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..