Midlife Meditation

I teach in a gym. Considering how important movement is to teaching music the Orff way, this space has many advantages. My students can make grand sweeping movements without fear of smacking anyone else in the face. I can teach them line dances, and never worry about someone colliding with a wall. I can separate the gym into two separate spaces, one for movement, the other for instruments. When we do body percussion, the hardwood floor makes a satisfying "smack" whenever students stomp their feet. And there the advantages end. The acoustics of a gymnasium cause my impaired ears to overload on a regular basis. I'd say it's like teaching in a barn, except that a barn has natural echo-reduction built into it in the forms of hay and straw. I expect this also contributes to the hyperactivity of some of my students: sensory overload, the stress of hearing so much noise and not being able to understand words. And then there's the temptation to run, screaming, be...

  Forget "E Pluribus Unum." The real motto of the United States is "There's money to be made." It's no accident we print "In God we trust" on our cash, because materialism is our true national religion.   This first struck me my sophomore year of college, when I took Econ 101. The professor told us a story of Soviet athletes (this was nine years before the Berlin Wall came down) visiting the United States, and being shocked by the sheer variety of products on grocery shelves. Granted, they came from what was, at that time, a planned economy, and they were often lucky to find one version of a product on the shelves, let alone the half dozen available at even a small market in America. But the question they asked is even more relevant today than it was then: Why do we need that many brands of ketchup? Or, if you really want to blow your mind with how many ways the same product can be packaged, take a look at the toothpaste aisle. I did just ...