 Society tells us lots of things these days. Wanna get skinny? Don't buy that burger. Try some tofu. Wanna get rich? Don't buy that extra grand latte with the expresso shot. Buy this financial course. Wanna relax? Scroll and click. Wanna be a better teacher? Buy and memorize “this” book and attend “this” professional development workshop. Wanna be a better musician? Buy “this” more exorbitantly expensive instrument/piece of equipment/technology. Wanna find God? Buy and read “this” book on a certain day of the week in a certain building. And don’t forget to make a donation on your way out. Does any of that actually work? Let me ask you a more pointed question: Does any of that work for you? One more question. Why listen to me? Because I was once you and encountered the issues that most music educators struggle with in their classroom. Not “sorta” you – but you. No matter where you are in your career as a music teacher, I was once there. Not “sorta” there – but there. The techniques and ideas I present are the result of not just years but decades of experimentation, research, refinement, and re-calibration. They work. And if you noticed, I’m not asking you to open your wallet; only your imagination and curiosity for something that might actually be . . . better. First, the three words that empowered a chunk of my growth came from my former principal Jack Jadach: “Addition by subtraction”. Strip away the old presumptions, jettison distractions, focus on the system to achieve the goal, and accomplish more with less. For now, I'm going to stay in the realm of your 7.5 hour classroom job and your wallet. Any significant change in your 7.5 hour job will have to be substantial, sustainable changes - changes that you can keep up for the long run and ostensibly turn into lifelong personal habits. As far as your 16.5 hour business goes, if you want more money in your pocket, you will have to make changes. Start by keeping track of your money. I know it doesn't sound sexy and it involves math and numbers, but it pays off. I am always amazed at how many people don't know what their “number” is. Without the assistance of a book, place, or day of the week, I religiously knew what that number was. You may think by cutting back on that latte or magazine or online subscription that you are going to save some money in your 16.5 hour business but unless you make substantial, sustainable changes, it will barely be a ripple on your financial pond. If you want sizable results, it's going to take some bold strokes. Start today. Those strokes start with sustainable short little lines that we draw in the sand. These are the lines that we tell ourselves (as well as others) that we aren’t going to cross again. Stay away from those lines long enough and you’ll turn that sand into stone. More on that in another post. In any case your personal business requires several different strategies: a one year plan, a five year plan, a ten year plan, a twenty year plan, and a retirement plan. You need to start working on these as soon as possible. No one can do this planning but you – but you will need the help of others to bring these plans to fruition. What skill sets will you need to acquire? You must understand that to enjoy the benefits of solid planning, you’ll have to anticipate some of the obstacle you’ll encounter along the way. Plan for both the good and bad that loom up ahead. As far as gaining more time and momentum in your 7.5 hour job, I can tell you that two techniques I've outlined on these pages will give you immense amounts ofnewly found time with your students. Using “stop and go” will drastically cut back on management waste where you find yourself looking for five hundred different ways to say “stop talking” or “pay attention”. Kids respond 60,000 times more to what they see than what they hear, but sure, keep saying “stop talking”. If you are in an elementary music room, employing “pilot and co-pilot” will create a franchise of pygmy-sized teachers who will do your bidding on an hourly basis. You don't even have to pay them. They will teach their peers better than you probably will and make connections that you never thought were capable of with other students. “Pilot and co-pilot” will give your program momentum as well as time. These two techniques alone will create hours and days of teaching time during your 7.5 hour job. The compounded gains over a career spanning twenty, thirty, or forty years is astronomical. These are gains that are yours for the taking. If you seriously analyze your teaching, you will undoubtedly find even more opportunities to streamline your teaching and find more instructional time in your classes. If none of this appeals to you, then by all means, keep looking for one more way to say “stop talking”. Mime it like Marcel Marceau. Say “Acha kuzungumza!” if Swahili floats your boat. Or you can do it like Cheech and Chong’s Sister Mary Elephant. My techniques work.
