arrange • compose • conduct
The joke goes, there are only two seasons in Michigan: Winter and Construction. As I see it, there are two seasons for educators, too: Build, and React. React lasts from September to June. The days move so quickly, with so many demands placed on educators time, that the best they […]
Take 10 minutes and breathe. I’m not talking about meditation – we aren’t going to be mindful of our breaths. Not exactly. Take 10 minutes and listen to your breaths. Can you breathe silently? It was my assertion to a choir earlier this year that 10 minutes, invested once, could […]
School years and semesters have a certain feel. A certain number of hours of class time per week, a certain number of weeks in a semester. Exams, midterms, finals. Start again. It’s been my experience that careers, particularly arts careers, don’t have the same feel. I work in projects: nebulous […]
School years are finite: they have a beginning and an end. Learning is infinite: it is bounded only by your time, energy, and interest. With a passionate topic, you could spend ten lifetimes digging ever deeper into a topic “covered” in a one-semester course. I don’t know the solution to […]
Welcome to the first post of my Summer Read-Along: Dare To Lead by Brené Brown. I chose this book because I think the skill of leadership is so important to educators in general, and to music educators in particular. As Dr. Brown says in the introduction, “As I often tell teachers–some of […]
Krista Tippett: You talked about in tenth grade how you fell in love with Walt Whitman. I think that’s the first line of your book. And I kind of think, part of what you are feeling and in pain about is that enough people aren’t falling in love with Walt […]
One of my core operating principles in rehearsal is to teach with concepts, not quick fixes. Almost every time you take 2 minutes to fix a specific problem, you would be better off spending 4-5 minutes establishing a concept that can be applied to multiple situations. Choose the right concepts […]
I am interested in giving my students more opportunities to speak in front of an audience as part of an ensemble – and the best way to do that is to introduce a song in our set. Here’s a template for the pieces I’d like to hear in a student […]
Lockstep education is the norm. By that, I mean this mindset: if you were born within these 12 months, you’re in this grade. For the first 10 to 20 years of life, we are fed, over and over again, that our peers are those who were born in the same […]
Some time ago, there was a house in the neighborhood that waited as long as possible for their first mow of the spring. Actually, they waited longer than possible. When they finally mowed the long grasses around their house, it left huge piles of clippings and shocked the lawn to […]