Into the Woodshed

"Take that home and woodshed it!"
                     - Charles Roberts, Greece Arcadia High School Band Director circa 1970


These are the words of my high school band director. This is one of the many sayings he had that he harangued us with, badgering us to do better, be better. And we loved him for it. What he alluded to, I guess, was the practice of going to the woodshed for a spanking, a dubious practice designed to make neurotic adults out of misbehaving children, but when applied to music meant to beat all the mistakes out of it. I have been thinking a lot lately about the merits of practice, what it takes to get kids to practice, and who really benefits from practicing. We have just finished a grading period at the middle school and are rapidly approaching concert time, and so this has been at the forefront of my focus for my classes.

What brought this into sharp focus for me yesterday was a silly and cute video that was making the rounds of two very small children sparring in a Tae Kwon Do test for their next belt. The two children, in full sparring gear, hop up and down on their toes, make sporadic kicks, but never once connect with each other. Having sat through many such tests at a school here in So Cal, I knew that those kids would both be granted their new belts. My husband, Jon, has always contended that in commercial martial arts classes, students progress through their belts by "testing" and always "pass" no matter whether they can demonstrate the skills required at that level or not. Many adults (my stepdaughter, say) take those tests very seriously and practice hard for them. But we have been to several of her tests and watched the little kids get their next belt when they barely made it through the test. My stepdaughter's brown belt is NOT the same as the brown belt won by a 1st grader, but getting that belt assures the school that the 1st grader's parents will keep paying for classes. This cheapens the belt test, and if you're an adult, you have to wonder if you would have gotten your belt anyway, even if you couldn't get through your forms or break a board.

It was testing week in my middle school class last week, and I am sitting here at the end of it, puzzling. This is the only thing, besides participation that I have to grade them on for this five weeks. We have a concert coming up in 10 days. The seventh and eighth graders have been through testing many times, and approached their tests with one of three attitudes: 1) terrified 2) don't care 3) care enough to work on the music at home to get it right. The sixth graders, for the most part, took this experience really seriously, and it was in that class that I saw the most dramatic improvements in skill. What several of the sixth graders accomplished in the last two weeks is nothing short of amazing, and all of them understood the importance of the test and what it means for the overall achievement of the orchestra for them to do well.

I think my mind is chewing on the issue of practicing because as a child and teenager, I, myself, didn't really believe that practicing would make any difference. I had some kind of block that prevented me from knowing that practice actually improved my performance. This was partly due to the fact that I was, from early on, a pretty good sight player and reader and could fake my way through lessons even well into middle school. I was the sort of kid, and I have met many like me in my teaching, who easily mastered things at a certain level, and instantly became frustrated when the level got past my easy mastery. I didn't know, until I was doing Master's work on cello performance, how much I could really achieve by systematic, careful, slow and abundant practice. I had always thought, before that, that somehow people were just ABLE to play difficult music, because, I don't know...they were magic! And since I didn't have that magic, I was doomed to mediocrity.

I also have been watching my husband learn the ukulele. I got him one for his birthday in September, and he has devoted many, many hours to learning chords, songs and strumming patterns, until now he is amazed and delighted that he can play some things with unconscious ease, making real music on his own for the first time in his life. He echoes back to me what I have said to him in our discussions of my own classes: "If you like it, you'll practice it".

So why is it important to me that my students understand the value of practice? Maybe this is the question I should really ask myself. When a student ends up in tears because of the pressure of performing and my expectations, have I really accomplished anything? Can I get them to care when they don't? Can I SHOW them how much they can achieve when they put the time in? When does individual practice turn into individual self-confidence? Should I be easier on the kids, not make them play for a grade? Give them all 3 (my highest mark) even when they can't get through the assigned passages?

The last two questions are the ones that have been eating at me all weekend. All the kids hate this test, some more than others. But for some the fear has spurred them to work harder and master all or part of the whole. Some moved forward a few inches in their skill level, and some just crashed and burned, with nary a backward glance. They all recognized excellence in their peers and roundly applauded after tests that earned a 3. But my grading system also takes into account other factors. For instance, several of the students in both classes are first year players and I measured their success by how far they have come, evidence of individual practice, and willingness to put themselves on the line. They might not get a 3, but could get close, just by stepping up and making progress.

