Midlife Meditation

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...

Why be good? When I was first studying to be a teacher, the answer to that question was the subject of a great deal of controversy. Humanist educators (and yes, "humanism" was a word well-respected in teacher colleges in the early 1980s) believed that achievement should be intrinsically motivated, that the content of the curriculum should in and of itself inspire students both to study and to behave properly in class. This was especially true in the "electives," those subjects that students chose to take, rather than being required to take. A band or choir student's love of music would motivate him or her to practice regularly and to be fully focused during rehearsals upon improving performances individually and collectively; a drama student's love of theater would lead her or him to learn parts long before memorization was necessary; and so on. Ideally, all subjects would be intrinsically motivating, though it would require considerably more creativity...

As I wrote in June (see  "Coercing God" ), I have some problems with prayer. That entry was mostly about the ineffectiveness of the practice, the way in which it extorts favors from God, and in the process casts an unflattering light on the deity. If God is all-powerful and all-loving, then suffering should cease to exist. If, on the other hand, God is all-powerful but only alleviates the suffering of those who pray or are prayed for, then God is a mercurial despot unworthy of praise. Since suffering is all around us, we can infer that God cannot be both all-powerful and all-loving; that, in fact, if there is any God at all, this deity either has limited power or has a cruel personality. In the face of such logic, one has to ask: whither prayer? Sunday morning, the church where I have been playing the piano for three years (and for the next month, after which I'm letting go of that job, but that's a story for another blog post) had a lay-led service. The pastor ...

If you're like me in a particular way, and people know you're like me in that particular way, and they're on Facebook or Tumblr or any of the other social media sites that constantly generate and recycle memes, you've probably been shown this by someone you're close to:   And if you're like me, and you've always wondered about why loud eating noises or leaf blowers or the repetitive on-off whine of a computer charger or an idling diesel truck make it impossible after awhile to concentrate on anything BUT those noises, then perhaps you felt a sense of relief at reading this random--well, fact isn't really the word I'd put on it, since it's more of a speculation, and just looking misophonia up on Wikipedia got me links to four other syndromes/conditions/behavior patterns that explain this sensitivity to noises--and then went right back to struggling to ignore crunchy carrots, closing windows to shut out as much mower noise as you can, and ob...

When it comes to learning names, I don't. That's not entirely true. I do pick up names when I interact with people regularly in contexts in which their names are used. That's how I've picked up names of everyone at Comedy Sportz: whenever they play, their names are announced throughout the show. Church is another matter. I've worked in a lot of church settings, and even managed to learn everyone's name in a few of them. A few. One or two. In most cases, I only learn the names of those with whom I interact frequently. In my current church job, there are only a half a dozen names I can pin on people with any certainty, and only because they're introduced every Sunday when they make announcements. Fortunately the piano player doesn't have to call people by name very often. If the pastor doesn't know people's names, that's a whole other thing, and it can get ugly. And if it's a teacher--well, you try getting a kid's attention wit...

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...

Did I mention I like Star Trek ? Welcome to Sisko's Creole Kitchen, an establishment that epitomizes the economics of the 24th century, when technological innovations work hand-in-hand with fully enlightened attitudes toward work and leisure to liberate human beings from wage slavery. People are no longer locked into drudgery by the need to earn a living wage, for all essential human needs are provided by society. Money is a dim memory, as anything one wants or needs can be instantly replicated. Individuals are freed up to follow their true vocations, whether that means enlisting in Star Fleet to explore the galaxy or opening a five-star restaurant in New Orleans. This doesn't mean that anyone can just do exactly what he or she wants. Joseph Sisko, I assume, prefers serving authentic dishes made from scratch, rather than replicated to identical perfection, which means someone still has to catch the crabs for his kitchen, and someone else has to cook it. I expect there...