Midlife Meditation

We are all body musicians. It starts in infancy. As soon as a baby learns to make noises with hands or feet, that child is a body musician. As we mature, we explore more sounds, and not always with music in mind: making noises that evoke giggles is a staple of elementary school humor. Making them rhythmically, on the other hand, is something we have to figure out, or learn from another. I was in my 40s before I realized there could be music in body noises other than stomps, snaps, and claps. Then Orff Schulwerk entered my life, and changed everything. I can't remember how it was used at my first workshop in 2005, but I know it was there. Body percussion is as essential to Orff pedagogy as rote imitation, improvisation, and mallet instruments with removable bars. An Orff staple is to teach a rhythm first by speech, then by playing it on the body, programming it indelibly into the brain, before ever an instrument is touched. I remember well how body music entered...

All-staff selfie, taken by Principal Matt. I'm not sure where I'm sitting. For the first time in my life, I'm coming home happy every day. At 55, I've had many jobs. Some I liked, a few I even loved. And some were miserable. Looking back on four decades of work, I'm sure of this: none of those jobs even approached being as consistently satisfying as this one. What makes teaching music at Byrom so wonderful? It's hard to pin down. It's not that my fellow staff members are exceptional: like every other school I've worked in, they're mostly enthusiastic dedicated educators, most of whom are on time to drop off and pick up their classes. Nor is it that my teaching space is spectacular: it's just the right size, and mostly well-equipped, but the Orff instrumentarium needs some major investment and the room is both windowless and chronically dusty. The building is a relic of the 1970s open classroom philosophy and, like most schools built...

Starting in September, I'll be teaching here. I felt it Monday morning when I woke up: a slight increase in the gravitational field holding me to my bed, coupled with a tightness in my throat. The pull of the bed I put down to still recovering from a bad fall I'd had Friday while out on a run, the throat scratchiness to the flurry of floral procreation going on throughout the Willamette Valley. Bruises, allergies--yeah, that's what's up. I shaved, showered, had breakfast, packed my lunch, kissed Amy, and headed off to my last full week of school. Five hours later, the teaching portion of my day complete, I stepped into the cafeteria to do lunch duty, and within a minute, knew I had to go home. I checked with the vice principal to be sure she could handle it by herself, notified the secretary I'd be leaving early, then spent 45 minutes contradicting myself by ensuring everything was in place for my sub, and headed for home. That night, I had a fever of 100.8...

It was just a marble: a small sphere of glass with a ribbon of color in its center. ToysRUs will sell you 160 of them for $4.99. I had bags of them when I was a kid. And when Abel put it in my hand, it felt like the Nobel Prize. I first met Abel as a feral kindergartner. Kinders are developmentally puppy-like: inquisitive, cuddly, playful, unhousebroken. For no reason at all, they will pile on top of each other. They will also hug anything: each other, a teacher's leg, a post. Abel had all these qualities, plus two more: he had the body and face of an anime version of a Mexican child, round eyes, round face, a shock of black hair, a teddy bear physique; and he spoke no English. I assume that was the case, because in the five months I taught at Margaret Scott that year, I never heard him say a word. He also seemed not to understand anything I said to him--or perhaps he chose not to. He'd run across the gym on a whim, forcing me to stop the music lesson entirely and...

Yesterday I said goodbye to Desale. Desale is in the fourth grade. While I can't speak for how he is in his general education classes, I know that he loves learning about music, and is always the most attentive student in the room when I'm teaching. He also goes out of his way to ask me about music outside of class. He's outgoing without being chatty, readily engages teachers in conversation, and is not shy about asking me to play a particular song over the PA during my morning gym duty. Two weeks ago, I started the fourth grade's second recorder unit, teaching them to play "Iko Iko," a New Orleans Mardi Gras song that just happens to be Desale's favorite. Uniquely out of the entire fourth and fifth grades, he began bringing his recorder with him to that morning gathering time (when 2nd, 4th, and 5th graders all wait to be picked up from the gym by their classroom teachers) in hopes of getting some extra coaching from me. This morning, Desale's ...

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...