Another video that came to me yesterday shows extreme athletes doing impossible things. I can't even begin to imagine what the practice looks like to achieve such impossibility. But there they are, flying, jumping, skiing, climbing in the most IN-human ways. They were not born with these abilities. No human is. And it's not magic. Somehow, they practiced.

But I have spent the weekend thinking about this: If I cheapen the test, to save some from embarrassment or failure, then I am really telling ALL the students that I don't think they are very capable. When I set a high standard and make everyone measure up, I am telling my students that I have confidence in their ability to achieve great things. There is no magic, no special birthright here. Instruction helps, but "taking it home and 'woodshedding' it" is really the only thing that stands between failure and success.

Weren't You My Music Teacher?

It happened again the other day. I was tuning violins in an empty school auditorium in preparing for a large 4th grade string class, and a young woman came in and asked me my name. "Are you Miss Betty?" was how she asked, and I said "No, I'm Mrs. McLean." Her face fell, as she said she thought I looked like her old music teacher and then when I told her I used to be Miss Crocker (get it? Betty Crocker!), her face lit up with recognition. "Yes, that's it!" she exclaimed. "You were my music teacher!" I asked her name, and, indeed I remembered her. She had been a viola student of mine in 4th and 5th grade and then went on to middle and high school where she played in the orchestras, as well as in the local youth symphony. She still has her viola, she told me, and "really ought to get it out and play it one of these days". She is now the parent of a kindergartener. The elementary group that started with her that year, way back when, was a small, really enthusiatic group. I only taught at that school for two years, and lost track of those fun kids. But it made me happy to know that she had played all the way through school.

This is not the first time this has happened, and every time it does, I have to stop and wonder where all those years went. How did these kids change so much, while I stayed the same (What!!!? I've changed too???)? The time I have been working as a public school music teacher has gone by in a blink of an eye, but constitutes a significant chunk of the life of a young twenty-something. It has not yet happened that I am teaching the child of a former student, but that day is coming.

Some of the young adults who stop me to recall our shared past are parents of elementary students now themselves, or they are working in our schools or elsewhere in town here. Some have gone on to college, others have not, but no matter what the level of their higher education, these kids all graduated from high school at least. They are members of our greater community, and, it seems, stable, healthy and productive. Maybe this is the best reason for keeping active music classes in all school levels. Kids stay in school if it's fun and there is some part of the school day that feels like it is just for them. They are part of a community within their school that has shared interests and goals and which, over the course of the four years of high school, at least, builds a shared history of events and memories. Music allows kids of different ages, classes, and peer groups to interact. Girls and boys participate together. Together they do what no one of them can do alone. Each has a part, and each part is necessary for the finished product. Individual effort pays off, as well as cooperation. There is nothing else in school, except for team sports, that can do this.

And just as with sports, in order to have satisfying high school music experiences, it is best if the students begin learning their instruments early on, say, in elementary school. Most fourth graders don't really know this, and they sign up for music class because it looks like something fun, and/or they can get out of class for a half hour a couple times a week. More and more, I am trying to paint this picture for them, of what they can expect if they stay with it. My mantra: Just keep 'em playing, no matter what. Then, some day down the road, I will be sitting in a restaurant or getting my hair done, or walking across a school campus and a young person will say: "Hey weren't you my music teacher?"

The Talent Myth

Talent- a special innate or developed aptitude for an expressed or implied activity usually of a creative or artistic nature


I believe Talent is a myth. This is my own personal belief, and I have had spirited discussions with friends, family and colleagues about it. It came up again the other day with a co-worker, this notion that people who pursue and succeed at music are somehow different from regular people. It comes up that the defining difference is "natural" or "god-given" talent, and I reject this notion. Maybe it is the liberal and democratic part of my being that does so. I want everyone to feel able to participate in the joy of making music, and not sit on the sidelines because of some perceived lack of "talent". When it comes to music, I believe that everyone and anyone can learn, and the only real limit to that learning is what I call affinity.

