Why you shouldn’t always tell your students the truth For more than half of my teaching career, I taught music & performing arts at elementary or K-8 schools – six of these schools in all, with a wide range of approaches to education between them. One common aspect among all my experiences at these schools, […]
Off The Podium
Off The Podium: Trust
This article is a companion to my article Wholehearted Attention. It’s generally accepted that one of the goals of education – beyond the attainment of specific content objectives – is to instill in the child a love for learning. It has been my experience however, that a love for learning is part of a child’s […]
Off The Podium: Inspiration, Part 1
In the contemporary climate of data-driven education, you don’t hear much about inspiration in the popular rhetoric about music education and its role and purpose in the lives of children. But in fact the music teacher’s most important responsibility is to inspire her students. Inspiration is difficult to assess and, if acknowledged at all, often […]
Off The Podium: Summer 2020
Saturday was the first day of summer, and Sunday was Father’s Day. There is no doubt about it: summer is here and it promises to be a long, hot one. The spring of 2020 brought calamitous societal changes: the first global pandemic in a century; the greatest economic crash since the depression nearly a century […]
Off The Podium: Solfège with Amadeus
continued from Solfège: Part 5: Solfège Exercises Solfège: Part 6 Solfège with Amadeus In January of 2012 I decided to teach all of my high school choirs at Nashville School of the Arts as many choruses from the Mozart Requiem as we could learn in four months and to then perform them en masse at […]
Off The Podium: Solfège Exercises
continued from Solfège: Part 4: Teaching Modes with Solfège Solfège: Part 5 Solfège Exercises This episode in my series of posts on Solfège recounts examples of solfège exercises I used in high school choir rehearsals. My usual practice was to begin every choir rehearsal with physical stretches followed by vocal warm-ups and solfège exercises (or […]