Take a chance on something different. Create something that’s superior - but try this first. If you choose to keep doing things the same old ineffective way, you are willfully turning yourself into a calcified, nagging, tedious caricature of Charlie Brown’s trombone-sounding teacher. Don't use “pilot and co-pilot”. Live a 7.5 hour life of willful ignorance. Find something that works better. Go right ahead - but try this first. If you don't try out these two teaching techniques, you know you're squandering educational capitol right under your nose and not compounding the positive efforts for your students. Make some big changes. Get some big results. Like I always teach “sing big, dream big”. A “new you” is possible – in both your 7.5 hour job as well as your 16.6 hour business. And if a “new you” is possible, the sky's the limit for your students.  Sometimes to make kids use their brains, I would respond to a student’s answer with “Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you know”. And a few minutes later, I would respond to someone else with “Don't tell me what you know, tell me what you think”.
Someone would always say, “But you said the opposite few minutes ago.” “Yes, because sometimes you need think and sometimes you need to react and reacting is based on what you have learned.” The 7.5 hour job is primarily concerned with what people know. The 16.5 hour business uses some time to think, dress rehearse ideas, and practice for the next 7.5 hours but make no doubt about it: when the 7.5 hours hit, you've got to be on and in total control of your material while in front of students. We learn that the proper response is some version of “Tell me what is there”. Taping our teaching is a good habit to learn “what is there”. I’m a big believer in taping my lessons and gigs. At times, I feel like a glutton for punishment – but I always find something I can improve. The reason we tape ourselves while we teach is for analysis afterwards and to learn not what we think we know but what we actually see - what is actually there. It's the only reliable way to make significant improvements in your teaching. As Frank Schoonover, American painter and illustrator, told my uncle who told me, “Don't paint what you see, paint what is there”. Our senses have a way of filtering what is actually in front of us. They're at their most distorted when we're in the process of thinking, “This lesson plan sucks, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote it.” It is a variant of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in action: any attempt to measure something will inevitably alter what is being measured in real time. Just by collecting data as the event is occurring, we will alter the evidence and skew the data. Try to live by these words: “Nothing is ever as bad or as good as it appears when you're living through it.” Even if you get fired or RIFed. One thing that happens to all of us when we teach is that we become distracted – and distraction always opens the door to mental errors. We typically say that we won't be distracted but we’re always tricked. When you have twenty to thirty to forty to upwards of one-hundred-fifty students in front of you like I did in chorus rehearsal, something is going to divert your powers of attention. For me, the toughest thing to do was to have my accompanying parts down solid for chorus. I needed to be able to play them in my sleep, to perform them with my eyes closed, basically have them memorized. There was a day and course where I was having trouble with a two bar phrase that I had thought I had mailed the night before after about an hour's worth of practice. During the rehearsal, though, I was battling several distractions with one-hundred-fifty kids in front of me and I kept missing a note or two when I would reach those two problematic measures. It wasn't an egregious mistake, nothing where the kids would say, “Mr. Holmes, you really messed that up” At one point as we performed the phrase that included those two measures, I fumbled my way through them for the up-teenth time. I was beyond frustration with myself and slam my fingers into the next chord and yelled one of my go-to curses. I was distracted by my own mistakes and momentarily forgot where I was – and how many kids were sitting right in front of me. “Son of a bitch!” rang through the PA system. I looked up and the chorus resembled deer in headlights. They were frozen in fear that I was angry with them, that their poor singing was the reason that I lost it. After being confounded by their scared, stunned expression for a few seconds, I realized their confusion and what I had done, started to laugh, and say “Oh, you thought that when I yelled ‘mother fucker’, that was about you? No, no, no! That was about Mr. Holmes . . it was about me and my bad piano playing. I apologize for my language. I kept screwing up in that one spot. Don't worry, you sound great; me, not so much today. Let’s take a break. You have go time!” As the kids started to buzz on their break, one of the kids on the first row quietly said, “Mr. Holmes, it wasn’t ‘mother fucker', it was ‘son of a bitch’”. “Thank you. Duly Noted!” I checked the tape after school that day since I was recording my rehearsal. She was correct. Distractions can make you forget exactly what you said in class. The more you prepare, the more you study the tapes of your classes and rehearsals, the more you get feedback of a constructive unbiased nature. The less you will need those feedback sessions. Good habits will sink in. And distractions will have a diminished effect on you.  