There's the confidence that deceives, and the confidence that supports, and a fine line between.
Making the Grade – an Epilogue
Making the grade
How we choose to be evaluated may reveal as much, if not more, than any test ever could.
The Emperor’s Social Clothes
Having professed one set of values just by teaching music, is it necessary or even appropriate to verbalize others?
Setting the Cat amongst the Sistemas
Is the word "Sistema" a launchpad or a shackle?
Hungry for Change
Should we be concerned about music education when children are going hungry?
El Sistema, Special Needs and Music Therapy – new article now available online
Although Sistema and music therapy are not entirely analogous, there's a very natural, organic overlap between the two. We see this common ground in the vocabulary Sistema-inspired programs use to describe their activities and their impact, and how it often emphasizes the development of the individual as much as the community.
Drink up! Reflections and video from Ottawa.
the nature of advocacy: not changing what people say, but what people do. The image of the bureaucrat gleefully snatching violins out of the hands of infants is a myth. Treating public officials, or those who just don't get it, with scorn and derision invites a similar degree of disrespect and disregard in return
“If you think education is expensive…”
Until education is viewed as the acquisition of multiple literacies for life-long learning rather than the timely regurgitation of factoids for standardized testing, music can’t compete in the educational sphere
The Domestic Dispute Strikes Back – Part 2, Jonathan vs. the Horn
...The part of the experience that has stayed with me the longest was the opportunity to engage with the music on a completely different level, to go beyond playing it to a place where I started to understand it, to appreciate its architecture and narrative experientially, even if I lacked the knowledge to deconstruct it theoretically. The difference was no more than frequency and repetition, but music had finally begun to mean something more to me.
The Domestic Dispute returns!
I occupied my mandated daily half hour by playing through things as best I could, trying to play fewer wrong notes each time without any conscious strategy or method, in a pseudo-Bachian optimism that if I were to hit most of the right keys at roughly the right time, the device would in fact play itself.
Jonathan Andrew Govias 