Some music teachers teach classes larger than this closing ceremony at the AOSA National Conference. I've been whiny. I'm not going to apologize for it: this is my blog, a diary about my personal struggles and accomplishments. As a reflection of my life, it naturally is filled with both highs and lows. Since 2009, music education has handed me a lot of lows: layoff, unemployment, underemployment, competing with teachers who are younger (and, with less experience and education, less expensive) for the few positions available, and once I finally found that elusive full-time elementary job in a high-poverty district, having to contend with teaching in the gymnasiums of two schools, with ineptly applied "restorative justice" behavior management, and, this year, again losing my classroom, as well as having my instructional time cut by a third. Teaching music in the Portland area has not been a walk in the park. Administrators don't have time for such com...

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 ...

I'm at a loss. For a month now, I've been rolling with the punches at Margaret Scott. First it was my "room"--or, rather, the lack of a room. I was to teach music in Kindergarten and First and Second Grade classrooms in the morning, in the gym in the afternoon to Third, Fourth, and Fifth Graders. There was no portable available, and the room dividers I'd requested to mitigate noise and space issues in the gym had never been ordered. Most of the instruments I'd spent the last two years accumulating would be gathering dust in the gym storage room, too big to haul around from classroom to classroom and, with PE in the gym every morning, too delicate to leave out should I want to teach units using them to my afternoon classes. Then came a district-wide hit: the visionary administrator with a plan to put music back full-time in every building left for a position in another district. His replacement was a pencil-pusher with no ideas at all for restoring our pr...

Remember this picture? This was my classroom when I started teaching in the Reynolds School District: a gymnasium. The acoustics were atrocious, the space made even the best-behaved kids a bit loopy, and I had to put all my equipment--truckloads of xylophones, metallophones, and whatever else I might be using--away in a storage room every afternoon, because I couldn't trust either the after school program or the evening basketball league to treat it with respect. That was my reality in two different schools for the entire year 2013-14, and led me to seek employment elsewhere during the summer. I didn't find any. When I came back to Scott Elementary a year ago, I found that my situation had partially improved: I was in a classroom now, though I had to share a third of it with a computer lab/English Language Development program. Most of the time, this wasn't too challenging: I could've used more room, and sometimes the more challenging kids would run to the oth...

These are not my students, but they're doing something you can see my students doing almost any day of the week. If church is the medium, the place and structure upon which and within which we exist as spiritual beings, then religion is what we do within that medium. That was not an easy definition to write. Like many Americans my age and younger, I've had a love-hate relationship with the word religion, trending more toward hate in the last decade or two. Post-War (World War II, that is) children have increasingly moved away from the clearly defined religion of our parents and grandparents, seeking less institutionalism, less dogmatism, less formality, less pomp, less structure, less of everything we were taught to respect as children. We shy away from titles, resist authority, eschew decoration. We long for freedom, intimacy, inspiration, and we find none of these in the stern, hushed gatherings our elders preferred, where we were expected to be seen but not heard. ...

,  I did some of my best ministry in this church, but it was never really mine. "Journalism is my church, reporting is my religion." --Jose Antonio Vargas on the Slate Magazine podcast The Gist , Tuesday, February 24, 2015. "The Lord works in mischievous ways, his blunders to perform." --William Power, Professor of Biblical Literature, Perkins School of Theology, c. 1986. Some people seem to know who they're meant to be from birth. Some have to wait until high school or college for the spirit to move them in the right direction, to hear the call of their true vocation, but once they've got it, they're happy to spend the rest of their working lives answering that call. And then there are those of us for whom the whole vocation thing is a ridiculous 5000 piece puzzle that takes us most of our lives to put together. In case you haven't figured it out over the last 300+ blog posts, I'm in the last category. In high school, ...

He's a little bit on the too old side, but I think the physique is about right. Kindergartners say hilarious things. They say them with utter candor, their eyes wide, the expression in their faces so pure and passionate they would be the envy of many a thespian striving for realism. They confuse "Mr." and "Mrs." all the time; in fact, when I'm teaching kindergarten music, I am probably "Mrs. Anderson" about as often as I am "Mr. Anderson." More often than either, I'm "music teacher." Today, however, was a first: as my first class of kindergartners filed into the room and took their places in the opening circle, one of them looked me in the face and said, "Hello, Mr. Awesome!" I was, of course, flattered, enough so that the ensuing half hour--which featured an inconsolably sobbing little girl and a sneakily violent boy punching his peers when I wasn't looking--was far more tolerable than it would ha...