One of the reasons that we decided to hire our DJ for our wedding was because he told us that he plays music that he doesn’t like.
His general approach was that during cocktail hour he wanders around, gets an idea of the demographic and the vibe of the guest and starts creating a playlist from those observations and the songs that we suggested. Then during the dancing part of the reception he starts putting on music. If the song doesn’t get people on their feet within a verse and a chorus, he will switch songs. There is no part of the process of deciding what to play where his personal preference for music comes into play.
Teachers have a similar process that they go through. Especially with music and English teachers, we study pieces of art in our classes. Often we get to choose literature and music that we like but this should not be the primary way that we make decisions on what we include in our curriculum.
Sometimes teachers become engaged in “vanity projects.” This is when a teacher chooses to read a book or teach a piece of music because they get personal pleasure out of experiencing the piece of art that to other people is clearly inappropriate for their students. For example, making a group of third graders struggle through Hamlet or having a 6th grade beginner band play an entire Beethoven Symphony. “Vanity projects,” are the opposite of being student-centered.
Artistic people who are teachers need to be mindful that they are not looking to their teaching experiences for their own personal artistic fulfillment. That’s not what teaching is about. Now, it’s great if once in a while your students create great art and you get artistic fulfillment from that but that should be an extra bonus, not the purpose of the teaching.
Of course, we shouldn’t only teach songs we don’t like. That would make our jobs miserable, but it’s part of the gig. I’m really sick of hearing “Hot Cross Buns,” on the recorder or a beginning band instrument. However the song is pedagogically sound and the kids like it, so I suffer through it.
There are times that what we are passionate about lines up with what works from an educational standpoint. For example, I do “Waitin’ On A Sunny Day,” one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs with my fifth graders. I get to share my passion with my students and do a song that teachers them important musical skills and concepts that are part of my curriculum.
Like my students, some songs that I don't like initially often grow on me. Sometimes its because of the positive experiences I have with my students that I learn to love a song.
Keep an eye on your audience. Be that DJ and see what really helps your students learn. There is far more satisfaction in bringing music to your kids that you don't like that they learn from than pushing a song upon them that you love that they do not connect with.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Monday, October 13, 2014
Parenthood: Week 72 – Super-cute
Last week Ollie was being super-cute.
The other day we taught him the baby sign-language gesture for “read.” He picked up this sign in under an hour and during our family story-time he made this gesture as soon as we finished a book. Did we repeat certain books multiple times? Yes. Did story time last far longer than planned? Yes. But it was just so cute.
Ollie’s ability to walk has really taken off this past week. At the beginning of the week he could walk but only if he had something to pull up on. Now he can go from sitting to standing all by himself, though half the time he falls back on his butt. It’s incredibly cute.
During the short window of time when he couldn’t get up by himself he would reach his hand up and grab my finger to pull him up. After a couple steps he would full and then look back and reach out for my finger. He didn’t really put a lot of weight on my finger; he just squeezed it to make sure I was there. Yeah that was pretty darn cute.
Ollie thinks its hilarious to put things on his head. We were outside in a playground and there was a layer of leaves on top of the woodchips. After swishing them around. He started picking them up and dropping them on the top of his head. Ollie thought that this was the funniest thing he had ever done. The leaves ended up going down his jacket and into his onesie. Even though this led to a minor-melt down because he was upset that there were leaves in his shirt, the time he was sprinkling them over his head was hilariously cute.
It wasn’t the first time that Ollie had eaten food from Chipotle but it was the first time I had gotten him the kids meal. I ordered him a chicken quesadillas. He didn’t really know what to do with it so I ripped off a small piece. Once he tried it and liked it, he wanted to rest of the quesadilla. Instead of taking small bites like when he eats a piece of toast, he balled it up and shoved into his mouth. The whole thing didn’t fit into his mouth but he managed to take bites and somehow that ball of cheeses and tortillas disappeared in one of the cutest ways possible.
