One of the biggest things that has stuck with me a week after finishing this Shakespeare course is the teacher repeatedly making the point that we must "land" our lines on the listeners. That it's not enough to know them and say them, even with great interpretive emotion, but that if you don't connect with the listener, you might as well be reciting Shakespeare in your car (no, I never do this...well, hardly ever...). Raise the stakes. Feel the importance of the words, implore the listener to hear you, understand you, go along with you. This is the lesson I am carrying around with me as a music teacher of children who, more often than not, would rather listen to each other than me. It's not that they don't like me. It's just that the things going on in their social world are far more important to them than anything I might want to say to them. Hisa, our teacher, reminded us again and again to "check in; are they getting it?" With her eyes and her gestures and a lovable habit of saying "do you know what I mean?" or "does that make sense?" after her explanations, she pushed us to look for our audience's eyes and signs of understanding.
It seems obvious that a teacher in a roomful of students should be striving to get them to understand and "get" what she is saying. But I know myself. I know that there have been times when I have wondered whether anyone cares enough to get it, or that maybe that what I am trying to get to them is maybe not important enough. It is at these times that I have underlying, unspoken doubts about what I am doing: Does music really matter? Does it really matter if the kids actually play a song? Or is it enough for them just to think they are playing a song, pushing a bow back and forth on open strings, or blowing random notes into a horn? The obvious answer to these questions is "of course those things matter!" But when it seems that said roomful of kids would rather talk to each other, or make random noise on their instruments, or daydream, then I do wonder why I bother. And I also wonder if this feeling is unique to me, or is something that other teachers, and music teachers in particular, share.
I find myself imagining that if I could just say the right things, I would have every kid playing like a virtuoso, motivated to practice that elusive 30 minutes a day, and showing up to my classes because they dare not miss one word of those important, and ever-entertaining mots falling from my golden lips. I imagine that other teachers, my colleagues, all have found the right things to say and their classes are full of eager, silently-listening, paying-attention musical geniuses.
Since starting the Shakespeare class, I have been studying in my working life how to be sure the kids are getting what I am saying. I have spoken Shakespeare's lines in my acting class, and felt the weight of their importance. I know the stakes. I must believe that words I speak to my students are just as important. The stakes are just as high. Maybe most important, I must find "the impulse to speak" that Hisa had us look for before we uttered one word. As teachers, we ASSUME an impulse to speak, a RIGHT to speak, but if we are honest, we would probably admit that we speak more than we should. I know I do. If I want to "land" my words on my students' understanding, to impart something valuable to them, then I must keep the words' value high, by making them rare. Kids learn by doing. I should only be giving them enough words to be sure they can DO. The end.
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