Boyd Holmes, the Writer

Don't teach, facilitate.

7/29/2021

If you were going to sclice and dice your professional self, what would the parts be that added up to your sum?

ME?

Coach, facilitator, musician, parent, and agent provocateur.

The trap that many teachers fall into is that when they teach, they talk too much.

Conductors and directors can be this way, too. I've been involved in professional productions where the director wants to explain to the ensemble exactly what he's going for in a three second bar of music. Weirdly, that director will waste ten minutes talking, often trying to hear his voice validate his thought process and not really making thee ensemble sound different.

Me, being my indelicate self, will often say, “Can we just play or can we loop it a half-dozen times so we get what you're going after?”

Elementary music class should be about making music, not primarily talking about music.

I go by the old 80/20 rule. 80% music, 20% or less talking.

The most talking I do during the school year is during The Golden hour, namely the first class of the year, and a portion of the last class of the year where I recap and praise the kids on their treatment previous.

When you’re teaching, you come across like . . . well . . . a teacher. And the kids are sub-servient.

When you facilitate, you’ve got the mindset of a musician working with other musicians. Yes, they might not be as accomplished in some technical areas as you but your mindset emphasizes that we are ALL musicians on this road. It’s just that some of us are further down the road than others and that were here to help and lead the way.

In loco parentis? Yada yada. More at a later date.

Coach? Yes, you can do better and I am here to remind you and give you the precise techniques to achieve that goal you have but are afraid to give voice to.

Agent provocateur? Yeah, I’ll stir that pot . . . and make you aware of the ying and yang of music.And somewhere down the road , we WILL jam.

Now lets make MUSIC!

YOU?

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And Whatever You Do . . . .

7/22/2021

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“And whatever you do, don't let those kids play that piano! All they do is hit it!”

Those were the parting words from a music teacher who was leaving a school I had just been assigned. The school enrollment was somewhere between 600 and 700 students. It was a Title 1 School.

My preliminary assessments showed that a very small portion of the school had ever touched a piano or guitar before. Many kids, when given the opportunity to play the piano, approached it with their hands clenched, thumbs up, and trying to text notes as if they were using a cell phone.

It became obvious that they had not been in a room with someone who could actually play songs on the piano so for several weeks, they got to watch and listen to me play. I made eight and a half by eleven sheets with a single octave piano keyboard landscape wise. I gave each child two sheets so that they could have a left-hand and right-hand and pretend to play. I would ask them to watch my hands and try and copy what I did.

I gave them immense praise for those who mimicked me the best and soon everyone was catching on.

Their paper piano playing was making me smile and yell words praise that they were unused to seeing or hearing from their music teacher.

The script I wrote for that moment was as follows:

“When you respect the piano, the piano will respect you and make you sound like a thoughtful musician. When you disrespect the piano, bang on the keys with a fist, you are hitting the piano and it will make you sound like a fool.

It's just like it is with people, with the people you know and meet.

When we talk to one another, when we can make music with our words and logic, we make ourselves and our friends smarter. But when we use our fists to hit one another, we are showing disrespect not just to the person we're hitting but also to ourselves and that only brings shame.”

Eventually that room had over 20 pianos in it and I'm happy to report that no one ever hit a piano.

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S.T.A.R.: Do respectable things and people will respect you.

7/4/2021

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This is basically what I said.

“I know many grown-ups have told you that you need to respect everyone.

That's what I was told to when I was your age. What I came to understand, though, was the crucial word was not ‘respect’ but ‘civility’. It was about being civil to people.

I had to be civil to everyone. That means that with everyone I encounter I don't hit steal, cheat, hit, or lie to them. Everybody starts with the same treatment.

However, the people that I really liked, the people that I saw do good things day after day, the people who were my helpers, my family members who loved me, those people earned my respect.

How did they earn it? You earn respect by doing respectable things over and over again.

You can't buy someone's respect or force someone to respect you: you can only earn it.

Let me tell you a story about a boy I taught named James.

One day when he was in fourth grade and we were on go time, he came up and said, “Mr. Holmes, I need to talk to you privately”. We stepped outside the door to our music room and he shared with me that he felt that no one in his class respected him. It made him feel bad. It made him feel as if he had no friends.