I brought Ollie upstairs to hang out with Diana. He walked over to his bin of toys and books and brought over the Belly Button Book. He sat down with the book and proceeded to try to find his own belly button. Because he was wearing a onesie that snapped between his legs he couldn’t find it. He was very concerned as he poked himself trying to find his little “bee bo.” So I lifted up my shirt. Ollie smiled up and me crawled over and giggled as he poked at my belly button. Seriously this boy is super-cute.
The other day we taught him the baby sign-language gesture for “read.” He picked up this sign in under an hour and during our family story-time he made this gesture as soon as we finished a book. Did we repeat certain books multiple times? Yes. Did story time last far longer than planned? Yes. But it was just so cute.
Ollie’s ability to walk has really taken off this past week. At the beginning of the week he could walk but only if he had something to pull up on. Now he can go from sitting to standing all by himself, though half the time he falls back on his butt. It’s incredibly cute.
During the short window of time when he couldn’t get up by himself he would reach his hand up and grab my finger to pull him up. After a couple steps he would full and then look back and reach out for my finger. He didn’t really put a lot of weight on my finger; he just squeezed it to make sure I was there. Yeah that was pretty darn cute.
Ollie thinks its hilarious to put things on his head. We were outside in a playground and there was a layer of leaves on top of the woodchips. After swishing them around. He started picking them up and dropping them on the top of his head. Ollie thought that this was the funniest thing he had ever done. The leaves ended up going down his jacket and into his onesie. Even though this led to a minor-melt down because he was upset that there were leaves in his shirt, the time he was sprinkling them over his head was hilariously cute.
It wasn’t the first time that Ollie had eaten food from Chipotle but it was the first time I had gotten him the kids meal. I ordered him a chicken quesadillas. He didn’t really know what to do with it so I ripped off a small piece. Once he tried it and liked it, he wanted to rest of the quesadilla. Instead of taking small bites like when he eats a piece of toast, he balled it up and shoved into his mouth. The whole thing didn’t fit into his mouth but he managed to take bites and somehow that ball of cheeses and tortillas disappeared in one of the cutest ways possible.
I brought Ollie upstairs to hang out with Diana. He walked over to his bin of toys and books and brought over the Belly Button Book. He sat down with the book and proceeded to try to find his own belly button. Because he was wearing a onesie that snapped between his legs he couldn’t find it. He was very concerned as he poked himself trying to find his little “bee bo.” So I lifted up my shirt. Ollie smiled up and me crawled over and giggled as he poked at my belly button. Seriously this boy is super-cute.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Year 5: Week 6 – Week In Review
Monday
There wasn’t a lot of playing music during 8th grade band class, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We joked around, watch some international speed-walking competitions, discussed how the past couple weeks had gone and then finally got around to actually playing our instruments. Was it the most productive class musically? No, but if simply creating great music was my mission I wouldn’t be teaching middle school band.
Tuesday
My instinct was to get mad when my 3rd graders giggled at the off-key, shrill recording of a Native American octogenarian singing a chant. I felt it was important for them to hear an authentic recording of this chant and while it wasn’t a good example of singing technique, it was an important representation of this culture. Before we listening to this recording I told them that some of them might feel like giggling and that was ok, but they needed to stifle themselves and I would be asking them why the were laughing.
Some of my student did smile a giggle while listening to the singing, so we talked as a class why someone might laugh at this recording. They had very honest reasons: her accent sounded funny, it was unfamiliar, the words sounded silly, and I didn’t understand what she was saying. I validated their reasons and talked about how sometimes when I’m uncomfortable, I giggle, but its important to move past that. The second time we listened to the recording, no one was laughing and they dived deep into the chant learning the words and the melody and captured the mood of the music.
Wednesday
The beginning of the school year 6th grade music is crazy. We voice test students and have them try to play all of the band instruments. After this process the students choose between band and choir. After that the band students need to rent instruments and then we begin teaching the kids how to actually play the instrument . . . kind of. Last week was spent teaching the kids how to open their cases right side up and how to put their instruments together. This week we finally got to producing a great tone and learning couple notes.
