Choir Baton Podcast Episode 3. An Introduction to the Independent Musician with Dr. Carol Krueger

Dr. Carol Krueger is revolutionizing how and why music teachers are approaching music literacy in today's rehearsal. In this episode, you'll hear her journey to understanding the gaps we have in our music literacy and how we can begin to close them. With her humorous candor, Carol helps you understand why you struggle in certain areas of music literacy and empower you to take the next steps to grow as a musician in your deficits. 

Part 1 of a 2-part series. Carol will be presenting numerous workshops across the United States. Click here for more information.

Choir Baton Host: Beth Philemon @bethphilemon | www.bethphilemon.com

Visit Choir Baton Online: @choirbaton | www.choirbaton.com

Choir Baton Theme Song by Scott Holmes

Carol Krueger: I think to fall in love with anything, you have to be good at. So that means this process makes them a far better musician. And I do believe they will stay with singing, which is really our legacy. It's not that I got straight superiors, who cares? I mean, yeah, that's important, but it's really in the long term. How many of those students are still singing, loving it, and passing that on to their own children, using it within their community? That's giving back and I think most music teachers would say, they would opt for that over just awards that sit on the wall that occasionally need to be dusted.

Beth Philemon: Welcome to the Choir Baton, a podcast designed to engage with people and stories, ideas and inspirations stemming from choir. No other art form, no sport, no hobby, no business requires a group of people to execute a communal goal with just their voices. Join me, your host, Beth Philemon as I interview guests who are singers, teachers, conductors, instrumentalists, and community members. Together, we'll ask questions, seek understanding, and share insight from our experiences in life and in choir.

Well, I want to thank you and welcome you to the Choir Baton podcast, Carol, and you have revolutionized my teaching. I just can't say enough about you and I've gone to your workshop three times now. And every time I go, I learn something new. I'm reminded of why I'm teaching the way I am because of what I've learned from you.

Carol Krueger: Thank you Beth, for inviting me. I really appreciate this.

Beth Philemon: Well, would you just give us a little bit of backstory about-- I know you're from Wisconsin and did your undergraduate there and grad school at Miami but give us a little bit of background on yourself for us.

Carol Krueger: Well, I started teaching right out of college in a 7th through 12th setting, and it was rural. And they really didn't have any skills, delightful kids, as most of them are. But I was such a novice teacher, that all I had ever seen for teaching in a choir setting was by rote. And so they made it real important in college that you have piano skills. Well I was a piano major, so playing open score was not going to be a major issue for me. But it didn't take me long to figure out that in most cases, I was the only one really working in the room. And the students were passive in their learning. Yes, you had some who were right there with you. But an awful lot of them really didn't look at the page. They waited for you to do it over and over and over again. 

And during those first five years, I really questioned whether I should be teaching, because I didn't know any other way to teach. And I realized that you have to put responsibility and ownership back into their hands. But when you rote teach, that's very, very difficult to do. Now, I was successful. The high school choir built to seven choirs. And yeah, it grew. It did all those things. But that isn't really the sign of a totally successful program. And then a choral festival up there, we did have to sight read as a group. But frankly, I didn't know how to go about the task of even getting them to learn how to do that together as a unit. I didn't come out of a program where they made us do solfege and the only kind of counting I really knew was “1 + 2 + ti +” and “Ta Ti-Ti”, which I looked at as something more for elementary, not necessarily something for 7 through 12, those students. 

So I started to go back to school to get a business degree. And then my husband was transferred to Florida. And so we decided it was the perfect time to start our family. So I had Hillary here in Florida. And then I went back to work. And I actually went back to teaching at a middle school which I had never done. And because Florida has such high standards and expectations for All State and all those things, I was shocked because you're told that come September, those students are going to take a test complete with ear training skills and error detection, dictation, obviously vocabulary. And then they're going to sight read. And so in middle school, it is 24 measures of sight reading. And the test is, you really have to lay some groundwork. 

