So, you were trained by people that didn't emphasize piano and guitar and your pedagogy classes, right?
Why is that?
Is it because they felt that music theory is the most important part of an elementary music program?
Knowing all the modes and where the whole and half steps in them occur?
Is it because there was a strong sense that hand signs, solfeggio, and singing pitch and rhythmic syllables were the linchpin of any progressive elementary music program?
Or maybe it was just about the way your teachers – and your teachers’ teachers - were trained. No malicious intent. It was just the way things were done during that time period.
The pedagogy pendulum can always be counted on to swing. Music teachers who were taught by World War II veterans who availed themselves of the GI Bill had an emphasis on wind instruments found in typical big bands. That influence is still visible today.
Often times, the pendulum is driven by technology and manufacturing. It has only been in recent decades that the global economy has been able to mass-produce low-price guitars as well as MIDI-equipped keyboards to the consumer class.
Societal patterns often nudge the pendulum. As people age, they tend to participate less in group music or team sport activities. Pianos and guitars are considered “life-time” instruments just as swimming and tennis are seen as “life-time” sports. Guitars, pianos, tennis, and swimming are here to stay.
The reason why the pendulum swings doesn’t matter. Elementary music teachers need to be prepared to teach piano and guitar skills as well as perform on both instruments.
I once told a group of senior music majors, “Once you leave the hallowed halls of college, I am your competition for a job. It will be my skillsets up against yours.”
As the shock appeared on their faces, I reassured them.
“Don't worry. There are music teachers in this very district today that don't know how to play piano or guitar and they still got jobs. Of course, they were hired by administrators who don't have a clue about hiring a music teacher. Some of these teachers have done everything they can to skirt the issue of their skillset. They are going to retire in their sixties with the same skillset they had walking in the door in their twenties.”
If there's any chance that you are going to be teaching in an elementary school or kids with severe disabilities, it behooves you to learn guitar. You can create an entire career out of four cowboy chords. The only thing stopping you is you.
You can do it.
If you don't know piano, start with the Alfred series and just plow through them. It doesn't matter if it takes you three weeks or three years. Just do it.
Put your ear training to good use. Learn how to play simple melodies with your right hand middle, ring, and little fingers while you play static bass parts in your left hand. Progress to filling in chord tones beneath the melody in your right hand. Develop this to the point where you can add a few comping patterns between your two hands and can sing the melody as you play.
You can do this.
The question I have for you is this: Do you want to train kids to become adults who need .mp3s when they perform music?
When your principal comes to you and asked you to play Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” three minutes before a kindergarten graduation ceremony, are you going to be desperately looking for it on YouTube? If you visit a student in the hospital, are you going to use your phone to play .mp3 files as you sing songs to them?
How Were You Taught? And Does It Matter?
Once you are twenty-one, all bets are off. Your past education and teachers don’t count as a viable excuse for what you don’t know. You are responsible for your skill set or lack thereof.
The only two things my parents taught me about finances were to save my money and not sell any stock once I bought it. One of those pieces of advice is incredibly ill-formed and could cost thousands of dollars over a financial investing lifetime. I quickly learned that I didn't know a whole lot about money and that if I was going to learn, it was going to be on me.
When I graduated as a music education major, I knew a ton of theory, history, and beginning pedagogy for wind instruments but little functional knowledge to hit the ground running in an elementary program.
When it came to both music and finances, I realized that I had to turbo change my instincts as a life-long autodidact. I had scant functional education in either area. That's not to say I didn't graduate from high school not knowing how to do basic math, trig, and calc or that I didn’t have a keen appreciation of Berg’s opera “Lulu” or Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system. I knew that stuff. But I'm talking about functional knowledge, street smarts teaching, and guerrilla financing.
Without making a conscientious effort to expand my skills after college, I would have stayed right where I was in my senior year.
For crying out loud, MIDI wasn't even invented until I was out of college – and in many ways, MIDI has been eclipsed by USB. The primary source for that kind of technical knowledge was only found in trade periodicals. Or with guitar, on a break during a gig, asking Nick Bucci how he was voicing that E9 chord up on the neck. Or analyzing the Bill Evans omnibook to see how he voiced his rootless chords.
