Vision Statement
“You can’t make people feel bad because they don’t know something.” World renowned jazz bassist Christian McBride very simply explained a great pitfall of teachers. All over the world, in many disciplines, people have decided to teach others about their passions. Unfortunately, this often means they are teaching people less passionate about those disciplines than themselves. McBride addresses this gap by “[giving] the best presentation you can and saying ‘either you like it or you don’t, and that’s okay.’”
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Teaching means being an ambassador for something you find important and offering any help and clarity possible. The caveat is you must do this without giving a heavy-handed presentation of your own worldview and opinions which invokes, as McBride puts it, “a knee-jerk reaction of ‘I’m definitely not gonna like it now!’” Doing this as a music teacher starts by realizing how many entry points there are to learning about music education and that no one has to learn about music in a way that is forceful or unpleasant.
Music is a part of everyday life. Whether or not people are actively listening to and making music, it surrounds them as a part of consumable media like TV, movies and commercials, as background ambience in stores and other public places as well as through functional music like alarms and other indicating music. Additionally, most people listen to music with conscious objectives: to feel, to relate, to learn. With so many conscious and unconscious objectives, teachers have an opportunity to illuminate every corner of the musical universe. Luckily, these corners are connected and a focused personal interest can easily be grown into a wider understanding and appreciation of a larger sect of music with the right approach.
Awareness of popular musical interests and connections between the eras and styles can create entry points and simultaneously avoid roadblocks caused by the disconnect from proclaimed “experts” and “amateurs.” The next step for a teacher is their presentation of these connections. This presentation is a balance of what the teacher has studied and understood to be the essence of the importance of their field and what they have understood to by the essence of the importance to their specific students. The most important part of this presentation is that it has both elements at a balanced level. An imbalance can result in inauthentic pandering with no new knowledge to the learner or, at the other end of the spectrum, an unrelatable, non-contextual explanation of a concept. Instead, a teacher works to find a tone and information that give learners not only something new to grab onto and follow, but a connection to something they already have and feel connected to.
Music is a part of everyday life. Whether or not people are actively listening to and making music, it surrounds them as a part of consumable media like TV, movies and commercials, as background ambience in stores and other public places as well as through functional music like alarms and other indicating music. Additionally, most people listen to music with conscious objectives: to feel, to relate, to learn. With so many conscious and unconscious objectives, teachers have an opportunity to illuminate every corner of the musical universe. Luckily, these corners are connected and a focused personal interest can easily be grown into a wider understanding and appreciation of a larger sect of music with the right approach.
Awareness of popular musical interests and connections between the eras and styles can create entry points and simultaneously avoid roadblocks caused by the disconnect from proclaimed “experts” and “amateurs.” The next step for a teacher is their presentation of these connections. This presentation is a balance of what the teacher has studied and understood to be the essence of the importance of their field and what they have understood to by the essence of the importance to their specific students. The most important part of this presentation is that it has both elements at a balanced level. An imbalance can result in inauthentic pandering with no new knowledge to the learner or, at the other end of the spectrum, an unrelatable, non-contextual explanation of a concept. Instead, a teacher works to find a tone and information that give learners not only something new to grab onto and follow, but a connection to something they already have and feel connected to.