So when I looked at that, and I'm a competitor, I'm not one to throw the towel in. I just said okay, I got to get about the task of figuring this out. And I started right then and there trying to get away from the piano and not using it much because I knew that it was a crutch, not something that was really going to help them and I took more Kodaly studies and just about everything, I went and watched other teachers teach. I wanted to know how they did it. I bought tons of sight reading books. It didn't take me long to figure out that this book had a big hole here. This book had a big hole here, because you really have to sequence with them. So I would tell you that at that point, I was teaching decoding. I didn’t know it then but that is what I was teaching. I was not doing it as much oral based as it should have been. But I didn't know everything about that. Well, as the years went on, I wrote more things. I even went to take a class that was teaching college theory via Kodaly. And then I started to read-- really read everything I could get my hands on.

And my students did exceptionally well and I taught at high school then for a while. Moved to Pennsylvania for a bit where their expectations-- there weren't any literally to go to All State it was just about your voice, it had nothing to do about whether you are a musician or not. And my husband was transferred back to Florida again. And then I really, I mean, I just took it in every direction I could. I did not ever teach another piece of music with that piano as a part of it at all. The kids were going to read it, I started to sequence it. And then I found out I was doing a lot of things right. When I finally read the book, The Ways Children Learn Music, that's when I learned the difference between decoding and music literacy. And of course, that's out of Gordon. 

And so from that moment on, I started to hone my skills. And I would tell you that I got very good at teaching dictation because I came up with a shorthand method and three different methods to help the kids because in college, I felt like a failure. You know, you walk into a college setting, and while I played piano, I could decode on the piano very well. I could decode on my French horn very well. But I was not good at doing it with the singing. And I realized that I was like an awful lot of other kids in that room. We were often promoted administratively to the next level because they didn't know how to work with us. We were older students without the basic skills. And most of them were not educators, per se, they were theorists and things of that nature. And I'm sure that they were frustrated by us as much as we were frustrated with them, you know, take out a piece of paper we're going to do dictation within that first week of theory class. I'd never heard of it. I had no clue. 

And then to move to Florida where sixth graders and seventh and eighth graders were doing this you have to say, okay, I'm gonna have to teach myself in order to teach my kids. And that's really where it started from. And I would tell you, my first five years, those kids should get a complete recall. I'm not sure I did much right other than maybe they learned to sing some phrase, and there might have been a lot of good singing, but it doesn't mean they could produce any bit without me barking it to them first. And then everywhere up to that I got better. 

Beth Philemon: Well, I have no doubt that those kids in those first five years, while they might not have learned the literacy skills that they would have had they been later, they got an unbelievable amount of knowledge and inspiration from you. Talk to us a little bit about-- and I know you go in depth about this in your workshops, but when you say decoding, like Bluestine said in his book and Gordon, if anyone is unfamiliar with that, help us out with that. 

Carol Krueger: Okay, so obviously they all believe in sound before sight before theory, and most people do, but they forget to start with the sound, they almost always go to the eyes. And they immediately go to the eyes on the staff or they might read it as Do Re Mi in a line up and down, but all they're doing is decoding what they see. Let me give you an example. If you've had English, Italian, French, or German diction, they're teaching us decoding which says I see this, I know the vowel rule. I know this rule. I know Lieder is going to be “leader” not “lighter” because the first vowel is silent in German. So I know how to pronounce it. It doesn't mean I know what that word means. It doesn't mean I can use it in a conversation with you. It doesn't mean I can write stories with that. I am illiterate in French, Italian and German. But I can decode the sound. 

So what we teach our kids to do, even in piano, we were taught to decode-- I am paper trained, I see the paper, I can find that A on the piano, that doesn’t mean I can hear it, doesn't mean I can take dictation in it. And it doesn't mean I can improvise with it. Let me take a step further. When we're learning a language, we begin to make sounds and imitate. And then we begin to learn words, you might say to the little one, go get your shoe. If they bring you back their shoe, you know they understand the word shoe. And it isn't long, they'll begin to talk to you with all the vocabulary they know. And in fact, we know that there are little tiny ones, 18 months to yourself, that can use really big vocabulary and understand it. 

