chick Club. You know who you are. Stroganoff on December 28, my house.
• Cromaine Public Library in Hartland, Michigan—small-town charm and service.
• The St. Paul’s Choir, the nice people who let me pretend to be their music teacher, filling a big empty space in my life.
• All of my thoughtful blog buddies—there were probably a dozen last Thanksgiving, and four times that many now.
• National Board Certification candidates who opened their teaching practice up, with the best of intentions and a great deal of humbling trust in me, in 2008.
• My fabulous family—on-call tech-support child, Tim Gunn fashion-advisor child, and the Rational One who accepts my Popsicle toes.

And most of all—I am incredibly thankful for hope. Can you believe it? In the middle of an economic nightmare and an endless war, there are flickers of optimism, some creative thinking, even a return to purpose.

Plus—there will be leftover turkey in the frig soon. Happy Thanksgiving.

It’s customary to express thanks this week. This is more than a perfunctory, blog-filling exercise—gratitude is learned and must be practiced, as any parent or teacher can testify. I remember many family Thanksgiving dinners where my children, nieces and nephews dutifully recited “what I’m thankful for” as prelude to gorging themselves; mostly these seemed to be politically correct appreciations: my mom and dad, my dog, grandma. All of whom, not coincidentally, were present at the time. Such public credit is mostly about knowing which side of your bread is buttered. Thanks for everything I have—I know I have it better than some kids—and by the way, keep those blessings coming. Amen.

I don’t remember anyone at my Thanksgiving table giving thanks for their wonderful school or hard-working teachers, so that’s probably a good place for me to start in this List of Things I am Thankful For, 2008:

• The Teacher Leaders Network and its on-line Forum, a.k.a. the teachers’ lounge in cyber-heaven. A greater concentration of smart, connected teachers than anywhere else on the planet. And extreme gratitude to the Center for Teaching Quality for hosting the party.
• New teachers everywhere, including the wonderful new teachers we’re e-mentoring in North Carolina. Teaching is hard. Sticking around is harder. Trying to get it right is hardest of all. And November can be a dark month for a novice teacher. Thank you for taking a risk and joining the world’s greatest profession.
• iTunes!  Love the iTunes. Love sampling, love making play lists, love downloading 50 new tunes by 42 artists. Totally addictive, but food for the soul.
• The Chick Club. You know who you are. Stroganoff on December 28, my house.
• Cromaine Public Library in Hartland, Michigan—small-town charm and service.
• The St. Paul’s Choir, the nice people who let me pretend to be their music teacher, filling a big empty space in my life.
• All of my thoughtful blog buddies—there were probably a dozen last Thanksgiving, and four times that many now.
• National Board Certification candidates who opened their teaching practice up, with the best of intentions and a great deal of humbling trust in me, in 2008.
• My fabulous family—on-call tech-support child, Tim Gunn fashion-advisor child, and the Rational One who accepts my Popsicle toes.

And most of all—I am incredibly thankful for hope. Can you believe it? In the middle of an economic nightmare and an endless war, there are flickers of optimism, some creative thinking, even a return to purpose.

Plus—there will be leftover turkey in the frig soon. Happy Thanksgiving.

Mozart Makes You Human

As a professional flutist, I frequently play for weddings, funerals and other life-transition occasions. Last Saturday, I was honored to provide memorial service music for a friend’s brother, who died way too young. Selecting music in tribute to a contemporary was a poignant challenge—we settled on some melancholy Irish ballads and Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic. After the funeral, my friend approached, wiping his eyes, and said “I was fine until you started playing—and then I lost it.”

And I thought—no, you weren’t fine. Until the music began, and made it possible for you to release your full humanity.

Once again, researchers—this time at Harvard—have presented us with scientifically-based evidence that studying music makes you smarter. Or to be more precise, studying music improves verbal ability and visual patterning completion. I expect music education journals and arts education advocates to jump on this little piece of good news and use it to advocate for inclusion of the arts in school curriculum. Having spent a good-sized chunk of my own life on that very cause, all I can say is—good luck and Godspeed.

But I wonder—why do we feel compelled to defend music, art, dance and drama for their subsidiary benefits: enhanced brain development, spatial/visual/temporal processing, improving memory and attention, pitch recognition, physical coordination, personal discipline, teamwork, etc, etc.?

This tendency to look for “scientifically based” reasons to teach the humanities was stirred in 1993 when Dr. Frances Rauscher produced a modest little study about the temporary effects of listening to highly patterned music on spatial reasoning. Rauscher (to her eventual regret, I’m sure) used the word “IQ” in noting that her subjects’ measured responses improved 8 or 9 points after listening to Mozart. From there, it was a steady parade of books, newspaper articles and boxed sets of CDs, since there was now proof that “Mozart makes you smarter.”

Naturally, music teachers everywhere repeated the mantra, and just as naturally, there was well-researched refutation. The movement hit its nadir when Zell Miller, governor of Georgia, promoted the idea of giving every newborn in Georgia a CD or cassette tape of classical music. Rauscher’s response, when she heard about the initiative in Georgia: “It can’t hurt.” Perhaps, however, we could be a bit more systematic and intentional in introducing students to their cultural heritage.

Where did we get the idea that artistic expression is less useful or important than the sciences? How did music, art, dance and drama get pushed aside in our American school curriculum? I’m not surprised that practicing or listening to music has beneficial effects on brain functions, but those are side effects. Kids should study music because it’s central to every human society on earth and has a vitally important role in every aspect of culture, from history to literature to media and communication studies.  Music is part of what it means to be a human being.