I told him that I thought he was dealing with a very important feeling and it must have been making him feel bad. I assured him that I was pretty sure that he did have a few friends but I wanted him to think back a few weeks to recess time when he stole the football from the other boys when they were passing it around in a circle.

“You thought that was funny, James, but the other boys didn't like it. Do you think they respected you when you stole the football?”

He slowly shook his head no.

“And how about that rainy day when I had stopped by your classroom to talk with your teacher about something. You had indoor recess and were playing checkers with Jessica and it was clear you were going to lose the game. You flip the checkerboard up in the air in anger. How do you think your class mates felt when they saw you disrespect Jessica that way?”

I asked him who his best friends in his class were and why he like them so much. We determined that he like them because they did respectable things on a daily basis.

“You might want to try that on for size, James, doing things like your best friends do and see how things change. Apologize for what you've done in the past and then just try to be a more respectful person and see what happens.”

Then there’s the story about the first time I set foot in our school, Wilbur Elementary.

It was 8:00AM on the first day of school and all the boys and girls had their fancy new shoes, clothes, and book bags. Everywhere there was excitement and a million smiles in the hallways.

There was one kindergarten boy trying to carry his lunch box and books in a flimsy grocery bag down the hall. Some bigger kids bumped into him. His bag ripped and his belongings flew across the hallway.

Before I could get over to help him, a lady came over with a big smile on her face, helped him pick up his stuff, looked him in the eye, and said “Let's get you a proper book bag”.

In that moment, I knew I respected that lady. I turn to someone coming down the hall and asked who that lady was. They said “Oh, that's Mrs. Howell. She's our principal!”
Good things happen to people who respect others.

This is what Mrs. Howell did that morning with that little boy.

There are people, though, that we will meet that we've never known before but because of their job title, we have to respect what they say and do as they tell us.

Fire fighters, the cafeteria ladies, the school nurse, the janitors, police - they all require our respect because they have learned that by learning how to do the jobs they are doing.

So even if I don't know the name of the cafeteria lady, if she tells me I need to get into a different line, I do it and I don't question her. And if she tells you that you're being too noisy, you don't give her an eye roll or any back talk. We do it and we respect them.

So just remember, everybody is to be treated civilly but respect is earned.

Would you respect a teenager who kicked a dog? No!

Would you respect a man who would hit a woman? No!

Would you respect a woman who hit a man? No!

Would you respect ANYBODY who hit Mr. Holmes? NOOO (laughter ensues from the class)!

That's right.

We have to be civil to all people no matter how disrespectful their actions are. But clearly, if disrespectful people do not value your respect, they will have to do respectful things to earn it – or they never will.

So if you want some more respect in your life, now you know how to get it.

Do respectful things. At your age, that's the only way you will get it.

Never forget, you owe everyone civility. I give civility to everyone I meet – including you.

You need to be civil to everyone you meet on this planet.

But respect is earned. It's not a gift you or I can give or receive.

So if you want respect, learn to do respectful, helpful things and see how differently people will treat you.

That is the only way you can gain respect, especially in this music room.”

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S.T.A.R.: Ask and Answer Questions.

7/3/2021

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From what I've been told, when in court, lawyers tend to only ask questions if they are certain of the answers. Unfortunately many teachers are that way, too. They use their questions as assessments: they know the answer, they want to see if the kid knows the answer.

I maintained that if you structure your classes and activities properly, during the daily course of duties, it is pretty clear to see which kids have a grasp on what skills and to what degree they understood them without asking questions.

The most cogent music assessment or question you can a kid is, “Can you play me a song?” For starters, you are signaling that making music comes first. Any additional talking and assessing can wait. All those boorish questioning tones start to resemble at best a post mortem and at worst pure BS. They reveal an adult’s inability to shut their mouth and allow a child to make uninterrupted music.

What’s even worse, I have witnessed teachers ask questions in blatantly rude and pandering ways that immediately demonstrate to the child that it is not the question or answer is not as important as the teacher’s real message: who's the boss.