So, in any case, then you can have conversations with that three year old, that five year old, they are not reading, they are not writing, but they are improvising. They are taking in all of that vocabulary. They can tell you their own stories sometimes, which are pretty big, and aren’t real truthful but they're great. They’ll repeat whatever they hear so you have to watch what you say. But they are literally building their hard drive. And now you have these wonderful conversations. 

We eventually send them to school to show them what those words look like. Then they read, they comprehend, they write, they take tests, but in music, we've skipped that whole first part. You and I probably had little to no training in improv. And yet it should have been some of the very first things that we did with music-- that we took patterns we knew, and made our own patterns from there and understood what was in that pattern. So sadly today, we see people with undergrad, masters and doctorate degrees in music who are musically illiterate, because they have a hard time taking dictation, they are not good at it. Rhythmically, melodically, tonally, harmonically. I mean, most of us if we had listened to a symphony and raised our hands when we heard the augmented sixth chords, it may not happen, probably not happen. Also can't improvise, because we are paper trained. 

So I know that was a long explanation for the difference between decoding, I see that and I know what to use on my French Horn. I see that and I know that’s Do Re Mi. Now for singers that doesn't mean Do Re Mi will come out. They might know that those solfege syllables are those three, but they often will sing Do Mi, they'll say Do Mi but they actually sing Do Re because they have not equated sound with the sight. They were paper trained, they only can label it. They actually can't use it and own it. So that's a long explanation. But if we could get our kids to hear it first, improvise with it, and actually, they can do dictation with it before they ever see it on a staff as a symbol.

Beth Philemon: I'll never forget hearing you explain that for the first time and the emotional response of, yes, I can sit down at a piano and improvise like I can. I struggled so much with dictation. So there was this feeling of camaraderie of being like, I am not alone, it's that musician failure fear that we're afraid to talk about, are you experiencing this like I am, and then being like, well, crap, I've got some work to do. And I think that's one of the hardest things about doing about doing this or making this brain change.

Carol Krueger: It is a brain change. And you know though, a lot of us hid for years. And didn't teach our kids necessarily these things cause we weren't good at doing it. And so we've done this generation after generation lacking these skills. Somehow, we have got to work with the teachers in the field, to build their skills to not be afraid of doing dictation and the process of sound before sight and improv with them. And realizing that our kids are capable of doing incredible things with their ears and their eyes, we shouldn't lower the bar for them, we should raise it. But in raising it for them, we have to raise it for ourselves first. 

And so it takes a brave teacher to come to my workshop. I realize that, but I'm hoping that when people come, they will see that I will tell you all my warts, all my failures, all my insecurities, because you're right. Most of us have something of this nature that we are hiding, or yes, we were there in college, you know, arm and arm suffering through it, but when we get in the field with our students, we don't necessarily want them to see all that. So we avoid teaching.

Beth Philemon: Yeah. Well, I would almost venture to say that, yes, the bravery is coming to one of your workshops, but the real bravery is going, okay, I have to change and there's things that I've been doing wrong. And it's gonna take learning on my end and failing and I think that's kind of the beautiful thing about what you do too is that you implement it for a year and then you get to go back and go, oh, I was teaching this incorrectly or something like that. And so I don't know if I've told you this, but when I moved back to North Carolina, everyone was “Carol Krueger, Carol Krueger, and Carol Krueger” and I just thought, man, I was a little skeptical. 

And I even saw-- I was teaching private voice and I had a student whose teacher was using Takadimi. And what I found is, the student was going tah tah tah tah. And I'm going, this is not working, you're not singing through the note, I don't get it and I just-- Well, truth be told. I was going to be able to say, well I went to a workshop and this is why I don't agree, not with you as a person, but with using Takadimi and this kind of stuff, I had to figure it out-- I mean literally within being there 5 or 10 minutes I realized, oh Beth-- what I saw was implementation of it in a poor way, and no reflection upon that teacher that was teaching within that way, but it's an important thing to realize that using it is just the first step and then implementing it better. So I have a weird question then, this is not what I told you I was going to ask earlier, but what are some-- you use Takadimi and La-based Do minor. So before I ask actually what I was going to say with this, would you mind briefly sharing with us why?