Susan wasn’t doing anything wrong on the clarinet, but she felt like she was a failure. While all of the other clarinet players were getting a nice low dark tone, she kept playing the higher octave of the instrument. My first three suggestions didn’t work, but after one crazy idea, a metaphor that barely made sense, she produced a beautiful rich dark tone. Susan wasn’t sure how great her sound was but I think she got the idea when I jumped out of the chair and jumped in joy.
Thursday
A spent almost all of my prep time responding to one parent’s email. Is this any way to balance my time between the families of the almost two hundred students that I teach? Yes. Being fair doesn’t mean that every family gets the same thing from me every day. We give to our parents according to what they need and sometimes one parent needs more time than others.
Friday
The best part of bringing Ollie to school for our annual County Fair was when he met the 8th grade girls. As we approached the 8th grade atrium, I helped Ollie stand up on the ramp leading up to the where the 8th graders were gathered. One of the girls recognized Ollie from pictures I had shared, announced “OMG!! It’s LITTLE TANG!!!” Then a group of about twenty girls rushed towards Ollie. They all stopped about two feet away from Ollie creating an arc around him, and kneeled and crouched down to greet him. As they smiled at him, and reached out to him, he stood laughing in delight at the attention.
There wasn’t a lot of playing music during 8th grade band class, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We joked around, watch some international speed-walking competitions, discussed how the past couple weeks had gone and then finally got around to actually playing our instruments. Was it the most productive class musically? No, but if simply creating great music was my mission I wouldn’t be teaching middle school band.
Tuesday
My instinct was to get mad when my 3rd graders giggled at the off-key, shrill recording of a Native American octogenarian singing a chant. I felt it was important for them to hear an authentic recording of this chant and while it wasn’t a good example of singing technique, it was an important representation of this culture. Before we listening to this recording I told them that some of them might feel like giggling and that was ok, but they needed to stifle themselves and I would be asking them why the were laughing.
Some of my student did smile a giggle while listening to the singing, so we talked as a class why someone might laugh at this recording. They had very honest reasons: her accent sounded funny, it was unfamiliar, the words sounded silly, and I didn’t understand what she was saying. I validated their reasons and talked about how sometimes when I’m uncomfortable, I giggle, but its important to move past that. The second time we listened to the recording, no one was laughing and they dived deep into the chant learning the words and the melody and captured the mood of the music.
Wednesday
The beginning of the school year 6th grade music is crazy. We voice test students and have them try to play all of the band instruments. After this process the students choose between band and choir. After that the band students need to rent instruments and then we begin teaching the kids how to actually play the instrument . . . kind of. Last week was spent teaching the kids how to open their cases right side up and how to put their instruments together. This week we finally got to producing a great tone and learning couple notes.
Susan wasn’t doing anything wrong on the clarinet, but she felt like she was a failure. While all of the other clarinet players were getting a nice low dark tone, she kept playing the higher octave of the instrument. My first three suggestions didn’t work, but after one crazy idea, a metaphor that barely made sense, she produced a beautiful rich dark tone. Susan wasn’t sure how great her sound was but I think she got the idea when I jumped out of the chair and jumped in joy.
Thursday
A spent almost all of my prep time responding to one parent’s email. Is this any way to balance my time between the families of the almost two hundred students that I teach? Yes. Being fair doesn’t mean that every family gets the same thing from me every day. We give to our parents according to what they need and sometimes one parent needs more time than others.
Friday
The best part of bringing Ollie to school for our annual County Fair was when he met the 8th grade girls. As we approached the 8th grade atrium, I helped Ollie stand up on the ramp leading up to the where the 8th graders were gathered. One of the girls recognized Ollie from pictures I had shared, announced “OMG!! It’s LITTLE TANG!!!” Then a group of about twenty girls rushed towards Ollie. They all stopped about two feet away from Ollie creating an arc around him, and kneeled and crouched down to greet him. As they smiled at him, and reached out to him, he stood laughing in delight at the attention.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Monday, October 6, 2014
Parenthood: Week 71 - Unpacking Your Chidlhood
One of the common exercises that is done in diversity work is for a person to examine their own journey in the field of diversity. This requires the person to ask themselves questions and come to terms with their own feelings is an open and authentic way. This is not an easy thing to do and sometimes it can take a lot of strength. However, this is one of most important steps because everything a persons says or does related to diversity work is influenced, whether the person knows it or not by feelings and experiences from the past.
