Improvisation

This week I am struggling with the horrible cold, cough, fever, aches and pains virus that has been going around our school, but it is easier to get through the day in school, than complaining in bed..so instead, I go straight home after work and go to bed for the night.  I am beginning to feel well enough to write my blog today, later in the week than usual!  I figured I would just let it go this week, but I was on vacation last week, so I hated missing two whole weeks without visiting with all of you.

This morning the radio went on and it was the BBC interviewing a Danish jazz musician who believes we need to improvise in life the way jazz musicians improvise on melodies.  He said that we make too big a deal about making mistakes, and that in jazz music, often a mistake can be the beginning of a beautiful improvisation.  He said Miles Davis taught him that.  He said that there really are no mistakes, only chances to improve style, form and design.

He said, in life this is true also.  He says that improvisation in life is something we all need to incorporate into our own lives.  A mistake is never a mistake so much as an opportunity to create something new, or to go in a different direction.  I think we all need to believe in this more.  We come from a frightening dialectic that there is only this view of good and bad, failure and success, is it possible that we have been viewing this all wrong?  I do have to wonder about that.  Is it possible that we have taken the idea of "not getting it, yet" as "failure" instead of possibly thinking of it as important information for a new viewpoint?  A different twist, a different take?  I think that's possible.

Let's put this into educational terms.  There are many articles recently about allowing students to "fail".  They say there is a stigma attached to failing and we need to squelch that notion as soon as possible.  That the only way to success is trying something enough times so that you can get it.  But why do we have to point to the idea of failure all the time, each time a child doesn't get it.  Can't we see it as a step in the right direction, or the beginning of something accomplished, or any other way of encouragement.   Perhaps we just need to eradicate the word "failure" from our lexicon, and come up with another way of talking about "not getting it".  It is a spectrum, after all, let's just think of it that way.  I never say to kids, "Oh, you failed at that piece of music."  Instead, I say, "There were some notes that were correct, and you had the feeling in the piece going well, but we need to practice that piece more before you should move on to something more difficult."  Failure, in my business, never comes into any discussion.  Why should it?  A new piece might have come out of the wrong notes that my student was playing.  I have been known to say, "That's not quite right, but it might be better than the original."  Let's just re-think our idea of what is right and wrong, and riff and improvise all on that, shall we?  And we really need to re-evaluate the use of the word failure, it is getting really annoying!!!  When we use that word it seems really final, and that is not how we teach.

 Chances, opportunities, wonderful melodic formations can be beginning, as long as we don't tell kids that they have failed..

I don't even know..

I am about to finish a novel about a professional blogger, and I realize I have been blogging for almost a year and I have no idea how to do it.  The blog that this woman writes is so edgey, so intense, so provocative, that she gets all kinds of mail, hate mail, support mail, and people re-post and re-post and go on and on.  I am, frankly, Ms. Frankly, just trying to share what I do with some other people who might be out there interested in the real experience of a middle school music teacher.  I remember, for example, a terrifying Saturday Night Live parody of a music teacher from many years ago, with a music teacher trying to get a class's attention, playing the electric piano, and losing the audience/class by the second.

That is not my experience at all.  I take my work seriously, but we have fun.  For example, this week and last week, we are writing plays using the meaning of songs for our points of departure.  I have realized recently that popular music these days is very lyric-heavy.  When you look at a song for the first time, it doesn't always mean what you think it does at the beginning.. I have students who have chosen some very interesting songs, "Mean", "Rude" "Counting Stars" "Viva La Vida" "The Eye of the Tiger".

 I began this project by singing "Titanium" with the students and having a discussion about the song.  What is it about?  What does it mean?  Why does she talk about "ricocheting" bullets and "Titanium" and "you have further to fall"?  Is the song about shooting at someone?  If you look closely, it is all about bullying.  But, one of my students today said something very interesting:  "Sometimes you have to be bullied to learn how to stand up for yourself and others."  I found this thought very evolved, as we talk about bullies all the time, real ones, cyber bullies, all the different sorts.  If we learn how to deal with them, we can be strong in later life, this boy said.  I was impressed, and talked further about this.  We were bullied as kids, and never had a grown up step in to help us.  We just kept it all to ourselves, and carried on.  These are wounds that leave scars, but I know that the middle school was the hardest for me, which is why I teach it.  I have been trying to protect my students every since, or at least teach them to stand up to those "bullets" that "ricochet".

