If You Can Read This, So What?

(Written November 30, 2010)

There was this bumper sticker that was going around a couple of years ago that I never really got. It showed this musical staff with a few measures of fairly-complicated piano scoring in it and a caption that read: “If you can read this, thank a music teacher!” I never really got it, because I always wondered what the point was exactly. Was I supposed to be thankful if I could read the music and perform it on the piano? Or if I could simply read it and imagine it rendered in my head? Or if I could just identify the notes on the staff?

I was thinking about this today after a conversation I had with a music teacher.

The music teacher in question was discussing a project he is working on and where it might fall in his curriculum. He suggested that, since the project would involve improvisation, he would teach it later, after he had covered the “fundamentals”: quarter notes, half notes, “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” etc.

I suggested that he might rethink his approach. “You know,” I offered, “Muddy Waters or Louis Armstrong never read music at all and they were great improvisers.”

“Don’t say that around my kids!” he shot back. “They all tell me they are all great ‘drummers’ but they can’t read the first note. I say to them, ‘Don’t insult my education. I had to go to college to become a musician.’”

After checking my iPhone to make sure it was still 2010, all I could do was offer, “I suppose that’s one viewpoint.”

How is it possible that we still think this way, arts teachers? Why do we still have the cart before the horse? How many more generations of young artists will leave school being taught they aren’t dancers or actors or musicians or artists? How many of them will watch their creative urges die and learn to hate the arts and arts classes.

Let me say this emphatically, as perhaps the only article of faith I have left: all human beings are creative and all are born artists. We may teach them craft, but creativity is something they bring with them to the classroom. We may nurture that creativity or we may kill it, but the urge is inherent in all of Adam’s children.

We have elevated craft over art for so long in the classroom, belittling students who show any real creativity. We laugh at them, tell them to stop screwing around or even punish them when they invent, compose, improvise, doodle . . . anything they don’t get from us, we instantly devalue. Why?

Honestly, I think it is rooted in our own insecurity. We are, each one of us, very insecure beings who fear being thought stupid or inept. This is easy to recognize in the students we teach. They are frightened to take a chance, mostly because they don’t want others to see they aren’t super groovy or brilliant or strong or whatever. Or maybe they are afraid that others will see that thing in them they have been hiding from the world for so long. Guess what? Teachers are the exact same way. We don’t like it when students learn that we don’t know the answers. Worse, we hate it when students know something we don’t. Our solution to the problem is simple. If we have a student who can sit at the piano and play for hours on end without looking at the first bit of paper, we say, “You mean you’re just playing by ear?!” If they can rattle off the lyrics from every single Eminem record, we say, “Rap isn’t music!” You get the picture.

The result is a stifling environment, for students certainly, but for teachers, too. Who can live with that pressure? Not only do I have to be better than I know that I am, but I have to be better than the other 30 human beings in the room? I have to know more? My skill level has to exceed theirs in every area?

Ken Robinson said, in his now-famous TED talk, “I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original . . . And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.”

Can we change that? Can we make our classrooms places where creativity is nurtured and praised? Can we build secure environments where we value the contributions of our students? Can you begin to imagine that?

If you are an arts teacher in West Virginia, I have a special message for you. Starting today, I grant you permission to be wrong. Admit you don’t know something. Tell a student s/he is better at something than you. I will still love you. And your students will love you. Maybe even more than they do now.