Midlife Meditation

Every music teacher has a story like this: Last Friday, the lesson had wings. The second grade class I was teaching it to were completely in tune with me. We were riffing off each other, sharing a vibe that was magical. When I told the children we were out of time, they sighed: how could it be over? It felt like we just started! I left that classroom feeling great, knowing I had a winner here. This was especially important to me because I'd be teaching the same lesson to a different class Monday morning with my principal observing as part of my annual evaluation. I walked into that class on Monday, confident, assured, ready to tackle this group. The principal was a few minutes late, but that didn't faze me: this was a great lesson, I knew, fast-moving, action-packed, with plenty of opportunities for students to interact with the material in creative ways. But the kids weren't having it. Something was off: the children just weren't feeling it. The high flyers ...

You may be tired of my complaints. This week, we will be two months into the school year at Margaret Scott. For me, that's two months without a classroom, carrying what I can from building to building in the morning, struggling to hold children's attention in a huge echoing gym in the afternoon; two months of having just one (hopefully uninterrupted) half hour session for each class (though some occasionally get two, depending on the "tech rotation" nobody's been able to figure out), instead of the two that's minimal; two months of leading "Rhythms" and pretending it's a musical experience for the ninety rowdy children simultaneously occupying the gym; two months of having one mitigating idea after another shot down because, realistically, my curriculum takes a distant second to me keeping an eye on kids somewhere that what I'm doing doesn't disturb any other classes; two months of district administrators reminding me in their own ...

Sure, they look far more fierce than meek, but read on to find out how they got there. The occasion for this post: I'm in San Francisco re-taking Doug Goodkin's "Jazz Course," a week-long workshop on how to teach jazz to young children. Doug is a master teacher of the Orff Schulwerk approach to music education. Studying with him has shaped me as an educator, a musician, and a spiritual human being, and this course is a huge part of that. Most programs for jazz education are aimed at secondary and collegiate instruction. The Jazz Course is unique in its focus on children between the ages of 3 and 13. I took the course in 2008, and was inspired to build an entire year's curriculum around jazz. I'm back now, seven years later, with my full Orff certification, dozens of workshops, last week's trip to Ghana, and several more years' experience under my belt. Most importantly, I've got a far greater jazz vocabulary: as much as I knew about jazz (an...

"I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and will give to your offspring all these lands; and all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves through your offspring." (Genesis 26:4) The promise to Abraham appears throughout both testaments, reworded by each writer to mean whatever will support the point being made. At times Israel is seen as a blessing; at others times as a conquering horde; but always, there is the assumption, whether explicit or implicit, that all this came out of one patriarch who had only two children, and abandoned one in the desert, then nearly killed the other to prove a point. But I digress. This essay is not about that rabbit hole of scripturally-sanctioned child abuse. Or maybe it is; we'll just have to say whether that point gets revisited at its conclusion. What I'm writing about here is the ripple effect. Last night after the Comedy Sportz show, Scott Simon, who performed our wedding, asked u...

These guys really need to meet: Pat Short of Comedy Sportz Portland and Doug Goodkin, master Orff Schulwerk educator. I move in different spheres: Music education. Orff Schulwerk. Improv. Jazz. United Methodism. Clergy. Outdoor recreation. Running. Cycling. Body Pump. Science Fiction. The Anderson family. Survivors of divorce. Beer. Preacher's kids. Summer camp alumni. Willamette alumni. Trekkies. By "sphere," I mean an activity, occupation, or status shared with a group of people that is a frame of reference for understanding the greater world, and which has a knowledge base unique to itself. Two people meeting each other for the first time who both went to camp as children can reminisce, nod knowingly, find common ground with each other. Many of my spheres overlap. I know a lot of United Methodist clergy, and we share experiences both of our education and work and of simply being United Methodist. Star Trek fans usually have a taste for science fiction in general...

