Midlife Meditation

It may be a stock photo, but this really is what engagement looks like in a general music class. Let's be clear about one thing: I can keep children engaged without teaching them anything about music. When I do, they look and sound exactly the way they're supposed to--in their home room. I do it by telling them stories. Sometimes I use puppets. Sometimes it's enough just to read them a picture book. When I'm doing these things, I'm using skills I mastered in my years as a pastor, tapping into narrative preaching techniques that held the attention of multi-generational and multi-ethnic congregations in Illinois, England, and Oregon. Preaching was challenging at first, but the more I practiced it, the easier it became, until I found myself able to reel off a sermon on the spot with little or no preparation. It was improv without a scene partner--except when I did it for African-American congregations, whose responses are very much a part of the sermon--and it w...

I work a tough room, two sets a day. Some days I kill; other days I bomb. Most days I reach probably 75 per cent of my audience, and of the remainder, I have very few complaints. Other performers would be thrilled with a success rate like this, but it eats at me, so I'm always tweaking my performance, trying to reach more of the room. And no, I'm not a comic. I'm a music teacher. For the first two years that I taught elementary general music, I drew heavily on whatever curriculum was on the shelves when I arrived at my school. I was creative to the extent I could be with those materials, but it was far from ideal. If, in those days, I had graded my teaching on performance guidelines, I would have been extremely unhappy with it. I was surviving, but I was working with sub-par material, and I had no real idea how to hone it and fit it to the population I was serving. Then I discovered Orff Schulwerk, and my teaching was transformed. What hit me from the first Orff wo...

Assuming I'm well enough to get out of bed tomorrow morning, I will spend the day teaching music without the use of my voice. It's not that I have no voice at all; I can speak (croak) well enough to be understood. Ask me to repeat myself, though, and you'll find me pointing at my throat and shaking my head. The best I can do right now is whisper, and even that takes an effort. I've also got the sniffles and a persistent cough, not to mention a slight headache, but none of that is severe enough to keep me home. The two days I missed last week have already set me back too much. So tomorrow, barring a fever, I will get up at 5 and drive to school, where I will teach seven half-hour music classes without using my voice. Sounds (ha!) ridiculous, doesn't it? And it certainly feels ridiculous. But I've done it before. I've taught general music, preached sermons, even led choir rehearsals with laryngitis. Every time I get a cold, it eventually moves to my che...