Carol Krueger: Okay, let's first take the Do-based and La minor. Originally we all came from modes, it's where we came from. So that if you build a scale on La, it's what today we've labeled as minor. If you build a scale on Do, that's our major, you build a scale on Re, that's our Dorian. So once the students know the relationship between Mi and Fa, and Ti and Do, which are the only half steps, and they just occur in a different place in each one of the modes, so they have their own special sound. However, three of them sound major-like and three of them sound minor-like so it makes it easier to do comparisons. But once that student can do the solfege, and remember, there are only seven of them, starting on a different pitch, they then actually can begin to sing and hear all those different modes. 

Well, La minor is fabulous because the students have no accidentals to be able to sing in La minor when you go to the page, there aren't any. Just like Do major, there aren't any accidentals. And you tell your students when you do start going to different keys and different things, it's just normal, regular old Fa or regular old Ti, unless you see an accidental there, because it's canceling what's in the key signature. So let's say we were in the key of G. G is going to be Do and F sharp is going to be Ti, it's just normal. But if there's an F natural, it's no longer Ti, it's Te. So it's easy to teach your kids when you see something different, something funky on that page, your solfege is going to change. 

So now let's look at that minor. La minor there's nothing new to learn. If you're going to sing Harmonic Minor, you would not have Sol you would have Si, and there would be a sharp there telling the student it changed. If you were seeing a melodic minor, there'd be a sharp by the Fi and the Si. If you look at Do minor, that kid has to remember that every Mi is Me. Every La is Le, every Ti is Te. That's minutia, and that isn't going to necessarily help them sing it better. Now, there's other reasons too for not doing Do minor. Most music when it modulates in the music, it is going to the relative minor it is not going to the parallel major. And so, why are we spending our time working on the parallel major when that is not where most of our music goes. And if you do that Do minor, then your kids really have to do a major type key change and everything different with it because you're really in the relative, not the parallel. 

There are other facets. So you're reading regular music and you have a secondary dominant, which means that you might have a Fi because you're tonicizing the Sol which would be your dominant. Then you have to say to the kids, there are two sets of rules. The rules for everyday singing, where you will change yourself as you see an accidental and a rule for the minor key which is, there will be no accidental and you have to change it. That is very, very-- shall we say difficult for anyone who is not a really good musician to understand regardless of age. Well, how come we have two different rules? I don't understand that? Well, we don't need two different rules at all. 

Another thing to look at is, most theory books will not really talk about the parallel minor giving it its own chapter, it will call it instead a borrowed chord, that we're changing the color of that chord, we're just borrowing it from major to minor coming right back. And that happens in all chords. The Sol chord is major, but we can turn it into a minor by just lowering that third. Or we can take a major chord and make an augmented by raising one note. Once again, the rule for accidentals is right there, isn't it? It makes it work for them to not have to learn any other sets of rules. Let's make it simple like these people who developed it back in the eighth and ninth and 10th and 12th century did, they were really gurus and made this an easy system. To follow and to learn, I mean, seven little solfege syllables with their accidentals. 

So I'm a strong believer in La minor, because I can teach Do major and La minor the same day. If I do Do minor, I have to wait a long time. And then it will be confusing to the kids, they've going to have to have some theory background, and even then they may not hear it. So why would we wait? I'm an equal opportunist. I think minor music is just as important as major music. And I'm not prejudiced against anything. I want my kids to be able to read in Dorian and Phrygian. I don't want them to have the roadblocks that I have in front of me. And that means I need to go back and teach the way this was originally developed and don't make a mountain out of a molehill. Just because you can get an A on a theory exam, doesn't mean you can hear it, use it, reproduce it, do it, why kids instead will start to tell me things about what they hear. And we can label it. And they will walk in and theory will be a piece of cake. Theory doesn't need to be the benchmark for whether we keep a kid as a music major or not. If we taught them through their ears, I believe there are lots of people out there who should have been in music. But we almost took it as a badge of honor at the collegiate level to flump them out.