As teachers, we need to encourage children to ask questions of each other as well as of teachers. I would often say, “If I wasn’t here, who would you ask?” There was a sign on our chalkboard: “C3B4Me” – as in “If you have a simple question one of your friends might know the answer, talk to three of them before you ask me.”

C3B4Me was designed for mundane, housekeeping, mechanical activities of our class. In other words, if you see your classmates doing something that you have no clue about, better to ask them first.

When I worked at a school with children with profound disabilities, I became adept it having both sides of the conversation in my quadrant. If a child was primarily nonverbal, I learned how to phrase questions as well as respond to them. For example, as in when a child was looking at my strumming hand , I might infer that he was thinking about my guitar pick. “Boy, I bet you're thinking that guitar pick is really easy to drop, and I have to tell you, it is. It's so easy to drop that I put stuff on my fingers called ‘Gorilla Snot’ so that my pick sticks to my fingertips.”

In my general music classes, some kids would be intimidated by a 6’5” male teacher and less likely to ask questions, especially if they were taking the C3B4Me way too close to heart. I would pepper what I said in class with phrases like “You might be asking yourself why does that dotted quarter note followed by the eighth note sound suspiciously like the dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth, and that would be a great question. Is anybody thinking that question?” As hands went up, I would call on someone and say “Why don't you ask me that.” It was a low stress way for me to encourage kids to ask without fear or favor.

There were times where a great question from a student resulted in complementary guitar pick, with the expectation that I would never forget that question or the answer that we found together. It was much like when my sixth grade trumpet teacher, Mike Gibson, asked me out of the blue in my trumpet lesson “Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida?”

While it’s important to ascertain what students know, it is even more important to know what they think, how they came to their decisions, and what does their knowledge leads them to: to know what they are bringing to the party, what they can already do.

As music educators, we need to remember that we were formed by the questions we asked and the answers we were given as much as by the questions we were asked and the answers that were expected.

The questions we ask as teachers will model how our students shape their own questions and develop their curiosity toward what is important to them. Assessment and data are not intrinsically bad things but they are not the most important information that we need to pursue with our students.

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S.T.A.R.: Track the Talker.

7/2/2021

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Stuffy woman at a cocktail party: They say the eyes are the window to the soul.

Frasier Crane: If only you had one.

We were all told as kids to “keep your eye on the ball”.

Some kids get this eye discipline easily and some don’t. If you don’t believe me, attend a T-ball game for five-year-olds and get back to me.

Tracking the talker is a skill that has to become a habit in kids.

When teaching little buckaroos, eye contact is everything.

Before I would start class, before I would start a song, before I would start a new segment of the class, I would make eye contact with every single child in the room for a split second. If I couldn't achieve contact because they weren't looking at me, I waited. Children figure this out and learned to know that eye contact was not an option; it was a requirement to move the addenda forward.

By the way, when day was done, my eyes were often the most tired part of me.

We have to teach kids to look up, both figuratively and literally. Some children developed the habit of looking down at their shoes or are reluctant to look up when talking with authority figures. I would often take a knee to assume a more face-to-face altitude.

Eye contact is the first step in learning how to give a good handshake. After getting some good eye contact, the next thing we would often work on was introducing ourselves. I would often film the kids simply smiling while they looked into the camera and said their first name. I would then show the movie on the Smart Board. There was a lot of laughter but at its core, every child got an affirmation of their smile and name from their peers and their music teacher.

The conundrum with many classrooms is that children are sitting in groups of four at round tables or square desks and are positioned to look at each other. Fifty percent of them are potentially sitting with their back to the teacher.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you concertize on stage, everyone in the audience is pointed in your direction? And when a rabbi or priest is standing before their congregation, isn’t everyone is facing them? And when we go to a movie theater, are all the chairs bolted into the floor and facing the screen? Those cemented screws were not indicative of options or suggestions for seating arrangements: it was a dictate.

But teaching is not about being set in cement – there needs to be latitude for adaptation.

I learned at the Leach school that if a child has to adjust their vision radius even a few degrees either way, there was a probability that the struggle would limit their ability to see me. It was crucial that, along with the support of helpful paraprofessionals, I position students in wheelchairs at the most optimum sight line.

