When someone asks me what I do, I tell them I’m a teacher or an educator.  So, while I’m pretty sure I know what I do, I decided to look up the definitions of both of those words and of course it’s a person who teaches or educates. But when you look up the words teach and educate, here’s what you get:

Teach: show or explain to (someone) how to do something.  From Germanic/Old English meaning to “point out, show, say”.

Educate: give intellectual, moral, and social instruction to (someone, especially a child), typically at a school or university.  From the Latin meaning “lead out”.

I was a little disappointed because if that’s all an educator does, does that person really make difference in how a child learns to learn?  Does an educator instill a love of learning or just lead by pointing out, showing and saying?  This makes me think of all of those lecturing professors I ever had who never left the front of the room, the all important “sage on the stage” as we tend to refer to them.  Okay great, so they’re a fount of impressive knowledge, but other than requiring students to memorize what they said in class, do they really do anything else?  Do students have opportunities to apply this knowledge in a meaningful, personal way? Or is this all education has become, to stand up in front, spout information and impress?

Notice that neither definition mentions learning on the part of anyone. I suppose it’s implied in that you’re showing something to someone, but that could just mean they’re listening, not necessarily learning.  As teachers, we’ve all seen it.  We have those times in front of the class when we see the eyes glaze over or they start staring at their shoes or up at the ceiling or they’re poking a friend just for fun, and we know we’ve lost them.  But there’s some comfort in that place for us up on that stage, right?  It’s the job of the student to listen and learn, isn’t it?

The problem is, learning involves engagement and if they’re not engaged, then all the great knowledge we have is worthless.  They need to get excited and WANT to learn and that is what our job should be about.  It’s during those excited, organized chaos times in our classes that real learning happens.  It’s that time when we let go and let them try things out, experiment, make mistakes and try again.  It’s loud and messy and not at all the organized world most of us work so hard to achieve.  After all, classroom management can become very precarious and what if an administrator walks by?  Do I have control of my class?  Maybe it’s not all about having complete control, maybe it’s all facilitating so THEY can ultimately have control.

As music educators, I think we’re under the mistaken idea that just because there is an instrument in their hand or they’re singing the notes on the page or participating in an activity that they’re learning.  Oh, maybe they’re engaged because they’re doing, but are they really learning or are you doing all of the work for them?  Are you directing every dynamic level, every tempo change?  Is everything done by rote your way? Are you correcting all of the wrong notes and bad intonation?  What’s going to happen when they eventually leave you?  Unless they have someone in front of them who is showing them what to do and saying all the right things and pointing out all of their flaws, they will never do this on their own.  They may be having fun, they may be engaged, but is this learning?

I’ll admit that I’m a control freak who wants to have complete control of my class and the content I’m teaching, but then, there’s that word again – teaching.  However,  I also know from experience that my kids learn more when I let them go – within parameters of course.  So maybe teacher or educator isn’t what we should be called.  Maybe I’m a professional learning facilitator or a life long learning coach instead.  Or maybe I SHOULD be.

I think philosophically, we all want kids to become creative, engaged, independent learners and we may feel that we’re stuck with making sure kids have the prescribed curriculum stuffed into their heads for the never ending assessments that follow.  However, what if, once in a while, we allowed a little organized chaos to invade our classrooms just to see what happens.  Same content, different delivery perhaps and not necessarily all from us. Maybe it’s time for us to match our philosophy with our methods so that students get excited and take charge of their own learning. And as for me, the self proclaimed control freak, I’ll just make it a two (or three) diet coke day and watch the learning happen amongst the chaos.