Beth Philemon: It's so relevant I feel like, particularly today where there's more of a divide perhaps more than ever between musicians within our world-- within popular musicians and classical musicians. I think a big component of what it boils down to is the theory. You know, classical musicians, oh, I can read this but then they can't hear something always and reproduce it or improvise. And then vice versa. And we're creating a disconnect within our own field because of this.

Carol Krueger: You're right, it's almost separate camps. If we go back a little bit to sound before sight before theory and we look at some of the rhythm methods that are out there. The Takadimi came along, was written up I believe, for the first time in 1996 in the Journal of Theory Research. Three theorists out of Ithaca at that point were tired of getting instrumentalists who were not accurate with their rhythms. Because as an instrumentalist, myself coming out in that world, we often play as fast or as slow as our technique allows us and because our “1 + 2 + ti +” was never taught to us orally first by doing patterns and feeling it. Instead it was immediately done visually on the page. And they talked about math with it. Well, by the time you figure out all that math, music is long gone. 

And so these three theories said no, we're going to start everything from their ears. And so I use the Gordon theory of how we learned and I do patterns on a neutral, then on the Takadimi syllables. Then I do them on a neutral and they give them back to me on the syllables. But because I've integrated so much body movement, they begin to feel macro beat, micro beat, meter-- they begin to understand what rhythm and meter are really all about, where you can get a ton of kids using the McHose/Tibbs or Eastman who do not feel it at all because it was done with the eye and a mental approach. Now if you do use the Gordon process with “1 + 2 + ti +” you will get a better result. 

But again, too many people can't remember what beat they're going to next. So they hesitate. And instead if we teach them that the downbeat has more emphasis, the upbeat has less, we're going to begin to feel meter and the structure of rhythm, where you can listen to a lot of beginning bands and even advanced bands, where you will not hear meter. You will not hear inflection of any kind. Instead, you just hear “bah, bah, bah”, everything is equal. Well, in meter it's not equal. The downbeat is more important than the second beat, which is a weaker beat, unless it's syncopated, etc, etc. 

So I think the McHose/Tibbs and Eastman, if you listen to even some advanced players, they're missing all those musical elements that should have been taught and felt before they ever saw a piece of music in front of them, learning their clarinet or whatever it is, because meter has to be ingrained in the body. And I mean, you'll see it when they march, they do not march and keep the beat, which says we went to the eye way too soon before their body felt it and understood it. So that Takadimi also is a beat function. So that means all downbeats are Ta, all upbeats are Di, and it helps the kid know right where they are. They hear it. And when they hear a rhythm they can figure it out right away. Oh, that came on the downbeat, that came on the upbeat. Oh, that rhythm is Ta Di Di Di Ta and that's an advanced rhythm but then they'll begin to figure that out because they feel that sound came on the up so we label it as a Di. 

It really makes hearing the sounds and dictation so much easier than the other way. So it divides up all the elements and parts of the beat, both in compound and simple. So in compound the beat is divided into three. So then we get Ta Ki Doo Ta Ki Doo as our division, and students learn real quickly with their hand motions, Ta is on the bottom, Ki is in the middle and Doo is on the top. So we can begin to feel the strength of where those notes are within the rhythmic palette. And then to do asymmetrical, it's groupings of three or two, so they can feel three and two, and all those divisions become equal. It's really nothing to learn to do asymmetrical meter. 

