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One of my students used to play a game with his classmates.
He was the only one playing it, but that didn't bother him. That helped him to win.
To win the game, you had to be first: first in line, first one on the train, first one off the train, first to have the answer.
The other students were focused on each other. They were too involved in flirting and joking around to notice who was first.
Read MoreWhen I was a young musician, I was fully steeped in the twentieth century idea of being “discovered” by a record company executive.
To a degree, that was still how things worked back then—and even today. However, they never really worked that way anyway. If you want to “make it,” you have to already have the look or sound that the industry was seeking. The stories of being plucked from obscurity make their way around the world because they are ridiculous fairy tales, not business as usual.
Read MoreWhat I love about teaching music is the immediacy of it.
No matter how old you are, you can make a pleasing sound on a drum, ukulele, or harmonium on your first try. Given a few more minutes, you can create an ostinato (a repeated melodic or rhythmic pattern) that you can build into a song. It’s so fun that it makes you want to do more of it.
Read MoreAll over the United States this month, new high school graduates are moving into their college dorms.
It’s a migration that’s exciting and, for many, has a feeling of inevitability. However, freshman year of college is not thirteenth grade. Higher education is a separate endeavor from secondary education, a non-compulsory privilege. Whether it’s today, tomorrow, November, or sometime next summer, some of the members of the class of 2021 are going to figure that out. They’re going to realize that they do not want to participate and they don’t have to. Welcome to adulthood, friends!
Read MoreAs painful as it is to see kids dealing with academic challenges, it’s even more heartbreaking to bear witness to their social difficulties.
In a school setting, it’s very common to see kids who are unable to connect easily with peers begin to act out in unpleasant ways in order to attract negative attention as a substitute for the positive attention they crave.
When even that stops working (if it ever did), you might hear a sad and familiar line: “These kids are stupid! I don’t want to play with them anyway.”
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