The same goes with parenting.
Parents make all kinds of choices about parenting every single day. There’s many different influences that help us parenting, from the doctor to the random blogger. We rationalize our decisions by trying to base them on sound advise but the reality is that much of the time, we go with paths that we feel more comfortable with and then find the person, research, author, or random person on the street to back up and help us rationalize our decisions.
Our choices are also informed by how we feel about our own childhood, how our parents raised us and how we think our parents raised us. All of these things, swirl around in our subconscious and come bubbling up when we least expect it and have a far stronger influence on the choices we make as parents than any of us would like to believe.
We as parents have to unpack our own childhood and ask ourselves a lot of tough questions so that we can get to the root of our own feelings about being a parent and the decisions that we are making.
What if you tell yourself that you use disposable diapers because of the time it saves when in reality the reason you are doing this is because cloth diapers remind you of the times your parents forced you to change your younger siblings diapers?
Unpacking our childhood experiences may not change any of the choices we make but it will make it more clear what insecurities, feelings, fears and hopes are influencing you as a parent.
You’ve got to dig deep and it’s really hard. There are some parts of my childhood I like thinking about and other parts I’ve left behind. It’s probably the later, which keeps me up at night when I can’t make a decisions about something related to Ollie.
We aren’t destined to become our parents when we have kids. But we are destined to try to capture the best parts of our own childhood for our children and steer them away from the moments we’d rather forget. This is not a bad thing, but we have to be careful. What was glorious for us, may not interest our children and what once felt so scaring, may not be so bad through the eyes of the next generation.
Kid’s force us to look back at our own childhood. Don’t fight this, stay with it. Have tough conversations with your parents and siblings, figure out what worked and what did it. Don’t always try to rationalize your parenting instincts with other people’s words, look within and try to find that reasoning in your own experience as a child.
Once you understand this and accept your childhood then you can let go of it when you need to make decisions about your own child. Only by finding those fears and insecurities, looking at them and getting to their core, can you then put them aside.
There’s a lot of things that are hard about being a parent. Being forced to reexamine your own childhood is one of the hardest things. This process may be rough. Under further examination the good things may not seem so great, and the bad things, well, you might realize, really weren’t that bad.
The same goes with parenting.
Parents make all kinds of choices about parenting every single day. There’s many different influences that help us parenting, from the doctor to the random blogger. We rationalize our decisions by trying to base them on sound advise but the reality is that much of the time, we go with paths that we feel more comfortable with and then find the person, research, author, or random person on the street to back up and help us rationalize our decisions.
Our choices are also informed by how we feel about our own childhood, how our parents raised us and how we think our parents raised us. All of these things, swirl around in our subconscious and come bubbling up when we least expect it and have a far stronger influence on the choices we make as parents than any of us would like to believe.
We as parents have to unpack our own childhood and ask ourselves a lot of tough questions so that we can get to the root of our own feelings about being a parent and the decisions that we are making.
What if you tell yourself that you use disposable diapers because of the time it saves when in reality the reason you are doing this is because cloth diapers remind you of the times your parents forced you to change your younger siblings diapers?
Unpacking our childhood experiences may not change any of the choices we make but it will make it more clear what insecurities, feelings, fears and hopes are influencing you as a parent.
You’ve got to dig deep and it’s really hard. There are some parts of my childhood I like thinking about and other parts I’ve left behind. It’s probably the later, which keeps me up at night when I can’t make a decisions about something related to Ollie.
We aren’t destined to become our parents when we have kids. But we are destined to try to capture the best parts of our own childhood for our children and steer them away from the moments we’d rather forget. This is not a bad thing, but we have to be careful. What was glorious for us, may not interest our children and what once felt so scaring, may not be so bad through the eyes of the next generation.