If you haven't read “Teach Like a Champion” by Doug Lemov, you should pick up a copy. Lemov is a master of classroom presentation and optimizing teaching environments. There are various video examples online that go with the book. Almost all of them have the class directly facing the teacher.

Tracking the talker doesn’t mean looking at the teacher all the time. It has implications for the teacher’s tracking, too. Tracking the talker means if a student is talking, all people in the room – including the teacher - are supposed to turn and look at the talker. Students come to realize I'm also going to turn and track the talker because it's a shared responsibility. It is a sign of respect. It goes hand-in-glove with S.T.A.R.’s “sitting like you're smart”.

Concerning the piano and guitar, if the music teacher has to constantly look at their hands and fingers when they play either the piano or guitar, you can bet that the kids will figure out two things: first, “This is the best time to do whatever I want to do because the teacher is concentrating on his hands” and second, “If the teacher doesn’t have to track me, why should I have to track the teacher?”

Tracking the talker might seem like a trivial point - until you're standing in front of a two-hundred-member fourth and fifth grade chorus. The habits that you've encouraged in groups of twenty or thirty in your classroom will pay huge dividends and will amount to life-saving skills for a choral director.

I will leave you with one last valuable tracking tip that I learned watching English actor Michael Caine in an “Actor's Workshop” episode. He was asked “what is the secret of acting?”

His emphatic, clipped response was “Nevah, nevah blink!! It shows weakness! But if you want to appear weak, blink!”

By incorporating that little tidbit in my teaching, I worked hard at not blinking and it really did pay off - I could go for long periods of time without breaking my gaze with my students.

It sounds like a crazy premise but it really works!

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S.T.A.R.: Sit Like You're Smart - Part 2.

7/1/2021

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I always want my students sitting in chairs and not on the floor.

I've learned that if I can get kids to sit properly in chairs in an elementary music room, they will usually perform, think, and have the attitude of someone at least one or two grades above where they are.

Unfortunately, that's not always possible. Sometimes there are just not enough chairs. At my last school, I used to borrow chairs from the multi-purpose room.

My experience is that classroom floors and their carpets are generally filthy. Younger children have a way of having soiled their pants and there's no way to stop those haz-mats from seeping into a rug. I always had a personal vacuum cleaner for the times that the cleaning staff didn’t clean my room.

We would never start the year with chairs. My students would have to demonstrate that they were ready to sit in chairs. That meant they had to be able to handle sitting in rows on the floor for at least two weeks. After that we would add the chairs. And if their management of chairs started to slip, I could always say “Maybe we need a refresher on the rug.”

As far as playing guitar, elementary school chairs are a must. The exception is kindergarten who will start with guitars flat on the floor. Strumming them that way is much easier.
I never bought 1/2 size for 3/4 size guitars. I always purchase dreadnaughts, knowing that kids aren't going to get any smaller, they're only going to get bigger as they grow into the instrument.

Sitting on the floor for any sustained length of time can be painful for a child – as well as for a less-than-limber music teacher. Just remember it is excruciating for any extended period of time. If kids have to sit on the floor, they have to be up and about, stretching their legs, at least every seven or eight minutes.

Next up: “S.T.A.R.: Track the Talker”.

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S.T.A.R.: Sit Like You're Smart - Part 1

7/1/2021

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Sometimes, during the opening sequence of our class when I played Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book One Prelude One as the kids walked in and sat down or after our “Hello” song, I would quietly give one or two attentive children a guitar pick. After the music finished, I would ask them if they knew why they were given the pick.

They rarely did.

Sometimes they had good guesses.

They sang the opening hello song really well? They moved their lips when they sang? They were watching my lips as they sang?

“No, you are sitting as if you are the smartest person in this classroom. Just look at how you are sitting. How does someone sit when they're smart? The way you were sitting.”
At least two-thirds of the class would immediately sit ramrod straight while the other third didn't change.

“It's not just a question of posture; it's also a question of attitude, of focus, of some degree of intellectual curiosity that is displayed on your face.”

I would always caution that I was only going by my first impressions, but those first impressions were often correct and more often than not, if I thought someone looked like they were the smartest person in the room, they would probably be somewhere in the top five.

