It’s November in Iowa and the harvest is over, leaving the landscape bare and in shades of gray and brown, clouds of white dust kicked up by pick-up trucks speeding down gravel roads in the distance.  The sky was bright blue today as I drove through western Iowa, the soundtrack to Mama Mia blasting loudly in the car while hundreds of wind turbines rotated against the that clear blue sky.  The shadows cast on the ground during mid-day made it look like the arms of giant clocks spinning out of control.  It’s a fascinating sight, seeing hundreds of these turbines, spinning at different speeds at different angles, the science way above what this little brain can handle.  All I know is that it looks cool.

Three and a half hours on the road by myself, to spend a couple of nights in a hotel by myself, to present to Iowa music teachers, by myself.  It’s a “pinch myself” kind of scenario, a ton of work and a satisfaction I could not have anticipated, my hope being that what I have to say touches or teaches someone.

Teaching is something I’ve always wanted to do, my earliest recollection being third grade, pretending to be a teacher in the basement of my house with my chalkboard.  Learning and gathering information has always been exciting for me, but just THINKING in general feeds my soul.  When I come up with something new, at least new to me, I find myself wanting to research it and I get excited making connections to other things.  Ok, nerdy I guess, but that’s the way it is.  I think it’s the connections to other subjects, thoughts and people that speak to me the most and it’s the that excitement for learning that I want to get across to others when I teach.

I’m grateful to so many of my teachers, especially at the elementary level who instilled a love of learning.  We learned in so many ways, simple ways, like drawing or coloring, making lists of spelling words, learning little sayings to remember grammar rules, drilling multiplication facts in a “spelling bee” kind of way, and having stories read to us a chapter at a time so we could anticipate the next chapter the next day.  I think that’s one of the things we’re missing in today’s educational system, the fact that we’re trying to make kids learn rather than teach them to love learning on the own.  I watch as enthusiastic kindergartners enter school, excited to be there, turn to fifth graders who can’t wait to get away from school.  Of course, there are always those overachievers, the nerdy ones like me who will always find a way to love school, but even I get overwhelmed by the things requested of me to MAKE me learn rather than LET me learn.  If I allow it, it begins to take the joy out of learning and teaching, something that has been a part of my life for over 50 years.

There’s a kind of desperation in that kind of teaching, a fear that we must be accountable to everyone and therefore students MUST learn.  We’re accountable to parents, administrators, legislators and the public at large.  Unfortunately, the ones who suffer are the ones we should be serving, the ones we should be teaching to love learning and those are our students.  If we were only allowed to be accountable to THEM and not everyone except them, maybe we could get this whole situation turned around.

It’s a lot to think about as I drive by those barren fields watching wind turbine shadows on the ground singing Dancing Queen at the top of my lungs.  Scary but true, in so many ways.  When was the last time you were excited to learn something on your own?  Is your child or are your students excited to learn on their own or have they learned to hate learning?  It’s something to think about.