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Volume I
Issue 5
8 September 1999 |
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September Song by Anne M Carley There's an inertia about learning; once started, it just doesn't want to stop. An infant exploring the joys and surprises of her first springtime can't help but learn: at that stage in life we are hard-wired. We must learn. For adults, it may be less imperative, but it's a definite option. Simply watching the child puzzling over a caterpillar, an adult can discover a new aspect, just imagining how life looks through the eyes of another. Our impulses to learn can outlast some of their fiercest opponents - the indifference, impatience, or brutality of authority figures; the destruction of war, chaos or disaster; the din of advertising and hype, the depression of illness and poverty. The "no pain, no gain" types take it too far, though. We learn in spite of troubles, not because of them. For the lucky ones whose basic needs are addressed, childhood and teenage can be greenhouses for daily growth, and adults can have lifelong opportunities to expand awareness. Lucky for us, teaching is one of the best teachers. Whether in a classroom, at the concert hall or dockside at the lake, teaching and learning can merge, to the benefit of all concerned. Effective teaching can be as simple as applying more alertness, care and deliberation in thinking and doing. Perhaps this is why it works for the teacher as well as the taught. On an August day hinting of fall, some concerted hammock-time spent musing on teaching and learning resulted in a short opinionated list of things good teachers seem to do: Identify building blocks and bumps. The things that make a quick exchange with a longtime colleague so charged with meaning are the things a teacher may want to examine more slowly. With the colleague, that short-hand allusion to prior shared experience can speak volumes, reassure them both and maybe get some laughs as well. Settings change, however, and when consciously working to introduce something new, it can pay to remember where this other person has and has not been, and to be prepared to unpack those short-hand assumptions as needed. With heightened awareness, the teacher can identify his customary elisions past a student's potential bump in the road, and will stop, to examine at the bump together. Say "I don't know." Common sense tells us that of the entire universe of things discovered, questions asked, and expressions ventured, each of us is overwhelmingly likely not to know, much of the time. It simplifies matters to admit it. Right, Wrong, and Other. Identify circumstances where right and wrong answers matter, and when there can be more open-ended interchanges. Playfulness, humor, and freedom to improvise. The capability to be non-critical, to disable the Inner Editor, and just get on with it, is precious. Add to that some playfulness, and you give a child a boost that can last a lifetime. Recognize limits, and know when to stop. We all have our saturation points, which vary with the weather, surroundings, mood, and everything else. The time you and your eleven-year-old neighbor made tremendous clay pots for four hours at the potter's wheel may never occur again. Each of you, though, still has a lifetime of unmade pots to realize if and when you want or can. Keep yourself honest. The singer and voice teacher, Jean Hakes, would often advise her students: "Sing as tired as you are," understanding as she did that the best work results from a clear-eyed acknowledgment of how things are at that moment. Very little in life is uniform. The singer who denies current reality is often the singer who has risked injury to the soft throat tissues that make the human voice possible. Singing softly can still be singing beautifully. Focus on the learner. The most brilliant content, presented in the most imaginative way by the most dazzling teacher won't have much impact if the student got lost after the first sentence. Encourage curiosity, even if it results in questions not easily answered. Be generous. By acknowledging the group's accomplishments, downplaying how hard she worked to make it all flow together "effortlessly," the teacher makes an important and valuable gift. Share excitement. Occasionally a good teacher in primary school can engage a bored student in a seemingly dull topic, thereby exerting a major impact on the student's later life choices. A classic cautionary tale illustrating the opposite is the story told by another voice teacher: When a person told him "I'm not musical," "I can't sing," or "I can only carry a tune in a bucket," he would ask, "Who told you so?" Invariably, the answer would be specific - there was always one particular music teacher or choir director or student assembly coordinator, perhaps fifty years earlier, who had silenced this person. Any teacher, given that kind of power over the student, could do some good instead. Subdue the Border Patrol. Remember that categories (the arts, the humanities, the natural sciences, etc.) and fields of endeavor (singer, storyteller, research scientist) are cultural constructs applied to or imposed on life as we live it. They still differ from one culture to another, even in 1999's global village. One culture's unique "performance artist" is another culture's ritual dancer, one of many, whose behaviors are not performances but communal gestures of unity and faith. It is not an extreme act for a teacher to cross some borders, erase some dividing lines and stand traditional sequences of events on their heads. (It might be "radical," however, as in, at the root of things.) Time and again teachers committed to their craft open surpassingly rich experiences for their students, by combining approaches and disciplines. Play it first, name it later. Western music education, for example, often distinguishes the performance from the composition, and relaxed enjoyment from performance. Might it not make more sense to begin music classes, in early childhood, with play - in both sense of the word - unconcerned whether the resulting songs are variations on a theme, or composed rather than improvised, or more a rehearsal than a performance? As the classroom teacher provides a structured growth environment for her class, the more she can learn to ignore unneeded barriers, and the more the child is able to remain blissfully ignorant of them. Might it not make more sense for the child to learn first to sing and play and improvise unselfconsciously, and then to learn conventional music notation in order to recall, later on, the culmination in dance, word and song of a wonderful music class? If poetry was written that hour, and dances choreographed, too, then so much the better. It should hardly matter if the school's curricula, grouped by academic departments, indicate that original poetry belongs (if at all) in "Language Arts" class while choreography might be a feeble offshoot of gym class. It all boils down to some unexceptional characteristics of a satisfying life: awareness of oneself and others, intellectual honesty, generosity, openmindedness, curiosity and a sense of humor. And maybe that's the beauty of it all: Each of us is teacher as well as student, so we can all inhabit the place where teaching and learning overlap and thrive. Songwriter Joni Mitchell once wrote, "Life is for learning" while vocalese lyricist Jon Hendricks put it, "Life is for living." Either way, at the root, it's the same old song. Hum a few bars... Resources: "Life is for learning" is from the song, Woodstock by Joni Mitchell. "Life is for living" is from Jon Hendricks's lyrics to What Am I Here For. For a variety of websites about learning, see the Newsletter's new Linkage Department. Discussion: Compare notes on your favorite teachers ever, and what made them great. Pay a visit to A4A Discussions.
Anne Carley is editor of the Arts4All Newsletter. She looks forward to crisp fall days. She sings as tired as she is. |
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