On Changing it Up

Been teaching my son to hear music.

Confirm: I've been teaching my son to 'hear' music. He's eight years old and has been playing trumpet for two years. Loves jazz and has posters of Miles Davis taped to the wall next to his bed.

But early on it was all drone all the time. Long notes played for as long as possible, generally in the bottom range of the trumpet, and repeated over and over and over.

I wonder why this was. After all, he was taking music class and learning songs. But when we'd play together improvising, he was just droning on.

Now, as a guy with a foot in the world of free improvisational music, I really didn't mind this per se; but I did feel like as an eight-year-old he needed to think about trumpet in a different way and get the experience of changing it up.

So I changed my instrument.

Whereas I had been playing mostly guitar and piano, I switched to double bass.

And suddenly his sound started to expand. And he started to bring snippets of melody into our improvisations. And his trumpet got more talkative. And he seemed to 'get it' more.

We often forget that as teachers, we are the ones who set the tone. And the instruments we choose to play -- sometimes out of habit more than pedagogical conviction -- directly effect the way our students both learn and express themselves.

So be willing to change it up. Don't let a tool become a given.

Keep yourself on your toes and you'll start to hear melodies in your students.

Improvise!

I'm a huge jazz fan.

And my favorite form of jazz is free jazz. That's the jazz of freedom and free improvisation.

A lot of folks think improvisation is just "making it up as you go along". And it is, to a degree.

But what a lot of folks don't realize is that improvisers -- be they musicians, stand-up comics, or story-tellers -- actually only get on stage after hours, days, and years of honing their craft.

So what may seem to you in the audience like a quick flourish or an ecstatic bang is actually the result of a process that started long long before that improviser ever took to the stage.

In the classroom, I consider myself primarily to be an improviser. I've discussed this in the past with other teachers and the general response was: "just don't let the administration know".

That's because they perceived improvisation to be just a form of flying by the seat of one's pants.

There's a lot more to it than that.

My personal journey to the front of the classroom began as a kid with a book in my face twenty-hours of every day. It continued as a teenager absolutely addicted to his record collection. It evolved in college -- endless hours spent wandering the stacks in the library and endless crazy discussions about every such thing. It followed me around as I traveled the world playing music and meeting people. It popped into my life in the form of three little kids.

Your journey is the stuff of your experience. It's your 'prior knowledge', to use an ed term.

And its what you bring with you to the front of that classroom everyday.

The Internet can be an extension of that.

If you allow yourself to seek to guide your kids towards understanding the essential questions rather than just completing "pg. 47 #1-5, 7, 8, 9-13".

If you seek to find links between the content of academics and the content of kids' lives rather than just follow whats printed in the table of contents.

If you let the discussion in class to get you off track. Because sometimes the kids have better ideas than whatever you worked out the night before in your lesson plan.

The Internet is a powerful tool for letting this sort of thing happen. The Net makes it easier to take on the sorts of important details that might pop up in a discussion that might provide a 'teachable moment', but for which in terms of resources you would otherwise be unprepared. How else, say in a class discussion about 'A Tale of Two Cities' and justice during the French Revolution, could you -- on the whim of a student's question of "Why do bad things happen to good people?" -- immediately draw upon the examples of The Apology, Job, a timeline of devastating natural disasters, the death of MLK, and 9-11 to help illustrate the philosophical and historical implications of such an important question? (And all immediately accessible in multimedia / multiple-intelligence-serving format).

But you better be prepared to improvise. You have to literally give yourself up to it. It is as much a way of life as a teaching strategy. What it's not is blindly reaching out into the dark with no support. What it's not is an excuse to be unprepared. Rather, improvising puts you on the hot seat; it lifts the energy level and immediacy of your class discussions; and, with the use of immediately accessible Internet resources, it demonstrates to the students in an authentic and representational way the power of history, the natural interdisciplinary quality of comparative analysis, and the value of being able to access and distinguish valid and documented support for one's position in a discussion.

And that's music to my ears.