Takadimi is incredible. It took me two years after I read that article to get the intestinal fortitude to try it and I knew I'd make a lot of mistakes, because I'd rather go back to “1 + 2 + ti +” because it's what I know, or Ta Ti-Ti. But in all my readings about Kodaly, he wrote so much about the importance of sound before sight before theory. And he told everyone early on that Ta Ti-Ti which they got from the French Paris Galin system of counting is a visual methodology. It has nothing to do with the function of meter and beat. And now I realize that and so it makes it near impossible for a kid to really get good at dictation. And all kinds of improv is difficult with it as well. Hence, you don't see a lot of those things coming out of Kodaly programs, because the methodology itself for that note name system isn't conducive to those two elements. 

Now I would encourage everyone to read The Ways Children Learn Music, it changed my life. And it gave me the beginning of, oh, I did that right! Oh, I taught that wrong. Oh, I can see why they mean that. And then when you feel comfortable, read Gordon's books as well, but you know, some of that is philosophical, and may not always be apparent to teachers how to take that and institute into the classroom. I'm the practical person. I'm the one who does the reading. I'm the one who does research. I'm the one that finds all the articles and gives them to everybody who comes to the workshops. I give them recommended reading. But I'd like to think I'm the person that's going to show them how to begin to integrate it into their classroom and change how they teach from a passive piano playing, I follow, to giving these the key to being a total musician to our students. 

There are so many things I've learned along the way. When I played, my kids sang behind the beat, because they had to hear me play it before they could sing it. Now, my biggest problem is breaking them of that habit when I get them. And it will take me awhile to get them to be on the beat. I think Robert Shaw would be really excited and proud of all of this because he believed so much in rhythmic integrity. And he was always on us as singers that we were behind the beat and we weren't on top of the beat. We didn't feel forward motion in the beat in our rhythms. We didn't feel the anacrusis going to the next downbeat. He was so right. We were little robots. And we were following beautifully. But even though many of us were trained, we were not using our own brains in those rehearsals and he made us count-sing, which is very difficult on the vocal mechanism where the Ta Ti-Ti is not. 

And of course, solfege gives you beautiful, beautiful vowels. And I would never ever again use numbers. Numbers are full of diphthongs and all kinds of stuff and kids are not going to be any better at numbers when they start jumping around. And then you have to change it for sharps and flats. Why not just take a system that was built from the beginning? And why are we trying to reinvent a wheel and then this new wheel doesn't work? 

So I would just encourage people to go back and read the history of where all this came from. And the pros and cons. There are lots of books out there, they're more than welcome to contact me, and I'll send them tons of things. So you don't have to take my opinion, you can take the opinion of the experts who are out there.

Beth Philemon: Well, you are an expert now. The thing that sells it for me too, Carol, is by going to your workshops, you've made me a better musician, and implementing these things is making me a better musician, and I have a master's degree in music like, holy heavens, I know that it's gonna help my kids. And that's another fun thing-- just to go back to another workshop and to see other people's faces. I mean, I think especially like last summer when I was with you, my friend Troy was with us, and I mean, Troy is such a fun spirited person and confident in his musical skills, which he has great musical skills, but to see him learning things and lightbulbs pop on, and that aspect is just priceless.

Carol Krueger: And how I wish I would have had this when I was younger. Because I'd be a better musician, life would have been easier. And I also think that the better we make our students into great musicians, the greater chance there is that they will make singing a lifelong skill. I see too many kids finish high school and they don't continue to sing. They don't go to their church choirs. They don't go to their community choirs. And I think it's because rote teaching is very labor intensive, and it's not fun at all. But if they could go and have the skills to pick up that piece of music and didn't need us on the podium except to guide and to inspire and give them options of how to interpret things. 

Because sometimes their imagination and their feelings of music and what they're thinking is greater than mine. And so when I'm on the podium and they have no skills, I am literally a dictator. I would much rather be in a setting with my students where they feel comfortable with telling me what they think of that phrase, or how they feel that phrase, or suggestions, because they're actually invested in it. Now, how many teachers wouldn't love it if their kids were invested in MacBeth, and other things rather than whining, I have to read this, but instead, to fall in love with it, and I think to fall in love with anything you have to be good at. So that means this process makes them a far better musician. And I do believe they will stay with singing, which is really our legacy. It's not that I got straight superiors, who cares? I mean, yeah, that's important. But it's really in the long term. How many of those students are still singing, loving it, and passing that on to their own children, using it within their community? That's giving back. And I think most music teachers would say they would opt for that over just awards that sit on the wall that occasionally need to be dusted.

