Music’s Joyous Potential

“Music produces a kind of pleasure that human nature cannot do without.”

—   Confucius

Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous Polish rabbi who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., once said, "First we sing, then we understand.” I was thinking of his words while I watched a YouTube video a grandmother shared with me of her kindergarten-age grandson singing his own original composition: “Spread your wings, spread your heart, that’s how we spread joy now.” His delightful song, which goes on for several minutes, expresses his full and exuberant understanding of the values he hears about every day in his kindergarten class. He composed this music as a surprise gift for his mom.

Students at the White Pony and Meher School sing songs that express our values starting in preschool and continuing throughout elementary school, and adult alumni report they feel comforted by singing them as they venture out into the world.

Beginnng in preschool, they also enjoy making music and performing for others. In elementary school, students not only sing in class but have the chance to join one of our school choruses. In this season of gift giving, what could be a better present for a parent or grandparent than a film of a child joyfully singing a song that they love or one they have composed? We often frame children’s paintings and display them in our homes, and today technology allows us to save their musical expressions and share them with others.

This holiday season, music at all the school parties and performances can remind us of the powerful potential for music to take us out of our worries and amplify gratitude and joy in our lives.

Music can be a central part of family life. Before radio and television provided entertainment, families often made a habit of making music as a satisfying pastime. Here are some ideas:

Use music to change a mood. If a child doesn’t want to get out of bed or clean up a mess, make up a song about it. “It’s so hard to get up in the morning.”

Encourage musical improvisation. A little girl was picking up golden leaves in the yard. I said,  “Why don't you sing a song about it?” She immediately burst into joyful melody and dance, and her friend eagerly joined in.

Make a playlist of family favorites. What are the songs you like to sing as a family while riding in the car or cleaning up after a meal? Writing down your family “hits” brings a sense of cohesion. Everyone gets a vote.

Create a song to help young children get ready for a family event. Music can help us prepare for new experiences more easily than words.  “Grandma and Grandpa are coming to stay, stay, stay.”

Let’s recognize children’s ability to feel joy through music, a capacity that can last throughout their lives.

Kiss My Brain

Instead of groaning when she realizes she made a mistake in her computation on a math problem, a seven-year-old says, “Kiss my brain,” with a smile, touching her heart, then her head, before continuing with the problem. Second-grade teacher Brenda Barnhart teaches her students to “kiss their brains” whenever they make a math mistake. She staunchly believes that learning to make positive responses to mistakes builds new brain connections. “Math was very difficult for me as a child, and it would have helped me to ‘kiss my brain’ every time I made a mistake.”

Many of us grew up with the idea that putting ourselves down for errors (“That was really stupid of me”) is normal and actually helps us save face in front of others. If we acknowledge we aren’t good at something, why should we be embarrassed? Having a self-doubting response to mistakes is natural because the brain is programmed to skew in negative ways, but children can learn to override that reflexive reaction and have the confidence to keep going.

Research bears out the idea that talking to oneself in encouraging ways increases brain connectivity in the reward-motivation networks, while negative self-talk reduces connectivity in some brain networks.

The phrase “Kiss my brain,” which has become a popular image in education, has importance for our perspective in every area of learning. In this age, as we understand more about the plasticity of the brain and the widespread existence of neurodiversity, we want to create new pathways for helping children appreciate their own minds and capacities for growth. Why not love the amazing capacities of our brains?

It’s hard to unlearn our self-talk, but instilling the habit of simply “kissing our brain” leads us into an evolutionary new way of learning based on gratitude rather than fear.

Progress Reports

A Global View of Elementary Students’ Academic Growth

Second grade teachers Shelby Gregg and Brenda Barnhart confer about their students’ organizational-skills marks. Writing the reports is a collaborative process.

This week and next week, parents of our elementary students will be meeting with their children’s teachers for the first of two parent-teacher conferences held each year. The starting point for their conversations is the students’ written progress reports, which in other schools are usually referred to as report cards.

A collaborative effort involving many hours’ work on the part of teachers, the co-principals, and the school editor, progress reports offer a global view of a student’s progress at that point in the year. (The second conference, an end-of-year overview of the student’s progress, is held in May.) Because teachers may spend an hour or more on each report, the process of writing them is typically spread over several weeks. Each classroom has two (or three) co-teachers, who share the writing.

Comprehensive picture. Subjects included in the first-through-fifth-graders reports are reading, writing, language, listening and speaking, mathematics, and science. Since a student’s progress in a particular area can’t be captured in a single mark (grade), subjects are broken down into strands that yield a more comprehensive picture. In the area of reading, for instance, second graders have marks for fluency (how accurately and quickly they read), literal comprehension, and inferential comprehension.

Progress reports also address students’ behavior and attitudes and organizational skills. These categories include interpersonal skills and character traits that help students achieve their highest potential in the classroom and beyond. Some examples are interacting positively and appropriately with peers, completing work on time, and willingness to use feedback for growth.

Rather than traditional A-B-C-D-F grades, we use marks that reflect a student’s progress toward the end-of-year standard in each area—Needs support or reinforcement, Partial progress toward standard, Satisfactory progress toward standard. For fourth and fifth grades, a fourth category is added, M, for mastery.

In addition to marks, there are sections on the reports for teachers’ comments in the academic and behavior-and-attitudes and organizational-skills areas. These allow teachers to address specific points not reflected in the marks, such as a student’s engagement in the writing process or facility with applying new math strategies. Comments sometimes include input from enrichment teachers (library, P.E., drama, art, and garden).

A collaborative process. Teachers arrive at students’ academic marks by reviewing assessments scores, marks on in-class and homework assignments, and notes they’ve kept. The teacher who teaches a particular subject assigns marks and writes comments related to that subject, which the other teacher reviews. They work together on marks that cross academic subjects, such as organizational skills and behavior.

Once they’ve completed their reports, the teachers pass them along to Co-Principals Ivy Summers and Vince d’Assis, who review each report—180 in all this year. They confer with one another or with the teachers if questions come up.

When Vince and Ivy are done with the reports, the school editor, Scott Wallace, proofreads them, consulting with Vince or Ivy or the teachers about questions he may have. When he’s finished, he prints the report and saves a copy for our permanent files.

Communication tool. Progress reports record a child’s academic growth and are one of the communication tools that keep parents and teachers on the same page about a child’s learning. At the start of a new school year, teachers meet with the previous year’s teachers and may review the students’ reports to learn more about the students they’re welcoming into their classroom. Each child’s progress report is kept in their cumulative file. When a student graduates, their new middle school usually requests this file from the school office.