As far as money goes, I had to figure out things like the difference between a mutual fund and index fund and which was more advantageous for my financial future. There was no course in my college curriculum that introduced me to small caps or mid caps.
Even though I got a late start financially, compound interest has been my friend and supporter to this day. All of that research and “advanced degree” work was on me. What I learned, I applied to my 16.5 hour business day.
No teacher told me to do these things. I was driven to learn them.
Find your inner drive. Determine how smart you want to be.
See yourself as the music teacher you could be with the financial stability you deserve after doing the homework and following through.
Find your career soundboard. A piano soundboard is the part of the piano that transforms the vibrations of the piano strings into audible waves of sound. It what makes that striking hammer on a string sing. A career soundboard is another music teacher who will listen to your thought processes when ideas are germinating. More on this in another post.
My career soundboard was Marty Lassman.
Marty and I had known each other since college, worked together at our first teaching gigs for eight-teen years, and simultaneously changed jobs to two areas of music that were foreign to us. Marty had been a band director and was now in charge of a choral program at a performing arts school. I had been in elementary and middle school music teacher and now was teaching at a school for severely disabled children.
Our first months were a blur of new experiences. We shared stories every weekend driving back from gigs at one in the morning, talking about what we were learning and trying for the first time. Marty actively listened to my ideas and experiences, remained quiet as well as asked questions at the right times. His soundboarding was invaluable. He helped me be a better teacher.
If you feel the need to “get down and get funky with your bad autodidactic self” but are looking for a little support, find a career soundboard like Marty. For that matter, feel free to reach out to me. I'm sure we can have some great talks at one in the morning. Or any other times it is more convenient for you.
Create a “new you”.
Make that “new you” so new that other teachers don't even recognize you and can’t remember the old you.
Identify and develop the skills that you should have had half a lifetime ago.
Make your career changes so dramatic that your college teachers look at you and wonder where you learned how to do what you're doing.
Lead by example.
Why is that?
Is it because they felt that music theory is the most important part of an elementary music program?
Knowing all the modes and where the whole and half steps in them occur?
Is it because there was a strong sense that hand signs, solfeggio, and singing pitch and rhythmic syllables were the linchpin of any progressive elementary music program?
Or maybe it was just about the way your teachers – and your teachers’ teachers - were trained. No malicious intent. It was just the way things were done during that time period.
The pedagogy pendulum can always be counted on to swing. Music teachers who were taught by World War II veterans who availed themselves of the GI Bill had an emphasis on wind instruments found in typical big bands. That influence is still visible today.
Often times, the pendulum is driven by technology and manufacturing. It has only been in recent decades that the global economy has been able to mass-produce low-price guitars as well as MIDI-equipped keyboards to the consumer class.
Societal patterns often nudge the pendulum. As people age, they tend to participate less in group music or team sport activities. Pianos and guitars are considered “life-time” instruments just as swimming and tennis are seen as “life-time” sports. Guitars, pianos, tennis, and swimming are here to stay.
The reason why the pendulum swings doesn’t matter. Elementary music teachers need to be prepared to teach piano and guitar skills as well as perform on both instruments.
I once told a group of senior music majors, “Once you leave the hallowed halls of college, I am your competition for a job. It will be my skillsets up against yours.”
As the shock appeared on their faces, I reassured them.
“Don't worry. There are music teachers in this very district today that don't know how to play piano or guitar and they still got jobs. Of course, they were hired by administrators who don't have a clue about hiring a music teacher. Some of these teachers have done everything they can to skirt the issue of their skillset. They are going to retire in their sixties with the same skillset they had walking in the door in their twenties.”
If there's any chance that you are going to be teaching in an elementary school or kids with severe disabilities, it behooves you to learn guitar. You can create an entire career out of four cowboy chords. The only thing stopping you is you.
You can do it.
If you don't know piano, start with the Alfred series and just plow through them. It doesn't matter if it takes you three weeks or three years. Just do it.