Kid’s force us to look back at our own childhood. Don’t fight this, stay with it. Have tough conversations with your parents and siblings, figure out what worked and what did it. Don’t always try to rationalize your parenting instincts with other people’s words, look within and try to find that reasoning in your own experience as a child.
Once you understand this and accept your childhood then you can let go of it when you need to make decisions about your own child. Only by finding those fears and insecurities, looking at them and getting to their core, can you then put them aside.
There’s a lot of things that are hard about being a parent. Being forced to reexamine your own childhood is one of the hardest things. This process may be rough. Under further examination the good things may not seem so great, and the bad things, well, you might realize, really weren’t that bad.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Year 5: Week 5 – The Honeymoon
This year I had my first honeymoon.
There’s this idea I’ve heard about ever since I started teaching about the “honeymoon period.” It’s this theory that kids are really well behaved and easy to teach during the first couple weeks of school and then they become a terror.
Why would this occur? There’s a couple theories. Some kids are simply scared of their teacher and this makes them straighten up. This fear eventually wears out and the kids start pushing the boundaries. Older students often give a teacher a chance, but once they see that the teacher doesn’t have their stuff together, they will dive right in and let the teacher have it.
In the past, I didn't experience a honeymoon period. If a class is going to be difficult, they usually start out difficult with me. This has led to having some pretty challenging starts to the school year. .
This year was different.
I was simply amazed with how smoothly this one class ran. They had great discussions, really dove into the activities without hesitation and worked together well. And then last week happened. It’s not that they were all that poorly behaved. They were actually quite typically with how much they interrupted each other and how many of them would talk out of turn. That part of this change wasn’t that surprising. It was just simply shocking how quickly they made this change.
Probably what happened is that the class was giving me a chance, which I appreciate, but then at some point they decided to start acting real. .
I prefer what I experienced in earlier years, with not having a honeymoon period. I guess it’s nice to have a softer start of the year with a group of kids but I would much rather start the year with the kids pushing boundaries immediately.
Maybe the reason I haven't had honeymoon periods in the past is because I'm not a intimidating teacher at all and I'm pretty real with my kids from day 1. I don't try to put on a front that I am more serious than I actually am. I don't do the whole "don't smile until November," thing. It's just not me and feels disingenuous.
I guess my honeymoon was nice, but the trip away wasn’t worth the rough landing back into reality.
There’s this idea I’ve heard about ever since I started teaching about the “honeymoon period.” It’s this theory that kids are really well behaved and easy to teach during the first couple weeks of school and then they become a terror.
Why would this occur? There’s a couple theories. Some kids are simply scared of their teacher and this makes them straighten up. This fear eventually wears out and the kids start pushing the boundaries. Older students often give a teacher a chance, but once they see that the teacher doesn’t have their stuff together, they will dive right in and let the teacher have it.
In the past, I didn't experience a honeymoon period. If a class is going to be difficult, they usually start out difficult with me. This has led to having some pretty challenging starts to the school year. .
This year was different.
I was simply amazed with how smoothly this one class ran. They had great discussions, really dove into the activities without hesitation and worked together well. And then last week happened. It’s not that they were all that poorly behaved. They were actually quite typically with how much they interrupted each other and how many of them would talk out of turn. That part of this change wasn’t that surprising. It was just simply shocking how quickly they made this change.
Probably what happened is that the class was giving me a chance, which I appreciate, but then at some point they decided to start acting real. .
I prefer what I experienced in earlier years, with not having a honeymoon period. I guess it’s nice to have a softer start of the year with a group of kids but I would much rather start the year with the kids pushing boundaries immediately.
Maybe the reason I haven't had honeymoon periods in the past is because I'm not a intimidating teacher at all and I'm pretty real with my kids from day 1. I don't try to put on a front that I am more serious than I actually am. I don't do the whole "don't smile until November," thing. It's just not me and feels disingenuous.
I guess my honeymoon was nice, but the trip away wasn’t worth the rough landing back into reality.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
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