I play gigs. I set up my PA, guitar, electric piano, a mic, and more cords than I care to describe. I enjoy interacting with the audience on a table-to-table basis on breaks, usually to find out what songs they want me to play but also just to say “hi” and “thanks for coming out.” My experience is that people will tell me what they want to hear and are also more than willing to strike up a conversation. Every time I play out, I inevitably have listeners say they wish they had learned how to play piano or guitar. “Well, what did you learn in music class when you were a kid?”, I always ask. And while you and I are in the moment, I’m asking you. What did you learn in music class when you were a little kid? The responses I get from the people on gigs are sometimes strained, always comical with a subtext of light but deep-seated resentment. “Not a whole hell of a lot.” “How to color and listen to music.” “How to sing songs I hated – and STILL hate.” Occasionally someone will say something about a flute-a-phone, a musical, a performance, or a few months of band lessons. But I'm not getting a whole lot of five-star reviews out there when I talk to the masses at gigs. After they answer my question and I tell them I am a music teacher, they admire the gigging rig and often end up asking me this: “Where did you learn how to play piano and guitar . . . and do all this stuff?” I often laugh because the answer is not at a college. Sure, I started dabbling with a piano and I was a kid but my parents didn't spring for lessons, primarily because we did not have the cash flow for that sort of thing. When my mom wasn’t looking, I took lots of small electric appliances apart and put them back together. Once I learned how to solder and interchange parts. Yeah, some things blew up but I was never electrocuted. Shocked a few times – but never electrocuted. I wanted to learn to play the piano that was at my grandmother’s house. Even though my mom was a child prodigy and was chauffeured to Philly to play at on the Horn & Hardart Children's Hour, she knew her limits as a mom and really wanted nothing to do with giving me piano lessons. I have a feeling that I was enough of a puzzle with adding another layer of enigma on top of the riddle I already was. So yeah, I am a sum of my parts. And one of the parts that was blissfully missing from my childhood was . . . I never had general music.  Yep. I went to a parochial school for eight years and the closest I ever got to the Arts was singing hymns or a handful of songs, our “Poems and Pictures” book, and a weekly Friday afternoon coloring sheet in eighth grade. My love of music from my earliest years didn’t include “kid music” or “school music”. Lots of church music, especially Gregorian chant. My father was a DJ on the radio so I grew up with whatever he was playing. From an early age, I learned how to make educational gold out of stuff others threw away. In third grade, a cousin gave me a wooden recorder. I figured out the C diatonic scale in a few minutes and was able to play about a dozen simple songs that first day. When I was about twelve, a perfect day was when I was allowed to go to visit my dad at work and explore the radio station. One day I found two huge garbage bins next to the clattering Associated Press tele-type machines that were filled with hundreds of LPs. I asked my dad why the LPs were in the bin. “Those are complimentary LPs sent by record labels to every radio station in hopes that we’ll play their disks. The stuff that doesn’t fit our play list gets thrown away in the bin.” “So if they’re garbage, can I keep them?” “Sure. By all means.” Dad pulled out a Philadelphia Orchestra album and laughed, “Swing and sway with Eugene Or-man-day!” And I discovered that I loved jazz and classical music. I poured over the 10-point-font liner notes, especially those written by George Avakian. Always astutely written, reading was like attending a lecture in music history. So, yes. I dodged the general music bullet in elementary school. My legitimate exposure to music education started in fourth grade with musicians who taught instrumental music on Saturday mornings at our diocesan music program. These teachers didn’t treat us like kids as much as young musicians. The fun was always balanced with subtle lessons on taking responsibility, practicing, and thinking on our own. There was always a stack of blank manuscript paper in