Dear Administrator: You Look Good in Motley

 [An educational makeover to The Beatles "Fool on the Hill." It's amazing how few changes needed to be made!]

Day after day, alone in his office
The man with the foolish grin is avoiding giving offense
The teachers don't want to know him
They can see that he's just a fool
He never gives a straight answer

But the fool his office
Sees the school going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning around

Well on the way, head in a cloud
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody wants to hear him
Or the sound he constantly makes
And he never seems to notice

But the fool in his office
Sees the school going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning around

And nobody really likes him
They can tell what he wants to do
And he never shows his feelings

But the fool in his office
Sees the school going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning around

He never listens to them
He believes they're the fools
They don't like him

The fool in his office
Sees the school going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning around

Youth of the Nation

I shall call him John. He's in kindergarten. And he's a spoiled brat.

Every time I come for music class, John throws a tantrum. The first day was because he didn't want to wear his name tag. Following week was because he refused to sing the song we were singing. The next week because I refused to stop the class (we were in the middle of a song) to listen to whatever it was he wanted to say.  I told him I was busy and didn't have time. You might think I'm mean, but he had already loudly proclaimed 10 minutes earlier that music class was boring and he hated it and he wasn't going to do it. I refuse to reward students with poor attitudes with attention; it sends the wrong message.

Now I can understand a kindergartener who takes a couple weeks adjusting to school life. But John has been whining and pouting and screaming during my class for a full month. It's becoming obvious that this kid has always been the center of someone's attention and never been required to do anything that he did not want to. The way the rest of the class ignores John suggests his problem is not confined to music class. I feel so sorry for his teacher who has to deal with this brat all day long, and yet remains completely placid. She's a saint.

QI in Music Class

Last week, I wrote about the QI philosophy and lamented about its absence in modern education. Not being a whiner or complainer, I'm trying to teach my classes in a QI type of way. This means that last Wednesday first period somehow ended up on my explaining plate tectonics to a group of fascinated 4th graders. How we got there from solfege, I'm not really sure, but does it matter? They were completely absorbed finding out where earthquakes and volcanoes come from. Yes, I did have to yank us back to music, but that's why I get paid the big bucks.

That same Wednesday, when learning "The Cat Came Back," I asked if anyone knew what the phrase "man in the moon" meant. No one did, so I talked about how some of the craters, if you look at them the right way, look like a face, and how early people had no idea what the moon was and made up stories about it. The kids tied it to an old Chinese legend about the rabbit living on the moon and the moon being made of cheese and Wallace & Gromit. We had a laugh, and then went back to singing.  It was fun.

None of this is on the official lesson plans. All they talk about is learning the song and defining the word "ostinato," which we do as well. How dull. And the students don't learn the music as well. After every digression my classes take into the meaning of the lyrics or music, the students come back singing or playing stronger. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

QI Philosophy of Education

I don't watch a lot of television. In fact, since moving from the back of beyond (where the cable was free with the flat), I've watched almost none. But every fall, I will make the effort to find a very nice YouTube pirate and splurge on Quite Interesting (aka QI). 

QI is the best television show you've never heard of.  It is a BBC production that I fear will never be imported or adapted for the US. Why? Because its style of humor is too blue and its content is too intelligent. But QI, according to its creator John Lloyd, is more than just a television show, it is a way of looking at the world.

The whole world is interesting if you look at it in the right way. There is no such thing as a boring subject, if approached from the proper direction. On the surface this is just a rehashing of that 1980's phenomena, Trivial Pursuit, but it goes much deeper than that.  The QI philosophy is about connections in knowledge, not just the knowledge itself. 

Why can't school be like this? Instead of finding the main idea of the passage on ancient Egypt, why can't we teach about the ancient Egyptians? Why are we forced to teach the writing process instead of how to actually write or where the words came from in the first place?

The world is an amazing, fascinating place. Why can't we teach that to children? Where did we go so horribly wrong?