Put your ear training to good use. Learn how to play simple melodies with your right hand middle, ring, and little fingers while you play static bass parts in your left hand. Progress to filling in chord tones beneath the melody in your right hand. Develop this to the point where you can add a few comping patterns between your two hands and can sing the melody as you play.
You can do this.
The question I have for you is this: Do you want to train kids to become adults who need .mp3s when they perform music?
When your principal comes to you and asked you to play Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” three minutes before a kindergarten graduation ceremony, are you going to be desperately looking for it on YouTube? If you visit a student in the hospital, are you going to use your phone to play .mp3 files as you sing songs to them?
How Were You Taught? And Does It Matter?
Once you are twenty-one, all bets are off. Your past education and teachers don’t count as a viable excuse for what you don’t know. You are responsible for your skill set or lack thereof.
The only two things my parents taught me about finances were to save my money and not sell any stock once I bought it. One of those pieces of advice is incredibly ill-formed and could cost thousands of dollars over a financial investing lifetime. I quickly learned that I didn't know a whole lot about money and that if I was going to learn, it was going to be on me.
When I graduated as a music education major, I knew a ton of theory, history, and beginning pedagogy for wind instruments but little functional knowledge to hit the ground running in an elementary program.
When it came to both music and finances, I realized that I had to turbo change my instincts as a life-long autodidact. I had scant functional education in either area. That's not to say I didn't graduate from high school not knowing how to do basic math, trig, and calc or that I didn’t have a keen appreciation of Berg’s opera “Lulu” or Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system. I knew that stuff. But I'm talking about functional knowledge, street smarts teaching, and guerrilla financing.
Without making a conscientious effort to expand my skills after college, I would have stayed right where I was in my senior year.
For crying out loud, MIDI wasn't even invented until I was out of college – and in many ways, MIDI has been eclipsed by USB. The primary source for that kind of technical knowledge was only found in trade periodicals. Or with guitar, on a break during a gig, asking Nick Bucci how he was voicing that E9 chord up on the neck. Or analyzing the Bill Evans omnibook to see how he voiced his rootless chords.
As far as money goes, I had to figure out things like the difference between a mutual fund and index fund and which was more advantageous for my financial future. There was no course in my college curriculum that introduced me to small caps or mid caps.
Even though I got a late start financially, compound interest has been my friend and supporter to this day. All of that research and “advanced degree” work was on me. What I learned, I applied to my 16.5 hour business day.
No teacher told me to do these things. I was driven to learn them.
Find your inner drive. Determine how smart you want to be.
See yourself as the music teacher you could be with the financial stability you deserve after doing the homework and following through.
Find your career soundboard. A piano soundboard is the part of the piano that transforms the vibrations of the piano strings into audible waves of sound. It what makes that striking hammer on a string sing. A career soundboard is another music teacher who will listen to your thought processes when ideas are germinating. More on this in another post.
My career soundboard was Marty Lassman.
Marty and I had known each other since college, worked together at our first teaching gigs for eight-teen years, and simultaneously changed jobs to two areas of music that were foreign to us. Marty had been a band director and was now in charge of a choral program at a performing arts school. I had been in elementary and middle school music teacher and now was teaching at a school for severely disabled children.
Our first months were a blur of new experiences. We shared stories every weekend driving back from gigs at one in the morning, talking about what we were learning and trying for the first time. Marty actively listened to my ideas and experiences, remained quiet as well as asked questions at the right times. His soundboarding was invaluable. He helped me be a better teacher.
If you feel the need to “get down and get funky with your bad autodidactic self” but are looking for a little support, find a career soundboard like Marty. For that matter, feel free to reach out to me. I'm sure we can have some great talks at one in the morning. Or any other times it is more convenient for you.
Create a “new you”.
Make that “new you” so new that other teachers don't even recognize you and can’t remember the old you.
Identify and develop the skills that you should have had half a lifetime ago.
Make your career changes so dramatic that your college teachers look at you and wonder where you learned how to do what you're doing.
Lead by example.
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