arrange • compose • conduct
Posts discussing education, both in and outside of music
We are all starting over. We are out of practice… teaching in person. learning in person. conducting gracefully. singing beautifully. interacting with a group. leading. following. trusting. And we have never practiced… conducting with a mask. singing with a mask. recognizing students with masks. safe distancing in the classroom. enforcing […]
I personally think it’s good for students to see their teachers and leaders figuring it out. The idea of the teacher/leader as a fount of knowledge, issuing decrees from a position of authority and wisdom is tempting, but it isn’t very realistic. We are all human, we are all figuring […]
Early correctives are so much more effective than late ones. It’s the beginning of the year/semester/trimester/quarter. Now is the time to make gentle correctives. A small, gentle corrective of a student in the early weeks can profoundly affect their trajectory. A much bigger correction at the end of term will […]
“In preparing for his oral qualifying examination, a rite of passage for every graduate student, he chose not to study the outlines of known physics. Instead he went up to MIT, where he could be alone, and opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: Notebook Of Things […]
Host Drew Carey began episodes of the improv comedy show “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” with the tag phrase, “the show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.” If there ever was a phrase for the utter reinvention of education in 2020, that’s it. And if we recognize […]
We can choose to seek many different destinations: Novelty Satisfaction Curiosity Distraction Dissociation Connection Peace Conflict Comfort One of the main lessons I seek to imbue my students with is to make the destination you seek beauty. Prioritize seeking beauty. To me, the outcome of all art should be beauty. […]
Punctuated Equilibrium is the theory, proposed and popularized by Stephen Jay Gould, that evolutionary change isn’t gradual, but instead has long periods of stability interspersed with rapid change. It is not the only theory to describe evolutionary change, but it is a persuasive one, and one that rings true when […]
In the first few turns of Yahtzee, your scorecard is wide open. You can take huge risks, knowing you’ll be able to score something, even if it isn’t ideal. And your risks can pay off with lucky rolls and higher scores. In the last few turns of Yahtzee, you’re most […]
I have been consistently inspired the past few weeks by the collaborative, supportive, freely sharing spirit of educators. So many teachers are spending every available moment creating new content, researching new techniques, learning new modalities – and they are freely sharing whatever they discover with colleagues. A pandemic makes us […]
To varying extent, we all teach in real time, rather than from a concrete plan. Good teachers react in the moment to their students’ faces, to the questions that are asked, to the specific singing that they hear from the choir. We make detailed lesson plans, and we throw them […]