Early exposure to music of all kinds, and an expectation from parents that a child WILL play music can give a person an advantage out of the chute. I see this every day, where kids who come to start a band instrument succeed quickly because they have had piano lessons and/or the parents have exposed them to lots of music, especially live performances. Such students take success on the new instrument as a given; that they will have to work at it to succeed is also understood from day one.

But I have also seen students who have no early exposure to live music, or very little, have had no previous training, and whose parents have zero expectation of their child becoming a musician move to the head of the class. But is it talent that explains musical success where the groundwork is missing? I don't think so. I think it is that a student discovers he really LIKES making music. He likes fooling around with the flute  or cello at home, making attempts to get sound, dragging the bow across the strings, trying the buttons, figuring out how to play Jingle Bells or the first few notes of Happy Birthday or the USC fight song.

And no one at home tries to stop him. Nothing makes me sadder as a music teacher than when a child tells me she cannot play at home because a parent won't let her. The family lives in an apartment, or has a small baby who needs to sleep, or the parent can't stand the squeaks and squawks that are inevitable at first. Or there might be a toddler in the home who might damage the instrument, so it is put away in a safe place, which is, unfortunately, not accessible to the fourth-grader either. These impediments WILL keep a student from succeeding.

But if the child has access and loves it, he or she will succeed. There ARE students who try it for a while and discover it isn't their cup of tea, this blowing and scraping away on some piece of arcane equipment. Some don't even feel compelled to try; music doesn't have any pull for them. They become visual artists or actors or dancers or soccer stars or history experts or spelling buffs or scientists, because that is what they LOVE to do.

What makes one person like one thing and not another? I don't know the answer to that. Maybe we need to redefine "talent" as something closer to "desire".

Maybe the job of the music teacher is to make sure the student is having fun. Due to some scheduling issues last year, I have almost all beginners in my elementary classes this year. There are a bunch of them. What's fun for a group of 30 beginning violinists, or a beginning band? I think, and am basing this year's pedagogy on this, that what's fun is success. I have been keeping this idea in mind, focusing on basics and getting it right. Sitting up with good posture, forming good embouchure, playing in tune, using a "beautiful bow hand", starting and stopping together are all things easy to overlook in the throes of trying to get some music happening, but when made the focus of the lesson, can be achieved by everyone and create an atmosphere of teamwork and accomplishment. What is interesting to me is that I hear from kids and the parents of those kids that they are having fun!

I have to admit, I didn't really think about this as I was going into the new year. I was thinking more about crowd control, breaking things down so I could manage so many beginners at once. The added benefit of creating successful moments for my students is something that I didn't foresee, but am enjoying nonetheless.

Now I hope I can keep the fun going, because that's where their future lies. Talent-shmalent. If they are having fun, they are going to keep playing. And if they keep playing, then doors open into worlds of fun they can't even imagine yet.

They Do It Every Time!

Well, here we are, deep into the school year. It's only October, but we have been back to school since before Labor Day- a first for us this year in Pasadena. I have nearly 300 kids signed up to play music in the elementary classes, and all but a handful of the instruments in my inventory are checked out. Kids are blowing in head-joints, buzzing lips, plucking open strings, learning about playing postion and rest position. They are excited, and in every single new class, sometime in this first month, sometime during the relative noise and chaos of those first meetings, someone will turn a clarinet or a trumpet or a violin up, place it on his shoulder (it really is the boys who do this, not girls) make two clicking sounds and then pantomime a kick back, and an innocent musical instrument is transformed into a gun. It is universal. It ALWAYS happens. My response to this is quick and serious: guns are not allowed at school, guns are not a joke, and instruments are never, NEVER guns. Usually I get a wide-eyed stare back, like how-did-she-even-know-what-I-was-doing...as though he was the first person ever to think of doing that.