the band room we were encouraged to use. So that’s how it started. No one could have predicted that the kid who crudely wrote notes on manuscript paper would someday be scoring and recording soundtracks for TV shows. If you’re teaching music in an elementary, junior high, or high school, that same kid is probably in your class right now. Can you guess who he or she is? Treating my students just as my most influential teachers treated me, as young musicians, has been a constant thread through all my years of teaching. We are all musicians; some of us are simply a few more miles “down the road” than some others. I’ve taught my students that no matter who we are, we treat all we meet on the road as a fellow musician with respect and share what we’ve learned. So take a hard look today at that eight-year-old kid in your general music class. Imagine someone running into them “down the road” in about thirty years. When they’re asked “What the most important idea you kept from my music class?”, what will be the answer?   Music teachers, How passionate are music educators about music? Would our students know that we have a passion for music and the Arts? The passion they see when Steph Curry charges the basket has to be seen in the music room. If we don’t communicate that passion, where will our students see an example of passion for the Arts? When we perform, conduct, or compose music, how do kids know we’re passionate about it? I guess that begs the question, are you passionate about music? And if you are passionate about it, how do you pass that on to your students so that when they sing or pickup an instrument, that they find music they can perform that they're passionate about, too? Notice that I haven’t used the word “teach”. I’m talking about a passion for music, not teaching music or teaching in general. To my mind, music is to teaching like god is to religion. I wasn’t all that passionate about teaching. My “teacher” mindset was more craftsman-like. I never said the quiet part out loud. But the kids knew. I WAS passionate about music, about making music, about sharing how important music was to me, about how much structure and understanding music brought to my world. Music, yes; teaching, not so much. I think the initial “tell” music educators give concerning their passion for music quotient is the first time they sing a song for a class of older elementary kids. When I flat out sang a song for new group of kids in a new school, there would always be some diverted eye contact and embarrassed laughter, as in, “What’s up with THIS guy?” I was doing nothing different than I had done on hundreds of gigs when I was wearing a tux and singing into a mic: focused, prepared, delivering the emotion, uninhibited. They just hadn’t encountered that yet. I would usually stop in the middle of a phrase and, with a sense of ennui, explain that this is what singing is about: it’s about BIG singing, not tentative singing; it’s not about going through the motions – it’s about traveling through the heart. And as my students, they better get used to this mindset because that was going to be how we were going to roll from there on out. The kids who initially got a lot of my eye contact were the ones who put passion into their music. I would rather have a class with one passionate music maker than a room full of well-behave, attentive kids. Passion can be the joy of a simple song. For the littlest ones that I taught, the song “Magic Penny” was one they noticed I felt a little bit more special about. “Love is something if you give it away”. I believe in that lyric! “This Little Light of Mine”. Again, sending your light out into the world – I passionately believe in that mindset!. And of course, there are all the goofy little folk songs that just make us smile and laugh. “Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream. Throw your teacher overboard and Listen to her scream!” A great source book for that material is “Campfire Songs: Lyrics And Chords To More Than 100 Sing-Along Favorites” by Rene Maddox and Rosalyn Cobb. As kids got older, more lyrically complex story songs started to appear in my lesson plans. “Mr. Bojangles” by Jerry Jeff Walker and Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” were favorites of the kids. The stories that I told behind the songs gripped their attention and made them think about people, places, time periods, situations, and hardships they would have never thought of before. The cautionary tale of the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” or the insecurity of John Mayer’s “Stop This Train” were like candles lit in a dark room that illuminated the idea that there is more to learning a song than just the mechanics. Lucky for me, I was able to write a song called “Two Friends” that was able to sum up a relationship that never ends. For some reason, that song resonated and stuck with kids.  As I told my kids, if at least a portion of your music isn't traveling through your heart, it doesn't really count.
