Teaching again..

Teaching again. What a great feeling to once again lead a class of general music students through a series of activities, discussions, and tasks. These kinds of opportunities are very special now since I've retired from full-time teaching. To be relieved of the class management responsibility, the burden of paperwork and bureaucratic claptrap that was such a big part of my career was especially enjoyable. Pure teaching! Walk in to the class and go straight to the lesson and straight into each child's brain. What a joy! This is what I am and what I was born to do!

Last fall, I was invited to teach a series of drumming classes for Eastern Mennonite University as they began to prepare for a spring drama production. In order to have drums enough for all the participants I borrowed a set of Tubanos® from Stewart Middle School in Augusta County. In return for the favor, I volunteered to teach sixth grade music for a couple of days. We worked at focus, beat training, hand/eye coordination, reading, and composition. Students were cheerful, happy to be learning, in fact, in all likelihood not even totally aware that they were learning so much!

For two days I trained the students to work as a cohesive drum community. We established group focus with a simple imitation exercise, "Do what I do, when I do it." I played various beats and drum strokes at various tempos and dynamics as the students imitated my every move. After some shaky moments as students began to get the idea, a nice unison was achieved. There was no need to correct or highlight mistakes as it slowly became evident to the students that the real payoff in sound and rhythm was a result of almost perfect focus by the class.

As we worked together, we tried out many drum strokes and techniques eventually working into patterns of rhythm. We started with the names of the drums, speaking the words then playing the rhythm. We moved on to Heartbeat, a drum song from Bill Matthew's great book on drumming Conga Joy, eventually learning how to start and stop all together using drum signals. We finally learned some techniques for solo improvisation which grew into student drum circle compositions.

At the end of the session, I observed the students leaving class energized, alert, and feeling good about themselves and what they'd learned. Their regular teacher, who had sat in and participated in all the classes, told me that she'd had a great time too, and had learned a lot about how to lead this kind of activity. She was please to have a new, valuable technique and a complete sample lesson plan to add to her repertoire.