Beth Philemon: Absolutely, absolutely. Another thing that I'm just so inspired by every time I hear you talk is your willingness to fail, and to try new things. And you're very vocal in sharing this with us. But that's an incredibly vulnerable place to be, to share with others and then just to do it yourself, so much of why we're in the place that we're in is because people, musicians especially, don't like change, don't like to learn something new. 

Carol Krueger: So I did fail at a lot of it. You know, I started with those middle school kids, and they're much more forgiving than a high school kid. I was lucky. I chose to do this at middle school at first. From them and watching them, I learned that I had to find another avenue to help them. Or I saw what they were doing and then I did it and realized, oh, that helped me too. And so it's a process of sharing, and not being afraid to say to the students, we're gonna learn this together. So let's also chat about-- we want our kids to learn something new. We want them to be vulnerable in our presence. 

But I think the best role model is the teacher who's willing to be vulnerable. And what's wrong with saying, oh, I'm so sorry, students, that was my mistake. And I'm having trouble with that too. Let me try it another way. And sometimes they'll raise their hand and say, Hey Mama K, I'm doing this and this is the way I'm feeling or thinking of it. And I'll say, well, let me try that. Because isn't that called compromise and learning from others, and cooperative learning and who says that an eighth grader can't teach their teacher something? I think that unless we're open to learning, maybe we really need to rethink whether we should be teaching. And so I'm still learning. Every summer when you come, I have new things that I have figured out or developed to help you in the field or how to get there a little quicker and more efficiently. Of course, you know, one of my greatest passions is then taking these skills and not just doing it for your sight reading or literacy portion of your classroom, but to apply it to their literature, just like the language arts teacher would do. 

So recently I read another book, The Music and Literacy Connection. Now I read tons of articles, but this is a pretty good book. However, I would make sure that I had read The Way Children Learn Music and some Gordon before I delve into this one, but it is going to show you all of those connections between how we linguistically learn a language and how it meets music at every level, from the oral level to the visual level to the comprehension level. So it's an excellent, excellent book. However, it is more-- it’s not necessarily about this is how you're going to do a better job of teaching in your classroom. But it may help you make the connections between how you learned linguistic literacy, how you learned to read, and how it parallels music so closely. 

I know you've heard that from me and all those sessions. And it does, but I think what it does is brings it to light. And you may go back and say, oh, yeah, I remember as a kid that's what they did with us when we were learning. It’s the same thing and the same process now, where I didn't get that process, because my teacher went right through to the eyes and didn't work on that aspect with me. So I would encourage you to do it. There is a second edition. I don't know that there's a third edition out yet. And it's Dee Hansen, Elaine Bernstorf, and Gayle Stuber. And it is published by Rowman and Littlefield. And again, that is not the most important book, but for those who've been really working at this, and been with me, or were lucky enough to have someone else in their life to help them lay the groundwork in the spiral for this, I would tell them, it will be good reading for them. But in the meantime, The Ways Children Learn Music by Eric Bluestine is a great place to start for everyone. 

And keep in mind, it doesn't matter what age you teach. If you are illiterate, you must go back and lay the groundwork. And so at all levels that I have taught, I joke you've heard me say, I have taught elementary music at the elementary level. I have taught elementary music at the middle school level. I've taught elementary music at the high school level and yes, I went and got a doctorate to have the privilege of teaching elementary music at the undergrad and graduate level, because if you come without it, you must go back and help them fill in their holes. And we all have holes. And it is that teacher who loves their kids enough, is willing to step back and begin to help them build a better foundation. So their end product can be greater than it ever could have been before. 