There are many ways to sit like you're smart.

You can sit like you're smart while you're playing guitar. You can sit like you're smart when you're singing in chorus. You can sit like you're smart when you're playing piano.

I wanted to make sure the kids understood that someday, they would want to stand out in a crowd, and the best way to do it was to look like the smartest person in the room.

Sitting up tall also has a positive effect on the way we envision ourselves. The action precedes the personal emotional response.

Our classroom had a tiny window that visitors sometimes peeked through. I impressed on the students that if someone looked through that window, they wanted to look like they were the smartest person in the room to the visitor. The idea was to do the things and adopt the habits that smart people do in school.

When an administrator would stop by our room, they were usually quick within their first few sentences to compliment the class on how attentive and engaged they looked while sitting quietly.

I've gotten push back from other teachers on advising kids to sit like they're the smartest person in the room.

I was sharing this idea at a workshop I was conducting with elementary and middle school specialist staff members. One of the teachers reacted with “But aren't you saying the other kids look dumb?”

“Absolutely not. They are all smart. And I treat them like they are smart. It's just that a few have been taught at home that it is important to be perceived in the best way possible, as respecting and understanding kids. If they do that, that will be the way the world sees them. It’s my job to make sure all children develop that mindset”

I continued to get push back. I told them that I was not ready to negotiate on this point and that we were going to move on.
No more than forty-five minutes later, the head of school unexpectedly stopped by our workshop to see how things were progressing.

What do you think every single teacher did as that administrator walked through the door?

They adjusted how they were sitting so that they would look like the smartest person in the room.

So while they say that life is not an audition, sometimes it actually is. It's important for kids to know they are being watched in schools and if they want to get ahead and rise above, sometimes they can start the process by the way they carry themselves through the day.

I briefly discuss the logistics of kids sitting in chairs or on the floor in “S.T.A.R.: Sit Like You're Smart - Part 2.”

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S.T.A.R.: an Introduction

7/1/2021

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If you've read any of my earlier posts, you know that the Golden Hour is how I view that first teaching hour of the school year, the most precious hour of all of them. It's the time when I get to imprint on my students my goals, expectations, systems, and communication techniques for the entire year.
It's also a time when I impress upon them my distilled vision of how I want them to carry themselves in our room.

S.T.A.R. was not an overnight design. It was distilled over several years. The five components of S.T.A.R. (sit like you're smart, know when to start and stop, track the talker, asked and answer questions, and do respectful things and people will respect you) were the top of my list as far as behaviors I wanted to cultivate in my classroom.

For that matter, they were the qualities I wanted to see when I looked in a mirror.

I could easily connect anything musical I taught at any level to some element of S.T.A.R. – and I often did.

While it only took me about five minutes during that Golden Hour to introduce S.T.A.R., I'm dedicating a more detailed post to each of the points in hopes to amplify my feelings on each of the character traits.

Anybody can come up with their own S.T.A.R. .

What requires more rigor is to honestly self-examine your own behaviors as a teacher as well as the behaviors you want to see grow in your students. It's easy to find some kind of mnemonic device to reinforce with your students.

I’m tempted to say that the skills and concepts found in S.T.A.R. are more critical for the personal and musical advancement of your students than anything you’ll find in the national standards but I’ll resist the lure.

What I will say is that if you get your kids practicing the truisms contained in S.T.A.R., their success – as well as yours – will be grounded in skills and habits rather than luck.

The important thing is to take action: examine your value system and character totems, prioritize them, break them down into bite-size morsels, review, edit, rinse, and repeat until it represents the vision you have for establishing your students’ habits.

Next up: “S.T.A.R.: Sit Like You're Smart - Part 1”.

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Don't teach, facilitate.

And Whatever You Do . . . .

S.T.A.R.: Do respectable things and people will respect you.

S.T.A.R.: Ask and Answer Questions.

S.T.A.R.: Track the Talker.

S.T.A.R.: Sit Like You're Smart - Part 2.

S.T.A.R.: Sit Like You're Smart - Part 1

S.T.A.R.: an Introduction

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