Klarinet Archive - Posting 000170.txt from 1997/08

From: Karl Krelove <kkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: Re: Kids Today
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 10:52:16 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Todd and Lynnette Staley <nette@-----.net>
Date: Tuesday, August 05, 1997 10:06 PM
Subject: Re: Kids Today

>Speaking as a music ed student and soon to be teacher, the problem is that
>in college, one is required only to take a semester course in such things
>as brass, woodwind and percussion and spend only weeks on each flute,
>clarinet, etc. At my school, the woodwind tech class is one semester and
>only three instruments are studied, usually flute, clarinet and bassoon or
>oboe. None of the instruments are studied as in depth as they should be,
>only the basics of playing such as fingerings and embouchre.

Speaking as an experienced school music teacher, I wish the only problem
were inadequate course work. I need to tell you something that most
schoolteachers figure out after they've been on the job a few years: one
learns most of what you've mentioned (and much more) on the job, from
your more experienced colleagues,=A0 your students' questions, and your own
mistakes. No one will ever come out of a college program in any area of
education adequately prepared to do anything but continue to learn.=20
There's too much to know. We might improve the situation somewhat if
we doubled the length of our ed degree programs and then added the type of
internship and supervised residency that physicians need to go through, but
no school board will ever pay the salaries that teachers would rightly
demand after that kind of training, and few if any high school grads would
enter such a program without seeing a commensurate monetary reward at the
end of it.

>...I have long felt that we should be required to thoroughly
>study every instrument in more detail such as cleaning, reed and
>mouthpiece choice on woodwinds and on brass.

You can read all there is to KNOW (the incontestable, indisputable facts)
about these things in an afternoon in any of several books or pamphlets
that, I will agree, music ed instructors ought to make available. But
there's not that large a body of knowledge before you go diving off into
opinions as diverse as those expressed by posters to this list. Most of the
instrument makers publish "Caring for your new instrument" pamphlets that
are meant for the kids and their parents to read. Surely it would require
no greater a course load for music ed students to read these.

>I intend to find experienced
>people to come in and do master classes in my band rooms to help eliminate
>such problems as you have described.

Such people don't come cheap, and my school board is already unhappy about
MY paycheck. They'll never be willing to pay outside resources like this -
you'll need more very good friends than I can boast to contribute this kind
of time on a regular basis, or pay them out of your own pocket.

>It is only the fault of the
>instructor that the kid put the clarinet inthe bathtub. The first lesson
>you should get on any instrument is proper care.

As I remember it, Dave Blumberg in his story made a point of saying that
the band director was too experienced a woodwind player to have told the
students to run water through their clarinets. Therefore, the student may
have misunderstood what was said. I only hope that as little actual damage
or harm results from the first time one of your students misunderstands or
misinterprets you. Sometimes things go wrong and it isn't anybody's fault.
I once had a student bring a sax mouthpiece to me that his mother had tried
to clean by boiling it. I never told my clarinet or sax classes to clean
the mouthpieces with anything but the swabs in their cases and maybe a=
little
alcohol if they needed to disinfect them for any reason. I DIDN'T tell them
NOT to boil the mouthpieces because it didn't occur to me that anyone
would. Besides, nothing you teach in that first lesson (or any other lesson
for that matter) means anything if the kids aren't listening - which most
of them won't be when they have a brand new instrument in their hands
they're dying to start actually playing.=A0 The process becomes partly a rac=
e
to see if you can repeat yourself enough over a period of time to get the
point across before one
of your students gets inventive and finds out for himself why your way
would have worked better.

>Until directors realize
>that they are not experts on every instrument, these things will happen.

"These things" (I'm not sure what other "things" you're referring to)
frequently happen independent of the teacher - we don't control children's
lives, only most of their behavior when they're with us (and sometimes even
that isn't so easy). It isn't that they (we) think they (we) are experts.
Most of us (excluding perhaps the trumpet player-band director who insists
his clarinet players all use B45's with VanDoren #3 V12 reeds because he
read somewhere that this is the best combination) become more aware over
the years how much we don't know. Our school programs, at least in my part
of the world, are built around the generalist who is, presumably, skilled
in music and has the performance skills on one instrument to be able to
demonstrate his or her musicality. Nobody can be expert in all instruments.
IMHO, one of the problems music ed faces constantly, and must sooner or
later solve, is that too many people graduate with a Bachelor's degree and
have demonstrated no real musical skill or even aptitude, because in too
many of the college programs I've been able to observe, it seems to be
assumed that a high degree of musical performance skill is unnecessary to
teach children. The problem is that absent a high level of performing
skill, it's very difficult to tell if musical aptitude is really as high as
it needs to be, and musical ability and skill ARE absolutely necessary for
any music teacher. So my vote, if more time were added to teacher ed
programs in general, would be to use it to build performing skills on the
student's major instrument and increase their musical knowledge. The two
kids who tried to drown their clarinets are a molehill at the bottom of a
much larger and imposing mountain.

I should apologize, I guess, for ranting so long about this, but it's a
sensitive subject. I don't like, in the first place, to see large groups of
people (in this case school band directors) all painted with the same broad
brush. I'm a very good clarinet player and a very good music teacher. I
know a lot about brass and strings and basic percussion because I've been
teaching for 25 years and because my own children have studied instruments
in all of these areas. I still don't know everything there is to know (or
that someone much younger and less experienced who specializes in one of
these areas thinks I should know). My greatest beef as a private clarinet
teacher is with some of the band directors (non-woodwind players) who send
me students and then cross me by insisting that the students do things in
band that are opposed to what I'm trying to get them to do in their lessons.
A good music teacher is first a very good musician and second a very good
human being. If the teachers described in the two clarinet drownings are
not hampered by their own egos, they will learn from any possible errors of
omission and their future students will not make the same mistakes. I now
tell my students not to boil their mouthpieces. It wasn't a complicated
adjustment in my technique. If a teacher doesn't make adjustments in
response to incidents like these, there's a bigger problem than lack of
education involved, and it isn't necessarily profession-wide. It is with
that individual.

Enough! I haven't really finished venting, but by now very few of you will
have had the patience still to be reading. Thanks for reading this far.

Karl

   
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