And then obviously, apply it to every piece of music that they learn-- do not pick a piece of music that they're not capable of reading at least 80% of it. Please don't do that. It's unfair to the child. I just did an honor choir, an SSAA honor choir for high school. And while I sent all the materials, they came that day and a third of them didn't even have a copy of the music. The other third got the music the day before and none of them had skills to read. And so you sit there, and it’s not the students’ fault, and I had asked about difficulty level, etc. But I should know by now, people pick hard literature and aren't thinking about, can their kid really read this, hear this, do this? But in any case, I had to say pick up your hand, listen to my patterns, and show me whether it goes up or down. 

And yes, 11th and 12th graders had a difficult time listening and hearing whether the pitches went up or down, and we had to do that for two days, had to work our buns off because it wasn't fair to them. We had to cut a bunch of the literature because better to have done it well or not at all. And they were great workers, incredible workers. And when I asked some of them along the way, what have you learned? You know, they talk about vowels. They talk about working together as a unit. They talk about writing the arrows up and down in their music. And one of them said, I learned that my teacher is lazy. And I said, oh, honey, please don't say that again. I said, because you don't know. Your teacher may not know any other way. To which there were a bunch of students in the room that looked at me went, oh, my gosh, they might not. I said, that's right. I said, let's not pick on them. Let's hope that they are encouraged to continue to be a lifelong learner. 

Because a lot of people stop learning once they get that degree. So it takes the brave person to come to the workshop. I don't pick on anybody other than teasing them sometimes, but it's because It's a tit for tat back and forth. And we have so much fun. But I see people struggling. I find ways that we do cooperative learning. So they're actually getting help from their neighbor without anybody knowing who was in the room that needed the help. Because mistakes are free. Until it's your fourth or fifth time making the same mistake, then we might have to have a discussion. 

I feel so blessed when I get these teachers who come and are lifelong learners who will step out of their comfort zone, may leave there afraid that first year and only implement a little bit, but that’s okay. Remember, I didn't learn how to do all this. Nobody taught me. I made lots of mistakes and I still continue to make them. But it is often the mistakes that we learn the most from. Sometimes we succeed at something and we don't even know how we succeeded. But make a mistake, and you will learn what it was that was wrong. So I almost value kids in the choir when they make a mistake, I will often stop and say, thank you honey for that mistake because you're not the only one and here's how we're going to fix it. How would doctors ever learn how to treat us if we didn't look at all these alternatives, and take a good educated guess? Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. I just hope that they're not wrong when it's life or death. And you know what I do, nobody's gonna die from it more than likely-- if I make a mistake and figure out there's a better way and it allows me then the opportunity to go back and try another way. How lucky are we as teachers to have those options?

Beth Philemon: Well, is your mind blown yet? Because I know the first time I began hearing all of this, mine definitely was. I had all the emotions about why I struggled as a music student, and probably why a lot of my students struggled because learning and thinking about teaching music in this way helped me see the gaps that I had in my learning and the gaps that I was proliferating into my teaching without even really realizing it, or ultimately meaning to. 

I'm so excited to tell you that the conversation between Carol Krueger and myself continues and will be featured in the next episode of the Choir Baton podcast. Make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast in order to see when that releases. Carol also talks a lot about different resources and books. They will all be linked in the show notes in addition to her contact information, her website and details on where she is going to be heading to in the United States and doing some of her conferences. 

Finally, two last things, I would love if you would review this podcast, let us know what you think, how we're doing, it really helps others find out more about what this is about. And finally, share. This is such powerful information that not just music teachers need to hear. Anyone that listens to music could so benefit from hearing, particularly this conversation with Carol. So, screenshot how you're listening to the podcast, share it on social media, send a text message to a friend, share it through that, send an email and let others know about this awesome, awesome conversation that we're really coming back to in music ed about how we can really teach music literacy by truly developing the ear first before we jump to anything sight or theory based. 

That's all and stay tuned for the next episode of the Choir Baton podcast. I'm your host, Beth Philemon.