I remember in the 70's when I had friends my age with small children, and those children were not allowed to play with guns, or weapons of any kind. These kids were not given cap pistols or air rifles or even pop guns, but they DID play with guns. Sticks, trucks, Legos, almost anything, except maybe a stuffed animal could become a gun. I am quite sure that if I had been teaching music classes then, the clarinets would have had their turn as semi-automatic rifles. We, as children, did play with toy guns, had a couple of realistic-looking pistols in a closet high up, where we had to ask permission to get them down. Sometimes we had rolls of caps that fit into the hammer, so that when you pulled the trigger, they made a dandy sound and emitted light, smoke, and the smell of gunpowder.They were fun, but I didn't care much one way or the other about them, and have absolutely no interest in guns, toy or otherwise, now. But, in every new class, in every year for 15 years, and I'll bet for the next 15 years, someone does.

So forgive me, kids, for getting on your cases about it, but in a post-Columbine world, I don't feel I have a choice. I cannot say that allowing 4th graders to weaponize their trombones will result in mass shootings in the high school cafeteria later, and I cannot say that making a big-deal prohibition of this weaponization will prevent such horrors from happening. But if I don't make my speech, I will be forever hearing that click-click kaboom, we will have it in every class, every week, instead of just the first month. I think we're done with it for this year. Good.

My Life in 6 Songs: Part IV- War/Lean on Me

Hai-yai, Kay-ay-kus
Nobody like us,
we are the campers of RSC!
Always a-grinnin'
Always a-winnin'
Always a-feelin' fine!
Kay-Ay!


Okay, this is actually two songs or maybe three if you count the one above. But they merge in my mind into the experience of one summer- the summer of 1972. I had graduated from high school a year early and was excited about starting college in the fall, and had landed my first job as part of the kitchen staff at Rotary Sunshine Camp in Rochester. RSC was, and is still, a summer camp serving disabled children( http://www.sunshinecampus.org/). The idea behind the camp is that, for a couple weeks each year, no matter how disabled a child is, he or she will be able to have fun, just like any other kid. Swimming, camping out, crafts, campfires, movie nights, special visits from bagpipe troupes and ventriloquists, sherriff helicopters and magicians all were accessible to even the most severely involved child. 4 ten-day sessions brought hundreds of children from ages 7-18 to the 23 acre camp situated on the shores of Lake Ontario. The camp relocated in 1973, and the format of the summer program has changed, but the mission of the camp remains to serve children whose disabilities keep them from being able to participate in other summer programs.

I worked in the kitchen. I had wanted to be a counselor, but was only 17 so was not yet eligible for that position. Instead, I was part of a team which included two other high school girls, Chris and Janet, Stella, our severe chief/chef, and Henry, a handsome African-American young man, the first such person I had ever spent any close time with. Our day started at 6:30 a.m. preparing breakfast for the 200 or so campers and staff. We broke egg yolks with our fingers in the steel vats where they cooked into scrambled eggs. We put out boxes of cereal and made piles of toast. We boiled pots of oatmeal. We fried bacon or sausage. We set tables with napkins and flatware at each place. The staff routinely and loudly complained about the lousy food, but to many of the campers, it was delicious.

In our kitchen was a radio that played all day long, tuned to a top 40's radio station. Having been brought up in a household where mostly only classical music played every day, the songs that came out of that radio were new to me. Stella tolerated the radio, but only because, I think, she was a little afraid of Henry. She was a no-nonsense boss, who kept us busy all the hours of our shifts, scrubbing the floor, mixing up government-issued butter with the dry, government-issued peanut butter, cutting, slicing, mixing, cleaning, washing dishes in the big, steamy Hobart.

Henry did all the heavy work, and was a jovial foil to Stella's seriousness. He was NOT afraid of her, as we girls were, and joshed her and teased her till she would crack a tiny smile, indicating that she wasn't all that tough after all. He was a lusty boy who stole kisses from us girls in the walk-in refrigerator. But he was our friend, and the kisses were just silliness that lightened the day.

We worked through the morning, and then had a couple hours off every afternoon to do as we pleased before coming back in to start on dinner. We finished the dinner work by around 6:30 and then had the evening to do what we pleased. Being teenagers, we would stay up till 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. and then get up at 6 to start all over again. We had 2 days off out of 10. It was a gruelling schedule for a solid 8 weeks. For this entire summer of work I earned $125.00. We got room and board, so I really didn't spend any of it, and it was the first money I had ever earned doing anything besides babysitting, so it seemed a small fortune.