Find the passion in your music. Don’t be embarrassed to display it. Pass it on to your kids. I’m betting that someday when I’m old and forget the lyrics, melodies, and chords, that last thing I’ll hold onto is this passion. And in reality, it’ll probably be the other way around. In the end, it will probably be that the passion I have found in music will be the one holding on to me.  I rarely play the piano part as written. I change it to accommodate my fingers and skill level. Guilty as charged. I know. Some of you are reaching for the fainting couch. Doesn’t matter if it’s Debussy or Billy Strayhorn. I’m putting it in a key that’s . . . convenient. The third movement of Suite bergamasque, "Clair de lune": yeah, it’s in Db but I’m transposing that bad boy and playing it in C (exceptions to the rule: choral accompaniments don’t get a Mulligan and Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” will ALWAYS be in Db). Maybe you took piano lessons as a kid or only class piano in college. Either way, if you’re honest with yourself, piano is a big part of music education at any level and especially in the elementary music classroom. Take a moment to examine your relationship with the eighty-eights. When did you start? What compelled you to play – or avoid – the piano. What’s the first thought you have when hear the sound of a piano? Joy? Fear? Contentment? When I hear the piano, I think of my mom’s playing when I was a little kid, Glenn Gould, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Peter Nero, Bill Evans, and Gene Harris, the pianists I heard live as a little kid like Count Basie, Earl Gardner, Bernard Peiffer, and Cy Coleman, the great local pianists I’ve met and got to hear live over the years like Don Glandon and Jeff Knoettner, and the fabulous pianists I played with like Frank Germin, Joe Laird, and Marty Lassman. Most of all, when I close my eyes and “think” piano, I see the thousands of children I introduced to playing piano. How you approach piano in front of kids or in the public is not dictated by just your technical proficiency. It also depends on your overall musical confidence and your ability to adapt on the fly, too. When I approach a piano to play for an audience, I am not concerned with notes. I am focused on how I am going to communicate the emotion and story that I found in the composition. You might hear a wrong note but you will NEVER hear a specious sentiment. I didn’t have piano lessons as a kid. I always wanted them. The primary reason was that my parents did not have the required discretionary cash. Although my mother was a childhood prodigy and played on the Horn and Hardart Children's Hour in Philadelphia and New York, she knew her limits with the kid she would be working with and did not attempt to give me piano lessons. By junior high, my hero was Bill Evans, who was soon joined by Keith Jarrett and Glenn Gould. Did I mention Gene Harris? In high school, I studied double bass and progressed to the point where I was playing in a variety of trio and big band settings. I was seeing in real time how the piano is played and was learning how to follow a pianist’s left hand. Nothing like on-the-job ear training. My only semester of piano was in college. If you weren’t a pianist going into music education in college, what was your college piano experience like? Starting in college, I practiced harmonically analyzing piano music (figuring out the harmonic progressions with emphasis on leading tones and crucial intervals) and re-harmonizing classical as well as pop melodies. I SLOWLY starting voicing what I saw, edited, and re-voiced until I heard first in my mind and second in my ears what I considered an functional version of the original part. During my last class piano session, my teacher realized my editing ploy – but confided with me that it was probably a more valuable skill than being a note-perfect reading technician, given the line of work was embarking upon. I worked on these skills so much that I got to the point where I could do simpler songs in real time. I was always testing my abilities with increasingly harder pieces. Now, every time I think of a song that I've never played before, I can feel the fingers in my brain falling into certain patterns before I even sit down at the piano. As Glenn said, “One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind.” I did this each day in my classroom. My own compositions and improvisations became more complex and harder for me to pull off. For years, I kept this in the classroom and held off attempting it in public on gigs. Anything I played on gigs was locked in before the gig and not done on the fly. Eventually, I got confident enough in my skills do it spontaneously on gigs. I was editing in real time and making sure the key notes fell under my fingers. Sure, after listening to my edits, Liszt would laugh, Gounod would groan, and Paganini might get positively postal – but the check was always cashed after I played. The issue then became ‘how do I voice a baseline, inside parts, and a melody, especially like Bill would’. I'm still working on it. I will never have Evan’s dexterity, speed, and command over rootless voicings – but I’ve developed the habit of taking the skills I have and pushing them to the next level so much so that I perform solo piano gigs on a fairly regular basis. In the classroom, I saw that the simple act of modeling piano playing and reinforcing the idea that playing anything musical is a journey was more important than anything I ever said. When I wasn’t playing, I talked about playing. I would tell my students that my favorite minutes with a piano or guitar were late at night, quietly playing for myself at home, not working on new, challenging pieces but old favorites. If, as a music teacher who wasn’t a piano major, you are ever disappointed in your piano skills, I’ll let you in on a secret: we all feel that way. The important things are to
And just like Alan Brandt and Bob Haymes named their classic standard: “That’s All”. I was lucky as a teacher because even though I taught hundreds and thousands of kids how to play piano, some individually, most of them in a general music class, I never saw myself as a piano teacher. I was just a musician who had a few skills, figured out some patterns, paid attention, made music at the piano, and loved sharing what I knew with others so they could go on their OWN journey. So yes, along with my thousands of accomplices, guilty as charged – and still doing hard time!  from 2019
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AuthorBoyd Holmes, the Writer Archives
February 2025
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