Fourth in a series of blog posts from the Denver AOSA National Professional Development Conference by POSA Vice President Mark Anderson
In high school, I was a fair-to-middling trumpet player, and in the early stages of becoming a scratch pianist (that's my own term for a keyboardist who seamlessly plays whatever's in front of him, making up whatever he has to, and freely improvises as well, to the extent that the listener is utterly unaware that little or nothing is on the printed page). If you'd asked my teachers what I would be after college, probably many would've said I'd be in education, but most likely in one of the humanities. And yet I went to college intending to double major in music and math, with an eye toward being certified in both. The math major died on the vine after two semesters of calculus, but I stuck with music education through graduate school and one miserable year divided between a broke rural district and subbing in Salem.
Why music? Because of my band director, Mr. Ogren, a man who embodied the twin passions of music education better than anyone I was to meet for the next twenty years: he loved music; better than that, he loved sharing music with young people. And I wanted to be like him. Except I wasn't like him--not yet, anyway.
I pursued a whole second career after leaving teaching, this time as a Methodist minister. When I was done with that, music education found me. I needed income, so I subbed for a year. During that time I was in plenty of music classrooms, but also in general education, grade-level classrooms. I was reminded of something I had only just figured out at the time I left this career in 1985: that working with younger children was much more rewarding to me than leading a high school band could ever be. Perhaps I should be a classroom teacher, I thought, and began taking some courses to be certified in that area. And then Beaverton called with a need for a full-time general music teacher.
My first two years doing that were a time for growth. I had so much to learn. I was mostly operating from whatever canned curriculum the school owned, supplemented with Recorder Karate and, in one location, a keyboard lab I improvised. My classroom management was all over the place.
And then, in 2005, I attended Orff 101, and finally found a home.
Eight years later, I teach for the right reasons, the reasons Mr. Ogren stuck with teaching for another thirty years, mostly spent with middle school bands: I love music, and I love sharing it with children.
That's a long introduction to today's first three sessions, and the concerts I've heard so far. I attended three different workshops on the child's voice. None was as "Orffy" as I wanted it to be, though I did glean plenty of techniques for warming up my little school choir, and for encouraging all the children in my classes to sing more authentically. It's the concerts that remind me, and most of my fellow attendees, what this is all about.
I taught singing the wrong way for my first three years back in the field, until my Level I instructor pointed out this wonderful gift my gender has: to sing the entire range of the human voice. Sure, I sound like Mickey Mouse when I'm singing in falsetto, but it magically transforms my students' voices from monotones to angelic choruses. Seeing the children's groups who have performed so far--and none of them yet has been an audition-only concert-grade ensemble--and hearing them pulls at me in ways that adult performances rarely do. It's not just the pure beauty of their voices, either: it's their excitement, their lack of refinement, the joy they clearly take in making music together, and the bashful pride they display when all of us adults roar our approval at the end of their performance.
There are many places one can go to hear children's groups perform, and it's not as if Orff has a monopoly on them. Every music educators' organization I know of makes ample time in its annual conference for concerts by school groups. True, our performances are a bit less stagey than those tend to be: we don't use risers much, there's very likely to be an instrumentarium included in the performance, and there's usually body percussion and movement worked in; but overall, this is the one thing that all of us, whether we're Orff, Kodaly, or Silver Burdett, are doing right.
Tonight, I'll hear "Young Voices of Colorado," a concert-level children's choir led by one of today's presenters who, while her workshop didn't do much for me, clearly knows how to get great music from a juvenile larynx. I don't know what the program will be like, but I can guarantee I'll be deeply moved by it. Right now, though, I've got a workshop to get to, by the other educator with the most powerful influence on my career: Doug Goodkin. I expect he'll more than make up for the ho-humness of those other three.
Viva la musica!
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