In those afternoon hours, Henry wanted to prepare a song for the staff talent show. "War" (Edwin Starr http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-2pNCZiNk) was one of the songs that came out of our radio in the kitchen. Henry told us he had a band that was going to come to the camp to play for one of the dances and he wanted us to perform this song with them. We were going to be the three white chick back up singers and he used some of our time in the afternoons to teach us the moves. My memory is fuzzy about whether we actually ever performed this song. I seem to remember that the whole band thing was a hoax. But we had fun, and whenever I hear that song I think of those days.

The other song that takes me right back to the steam tables of Stella's kitchen is Lean On Me (Bill Withers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaVXfHZv50Y ) which was also on the playlist of our top 40s station. It was a summer of firsts. This song might be one of the first top 40 songs I ever knew all the words to. We sang along in the kitchen as we opened #10 cans of ravioli and green beans or mixed up vats of jello or made sheet cakes. We were 4 strangers who shared 8 weeks of hard work and hard play. I don't know what ever happened to any of those people, but when I went back the next year as a counselor, they were all gone. I never complained about the food.

The Matrix Music Teacher: New Year's Wishes

The Matrix Music Teacher: New Year's Wishes: Here I am on the 4th Wednesday of the new school year, and it is the first day I feel I have a grip on my schedule. One of my former scho...

New Year's Wishes

Here I am on the 4th Wednesday of the new school year,  and it is the first day I feel I have a grip on my schedule. One of my former schools closed at the end of last year, victim to state and local budgetary woes, and so I took on one new school this year. I have had more or less the same schedule for the last several years, and suddenly I have a new bell schedule to accommodate. It's all worked out now, and I think I will actually sleep tonight, instead of lying awake trying to see into the black hole of instructional minutes, recesses and lunches. The new school just so happens to be a school I spent LOTS of time at up till about 4 years ago. It was my home school, I had my office there and I taught two or three middle school classes plus 3/4/5 instrumental and choral music. We put on huge musicals every spring, and at one time I had fully a third of the middle school population in my classes, and most of the 3rd-5th graders. I had only one other school during those years, and so was heavily invested there.  I have now come back to work with only 4th and 5th graders. It's great to be there. There are many familiar faces, and there are lots of new ones. None of the kids remember me from before, as most of them didn't go to school yet at all last time I was there. That's a good thing, if only because there are no expectations of the former glory of the music program. We can rebuild it from scratch, though I won't ever be able to devote the time there I once did. The new principal had been a music teacher herself once upon a time, so, while respecting the needs of the classroom teachers, is very adamant about getting as many kids playing an instrument as possible. All of this is wonderful. So what else is new? We have a new room at Sierra Madre Middle School, where the AC works ALL the time and there is room to do everything we need to do. I have 45 kids signed up for the orchestra, whose name is now iPAK (instrumental Performing Art Kids) and there is talk of splitting it in two- a real BAND, and ORCHESTRA! They are sounding pretty good at moments, and I only wish there was more good music at their level for this kind of mixed ensemble. I think we have played almost all of it in the last year or two. I have to be careful what I wish for. I might just get it! I wished for 40 kids, I got 45. I wished for the new room and we got it. I have wished to have a band and orchestra, instead of the mash up of strings and winds together that we call a symphony orchestra (heavy on the alto sax); I might just get it. If it happens, it will further complicate an already complicated schedule- I have no two days in the week alike- but I will be thrilled. Check back in October. Meanwhile, the other elementary schools are raring to go. Field Elementary Band blew a few notes today. The 4th graders at Roosevelt are learning Hot Cross Buns on the recorder and the 5th graders are learning how to hold a violin bow.  At San Rafael, we had a few classes on note and rhythm reading in anticipation of passing out instruments. In a week or so, I will jump in and work with some string classes at Marshall Fundamental. This will bring the total of number of campuses I visit each week to 7. I will rub my lamp and wish for enough instruments for everyone who needs one, and off we go! Labels:

draft