If you notice, I don't push a lot of different methodologies on this blog. It’s not about right or wrong. Or if “this” way is the best way to do “that”. Sure, I have my ways of doing things. But I leave most of that stuff to more highfalutin edju-ma-cators. I’m too old and have been in a music room too many decades to believe that methods are anything more than swinging pendulums.
If it’s not about rights or wrongs then what are these posts about?
They’re about the choices we all have to make as educators of music.
What our college teachers taught us isn't always the best fit with how we understand and ultimately teach music. Especially at the beginning of your 7.5 hour career, finding a variety of approaches is more informative than one specific methodology being sold as an “all you need” answer.
As you travel through your first years away from college, it’s more crucial that you find a system that is authentic to the way you process music and as well as to the way your children get results. With a few non-negotiable exceptions, everything that I have espoused in these posts is fair game for your introspection, manipulation, or rejection.
Whatever you teach or model, have it originate from authentic core. Don’t worry if your old teachers or I wouldn’t agree with your approach. Keep your eye on the kids. Are your ideas connecting and building upon each other? Do your lessons dovetail and reinforce what YOU think you should be presenting in your class?
What is important to you as a teacher? If it all stopped today, what would you regret that you hadn’t covered in your classes?
When the synergy of what you value starts clicking on a daily basis, your students will positively respond like a ball rolling down a hill.
Your kids don’t care about your schedule, your budget, your student debt, or any of your regrets. They want to make music with you.
It’s that simple.
Making music. That’s what’s going to matter to your young musicians.
Teaching from an unauthentic place is the stasis that stymies any music teacher from achieving momentum, from connecting with large groups of kids, and from reacting self-actualization as a musician who shepherds young musicians. If you aren’t having fun teaching, there is a strong chance that your kids aren’t having that much fun either. It’s time for a check-up from the neck up.
It never hurts to take a self-survey of how authentic your approach has been over the years. Start by talking to old students. Ask them to be frank about what they remember of their classes with you. Tell them they can’t hurt your feelings, that you want their help to be a better teacher today by learning what you did in the past. Do they remember the stuff you were trying to communicate as important?
Most of all, know that you create your own history. You hold the pen. Or as one of my teachers said to me, “You picked the ax. Cut the wood”. You’re not there teaching as a testament to your college teachers and their choices. Their time with you has come and gone. You are creating your own legacy.
Take away point: Everyone creates their own legacy. Not just music teachers.
Respect what you’ve been taught but come up with your own ideas, explore, create, bring an old idea around to something new.
Lead with you authentic self. Find your truth. Remember what Polonius said to his son in “Hamlet”: “This above all: to thine own self be true.”
Take a chance. Every time your kids make music, you are asking them to take a chance, go out on a musical limb. A chance of playing the “wrong note”, of enduring ridicule from other kids, of exposing themselves to “suffering the slings and arrows of daily living and living life on life's terms” as an artist. How can we expect our students to take musical chances if we are playing it safe.
Take musical chances.
Who knows what you might find if you start tinkering around with an idea?
Maybe a new you.
If it’s not about rights or wrongs then what are these posts about?
They’re about the choices we all have to make as educators of music.
What our college teachers taught us isn't always the best fit with how we understand and ultimately teach music. Especially at the beginning of your 7.5 hour career, finding a variety of approaches is more informative than one specific methodology being sold as an “all you need” answer.
As you travel through your first years away from college, it’s more crucial that you find a system that is authentic to the way you process music and as well as to the way your children get results. With a few non-negotiable exceptions, everything that I have espoused in these posts is fair game for your introspection, manipulation, or rejection.
Whatever you teach or model, have it originate from authentic core. Don’t worry if your old teachers or I wouldn’t agree with your approach. Keep your eye on the kids. Are your ideas connecting and building upon each other? Do your lessons dovetail and reinforce what YOU think you should be presenting in your class?
What is important to you as a teacher? If it all stopped today, what would you regret that you hadn’t covered in your classes?
When the synergy of what you value starts clicking on a daily basis, your students will positively respond like a ball rolling down a hill.
Your kids don’t care about your schedule, your budget, your student debt, or any of your regrets. They want to make music with you.
It’s that simple.
Making music. That’s what’s going to matter to your young musicians.
Teaching from an unauthentic place is the stasis that stymies any music teacher from achieving momentum, from connecting with large groups of kids, and from reacting self-actualization as a musician who shepherds young musicians. If you aren’t having fun teaching, there is a strong chance that your kids aren’t having that much fun either. It’s time for a check-up from the neck up.
It never hurts to take a self-survey of how authentic your approach has been over the years. Start by talking to old students. Ask them to be frank about what they remember of their classes with you. Tell them they can’t hurt your feelings, that you want their help to be a better teacher today by learning what you did in the past. Do they remember the stuff you were trying to communicate as important?
Most of all, know that you create your own history. You hold the pen. Or as one of my teachers said to me, “You picked the ax. Cut the wood”. You’re not there teaching as a testament to your college teachers and their choices. Their time with you has come and gone. You are creating your own legacy.
Take away point: Everyone creates their own legacy. Not just music teachers.
Respect what you’ve been taught but come up with your own ideas, explore, create, bring an old idea around to something new.
Lead with you authentic self. Find your truth. Remember what Polonius said to his son in “Hamlet”: “This above all: to thine own self be true.”
Take a chance. Every time your kids make music, you are asking them to take a chance, go out on a musical limb. A chance of playing the “wrong note”, of enduring ridicule from other kids, of exposing themselves to “suffering the slings and arrows of daily living and living life on life's terms” as an artist. How can we expect our students to take musical chances if we are playing it safe.
Take musical chances.
Who knows what you might find if you start tinkering around with an idea?
Maybe a new you.
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