Jed Scott Music

I attended a great lecture today – it was informative and compelling. Unfortunately, it was given to an audience of 20 who were pretty well-informed and had no need of being compelled–they were already on board with the thrust of his speech. It got me to thinking about the need […]

In the Sunday New York Times, and already online, is a great article by Alfie Kohn assessing the true impact of zero-sum testing…on students, on culture, on what and how we teach. A few choice quotes: “A school’s ultimate mission, apparently, is not to help everyone learn but to rig […]

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 […]