Orff Evangelism
For those of you who saw the title, but not the content, of an essay I posted, then deleted, yesterday: I'm looking for a new job. I'm not going to air the details of what happened here. Rather, my goal is to articulate the importance of something I've never done well, but need to start doing much better in the future: advocating for the way I teach music. From the responses I've seen to that short-lived post yesterday, I'm not in the only one with this problem. Throughout North America, and very likely around the world, music teachers are being marked down by their administrators because they teach in ways that, while engaging, effective, and transformational, are so radically different from what those administrators are looking for that they find themselves under fire, marked down in evaluations, and potentially unemployed. I'm speaking, of course, of Orff. Teaching the Orff way means engaging students in making music from the moment the lesson begins. Chi...