Anyway, if you can take a song's meaning, and then create characters, and create a play around all of it as well, then you are in a place to really work with a group, evaluate artistic projects, and you can explain how the arts helps people understand what is going on in our culture today.  If you chose a song from the 60's, you might have to base your play on some event from the Vietnam war, or the civil rights movement, or some sense of freedom of speech or rights for women.  If you choose a song from today, you are more likely to be dealing with break-ups, the paparazzi, the way rich people deal with less rich people,  body image, death, bullying, or identity.

 I leave you with the link to Titanium, by David Guetta, written by a man but sung by a woman.. I think the songs show the changes in our culture better than any other art form, and it is immediate and very revealing.  I hope my students will get that from this experience.  That is my hope for today.  Titanium David Guetta lyrics Youtube

Make Our Garden Grow

It is the beginning of the fourth quarter of the year 2014-2015..There is something to be said for knowing where you are in the year.  You can judge where you have been, you can take stock of what you have accomplished, and you can see what time you have left and where you have to go.  That being obvious, it is also a complicated process when you are working with proficiency based learning, and proficiency based assessments.

When do you draw the line?  When do you say to a student, it is too late to go back and take that assessment again?  When do you say, you never did that assignment at the beginning of the last quarter when it was assigned, why is it ok to hand it in at the beginning of quarter four, and say that you deserve a mastery on that project?  I think there are varying opinions on this score, and I know that there have been many heated discussions amongst fabulous teachers that have shown that there are viable reasons for these opinions.   However, if we are proficiency-based from beginning to end, then you have to accept work whenever it has gotten to a proficiency level.  That is another reason NOT to translate into old-fashioned grades.  It won't compute at all, to take an assignment from another quarter and try to translate it into conventional grading practices.

 Finally, we must ask, what is the standard?  What did the student work on to find his or her way to proficiency in that standard?  Did that student meet that standard?  Did that student do all that was required to meet that standard?  Is that student prepared to move onto a higher and more complex level?  Can we say that this student has truly mastered this standard, and can both remember it for further use and also can and would want to go to a deeper and more sophisticated level with it?  If that is the case, then we must give that student a mastery, a green light, and continue to keep that child engaged, learning, enthusiastic, coming to school regularly, ready to face the next challenge, and the next challenge and the next one.

I have never believed in grades.  I, myself, have never been motivated by grades other than that I was afraid to fail or be mediocre.  I was afraid of getting a C because my sisters were so brilliant and I was considered the "not as smart one with a talent" growing up.  I couldn't test well to save my life, and I had test anxiety so much so that I almost flunked the written driving test when I moved to Chicago at 24 years of age.

I have since realized many things about myself, and especially the ways I am motivated to learn, to grow, to challenge myself.  It has helped me to see all the benefits of motivating students in a positive way.  I know my students don't have to take a Smarter Balance test about Modest Mussorgsky or the notes of the scale.  I am grateful of this every day.  The anxiety for me is only my motivation always to do the best and to be the best that I can be.  I only wish to, as said in "Candide" to "Make Our  Garden Grow".                                   Make Our Garden Grow  

Mussorgsky inspired pictures

This has been one of the best weeks of school, speaking only in superlatives, of course.  I have been gifted with wonderful pictures at an exhibition, let me share those first.  This is an interpretation of "The Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells"..        

This is a picture inspired by "The Old Castle"

Here we have the "Great Gate of Kiev"

This was inspired by "The Hut on Fowls' Legs"

Here is another "Old Castle"

And if you would like to hear the music that also inspired some of these pictures, let me direct you here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXy50exHjes

Let me leave you here for this week.  It has been a very busy week, and I just want to say, the pictures and the music say what words cannot or will not say.  Enjoy the pictures, enjoy the music, speak to me or send me pictures or links that you would like to add to this.  Have a great week! 

PS- The GNOME