At one point during my Master’s degree in Denver, I served briefly with the Colorado Youth Symphonies, leading their youngest orchestra for a single concert. I had a very different concept of “leadership” back then, rooted in an absurd kind of strictness and authoritarianism that novice conductors employ as a substitute for the knowledge and experience they lack. And true to form for who I was at the time, I brutalized the musicians with unending drill, rehearsing not until they got it right, but until they couldn’t get it wrong. I imposed a crushing level of discipline within rehearsals, insisting on a standard of conduct and play without allowing a single deviation. Certainly they were an undisciplined, unlettered, and relatively unskilled bunch of musical miscreants – but they were also between 8-12 years old, so they might be forgiven for acting their age. But the methods, as barbaric as they were, produced outcomes. When the concert came around, the children performed well – well enough that the Artistic Director told me that their performance was the best he had ever heard from them. His one piece of feedback from talking to the parents? I could have been “tougher on the kids.”
Heaven help us.
It worked for one concert. It wouldn’t have worked for a second.
[On a side note, on the extremely improbably chance that one of the children in that group, now well into adulthood, reads this blog and remembers my brief tenure, please reach out to me – I would love to hear from you and ask you about your experiences.]
If The Problem is that we teach the way were taught, then The Problem’s first offshoot is the culture of instructor omniscience that disavows alternatives. The second is that we don’t know -or want to know – what good teaching looks like.
The reaction of the parents – that I could have been harder on the kids – reveals our innate preference for order and for discipline, even when we know these are cosmetic features that compromise learning. We believe on some level that having been brutalized ourselves, our duty is to ensure our children are similarly brutalized, in their best interests, of course. It’s a cycle of violence, symbolic or psychological (sometimes worse), that like all self-serving cycles of violence we as a society are more interested in perpetuating than breaking. This is particularly apparent in some Sistema programs, where creativity, confidence, and independence are apparently cultivated in children through an environment that in its oppression more closely resembles a juvenile penitentiary, with program participants subject to military levels of discipline in the corridors and during activities. I don’t think I need name the programs – some are openly proud of this aspect of their work and have been lauded for it by the equally uninformed.
The cruelest thing I’ve witnessed was a bucket band class in which an energetic bunch of kids were handed drumsticks, placed in front of the upturned receptacles, and then warned of immediate and dire disciplinary consequences were a single bucket to be tapped. Spare me your lectures on the psychological and social benefits of delayed gratification: this was just nastiness and arrogance, the delusional belief that the class could only progress under the measured guidance of the teacher, and that the kids (almost 100% black, not incidentally) needed to learn discipline.
In my experience, describing this as problematic has proven an invitation to have scorn and ridicule heaped on my head – the aforementioned disavowal of alternatives, or worse, the usual assumption that I’m advocating for no structure at all. Chaos! Anarchy! You’ll have no control!
No control? Your Freudian slip is showing.
Similar to the past discussion of the Karate Kid movie, there are simple modifications in communication and in implementation that can drastically transform the experience for the children positively.
When I’ve led the classes, I make them an offer they can’t refuse. I start with very brief instructions, before a drumstick is even in sight. If they refrain from making any noise until all the drumsticks were handed out, I give them a full six minutes to beat the living $#!t (I don’t use that word in front of children) out of the buckets in any way, shape, or form that they wanted. Six minutes of unrestrained, unfettered access, six minutes to purge all their desire to create pure noise and chaos just for the sheer fun of hitting something. They always accept and honour my condition.
I also ensure that there’s only one drumstick and one drum for every two students, because the time they’re not holding the stick is the time they’re watching their peers, time reflecting about what they did and what they’re going to do next. And that is time very well spent. After every minute, the literal baton would be passed, so each child would get three minutes to explore fully the creative potential of the bucket and the stick, separately and or together, before the class started the process of learning to play together. (Now you know why it’s six minutes and not five…)
We shouldn’t try to eliminate or control chaos, but instead focus or direct it in ways that are the most pedagogically productive.. The environment has simple mechanical limitations (shared drumsticks, time limits) that don’t require me to bully the kids. The process is being structured, but not the product. When outcomes are not dictated, there is space for participant creativity.
And all this took just six minutes, after which the kids were fully ready to get to work, making the rest of the session more productive and less frustrating for them. And perhaps they had fun too.
Jonathan Andrew Govias 