arrange • compose • conduct
I have made a personal vow never to complain about the letters in my rack in Scrabble. The thing is, if you play enough games, you get lot of great sets of seven, and lots of terrible sets with no vowels or all vowels. The trick is to anticipate how the word you play […]
You have to slow down for poetry. In good poetry, the words are placed with such care and precision; we must treat them with respect. Too many adults leave poetry behind with their high school English classes – something for smarter people than I, something for more sophisticated people than I. […]
Mondays are many people’s least favorite day of the week (and cats, apparently). The truth is, though, it’s the transition from weekend to weekday that people hate. We thrive on rhythm, on routine. The weekend disrupts our routines, and the shift back into the routine is what people dislike. This is the dark side of Snow Days […]
Our school district presents a thrice-yearly series of speakers and presentations called “Developing Healthy Kids” – meant to address often-overlooked educational issues. Last night there was a powerful 90-minute presentation titled “Surviving and Thriving During the Teen Years.” Spearheaded by my colleague and friend Kris DeYoung, it was a mixture of video, […]
Note: this is the fifteenth of a series of posts investigating the leadership style of John Wooden and its applicability to choral music education. We have reached the peak of John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. The personality trait he places atop his pyramid is COMPETITIVE GREATNESS. Wooden says, “Competitive Greatness is having a real love for […]
I’ve written before about snow days, and the special opportunities they provide. Today, I’m thankful for the snow day that gave me a morning of writing, an afternoon of family games, and an evening of listening to my president address the nation. I enjoyed it so much, I almost forgot to share […]
You can choose to do more. Or you can choose to do what you already do, but better. Our society values more. If there is one overarching motto to 21st Century America, it is More. More stuff, more channels, more extracurriculars, more friends on social media. More is not the same as better, though. Too […]
Yesterday I talked about the steps to fix a new mistake. Those three steps can be hampered by our reaction to the mistake. We tell ourselves a story about mistakes, and the story we tell can make the solution either easier or harder. If we tell ourselves the story that making mistakes is a […]
I made a new mistake baking the other day. It led me to consider the steps we take in fixing a new mistake. Recognize the mistake’s outcome. (In this case, I noticed the dough was behaving strangely during kneading.) Determine the cause of the mistake. (In this case, I walked through every […]
Building a habit means doing something every day until it’s secure. How do you know your habit is secure? When you wake up knowing that you’re going to complete it. Even better, when the knowledge is so firm that it doesn’t even enter conscious thought unless you ask the question? Am I […]