Blow this image up, zoom in on the far center of it, and you'll see a man with very little hair, wearing a purple shirt. That man is Doug Goodkin. I Googled him in hopes of finding an image of him working with children, but came up dry. Even though teaching elementary music at The San Francisco School is Doug's day job, our modern anxiety over posting pictures of children seems to have limited images of Doug to his weekend and summer job, teaching adults how to teach music to children, something he does all over the world. There's no need to blow this image of a different man who, like Doug, has little hair to conceal his busy head: I'm talking about the tall man in a red jersey (sorry, Andrew). His name is Patrick Short, and he is the founder and co-owner of ComedySportZ Portland, an improv troupe that performs fast-paced shows every Friday and Saturday evening, as well as teaching improv classes to children, teenagers, and adults. Like Doug, Pat travels extens...

The slogan always made my skin crawl. When I first heard it, the place was called "Show Biz Pizza." Eventually the name was changed to "Chuck E Cheese's," with ads featuring the eponymous mouse in both costume and animatronic incarnations interacting with children, and usually concluding with a child falling, in slow motion, into a ball pit. I never actually visited one of these establishments until I had children of my own, but I knew from the moment I set foot in the place that there was far more evil at work here than just a grammatically abominable jingle. Eventually that slogan was cleaned up so the subject and predicate could be in agreement--"where kids can be kids"--but in my mind the name should be changed to "Migraine Manor," "Ulcer Alley," or possible "Tantrum Town." Walk through the door and one is instantly besieged by the clamor of video games, background music, and shouting, screaming, wailing children. ...

  Peter Schickele didn't say it, but if it wasn't for him, I probably would never have known it.   Peter Schickele, in case you're not familiar with him, is an American composer and humorist most famous as the man who discovered and curates the music of PDQ Bach, last and least of JS Bach's many children. The music is all intentionally awful, laden with quotes of popular songs, voiced on bizarre alternative instruments, and setting texts in hilarious ways. The whole PDQ Bach phenomenon is a satirical stab at pompous, judgmental musicologists, a class of intellectual who came to the forefront of mid-twentieth century musical criticism. Pointed as they are at such a rarified field of study, Schickele's jokes can at times seem a bit too obscure to the layperson, but then the orchestra starts playing, the soprano warbles out another twisted aria, and they're all back in the palm of his hand.   Apart from his mission of getting the musical intelligentsia...

Chances are very good that the only thing you know by Carl Orff is Carmina Burana. Carmina is a suite of songs for chorus and soloist based on poetry by medieval defrocked monks. It's lusty music, full of pounding rhythms and grunting voices, collectively evoking a post-Christian bacchanale. The most famous piece from the suite is "O Fortuna," a hymn to chaos that begins and ends the work, and which has provided background music for many a depiction of apocalyptic warfare. As a whole, Carmina Burana is one of the most popular classical works composed in the twentieth century. Musically, it's schlock, but it's fun schlock. It's a shame that so few know anything else about Carl Orff, because it's far from his greatest contribution to music. That would be the Schulwerk. With the help of Gunild Keetman, Orff developed an approach to teaching music that puts children at the center of the learning experience. The Orff method is elemental, starting with...

I am an early adopter. Just to be clear, I'm not a first adopter. I don't buy the latest tech when it's hot off the freighter from whatever Chinese mega-plant it was assembled in. If possible, I try someone else's early-adopted purchase first, then give myself some time, just to be sure the kinks are worked out. Sometimes that means getting a second- or third-generation version of a promising technology. But I do like to be in the front of the pack on these things. Thus I became a Macintosh user shortly after user-friendliness was introduced to the personal computer world, but waited six years to be a Mac owner. The Macs I learned on were located at the library of my seminary. I typed most of my papers on them, except one that had to be done on a manual typewriter due to a power outage. Getting access to a computer was still too inconvenient for me to learn to compose on one, so I would write my first draft on notebook paper, then type it into a word processor...