For Off The Podium this week, please check out this repost of Wholehearted Attention, which will be the basis of a FREE talk presented by the Richmond Symphony School of Music, featuring a discussion with: Dr. Ronald Crutcher, President, University of Richmond Alex Laing, Principal Clarinet, Phoenix Symphony and Walter Bitner (yours truly) Thursday, November […]
Off The Podium
Off The Podium: The Rhinoceros
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: 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 […]