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played as everyone paid their respects. That night, I rocked my daughter Ella while quietly singing,“ Andrew, Pandrew, Mandrew— he is my little brother; there is no other …,” and she drifted off to sleep.
Of everything that we do in our music classrooms, what will last? The fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’ s book The Little Prince captures it best:“ One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” 6 If the fox is correct, anything lasting, meaningful, and essential in music education comes from and ultimately resides in just one place— the heart.
Parker Palmer, educator, activist, and the author of The Courage to Teach, states that good teachers“ are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students.... The connections made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts.” 7 For the majority of our students, the lasting parts of their music education experiences, the web of connections, will exist solely in the form of mental snapshots of powerful moments and feelings that are generated in our classrooms.
In her 2008 poem for the inauguration of Barack Obama, Elizabeth Alexander asked,“ What if the mightiest word is love?” 8 Love. It is a word that is largely absent from music education advocacy discussions and yet is the only word that can answer the question,“ What truly lasts?” Every image on my own golden record is filled with love— love for music, love for teaching, and love for Andrew. The deepest grooves often lie at the intersections— the places where my special relationship with Andrew, music, and our K – 12 experiences met. Those places are alive and teeming with love.
The work of teaching from the heart— teaching with love, passion, and justice— is the type of work that will crystallize into lasting, awe-inspiring, love-filled moments. It is work that challenges us to be empathetic, compassionate, and vulnerable in our teaching. Perhaps we can find moments to pause— to take shelter from perpetual resisting and defending— and let ourselves be open to allowing the mightiest word, love, to give rise to the music, experiences, images, and feelings that will crystalize in our classrooms, forming beautiful and deeply meaningful imprints on our golden records.
Notes 1. L. Scott McCormick,“ The Boardroom Case for Music Education,” Inside Indiana Business, accessed August 20, 2015, http:// www. insideindianabusiness. com / contributors. asp? id = 1140; Joann Lipman,“ Is Music the Key to Success?” The New York Times, October 13, 2013, accessed August 20, 2015, http:// www. nytimes. com / 2013 / 10 / 13 / opinion / sunday / ismusic-the-key-to-success. html.
2. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, narrators,“ Space,” radio broadcast on Radiolab, National Public Radio, August 20, 2012, http:// www. radiolab. org / story / 231536- rebroadcast-space /.] 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Chuck Mangione,“ The Land of Make Believe,” sound recording of on The Land of Make Believe Mercury, 1973; Herb Alpert,“ Spanish Flea,” sound recording of on What Now, My Love, A & M, 1966.
Bachelor of Arts in Music Bachelor of Arts in Music with a Double Major Bachelor of Music Education Bachelor of Music in Performance
For Open House and Audition dates, go to: www. gettysburg. edu / sunderman
www. gettysburg. edu / sunderman
6. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince( Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1943).
7. Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach( San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons, 2007, 11).
8. Elizabeth Alexander,“ Praise Song for the Day”( poem delivered at the inauguration of Barack Obama, Washington, DC, January 20, 2009).
Colleen Sears is an assistant professor and coordinator of music education at The College of New Jersey in Ewing.
From the March 2016 issue of Music Educators Journal, Copyright © 2016 by National Association for Music Education.
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