Music Monday - WA Covid lockdown

And in the blink of an eyelid,  parts of my home state of Western Australia is in a 5 day lockdown. We had gone 10 months with no community transmission of Covid-19,  schools were about to start today, and in many ways Western Australians had been lulled into a comfortable state of living as though the pandemic didn’t exist for us. Perhaps this (hopefully) short lockdown is the wakeup call we all needed?

My social media feed this morning highlighted two main camps when dealing with the new lockdown. In the first, and more active camp, are friends, colleagues and students who had already this morning, started a frenzy of at home activity - sorting teaching notes, organising clothes closets, meal preparation for the term, and so on. In the second camp were those who turned over in bed and went back to sleep this morning. I confess that I was in the latter camp today. Instead of leaving the house at 7am for my first scheduled lesson at 8am, I stayed in bed later than I had for the entire summer holiday.

Now I have four lockdown days to get something done and catch up with those in camp one!

On my shelf are three books on singing teaching that I have been reading and reviewing over the summer.

 As a teacher of many years now, I still find it fascinating to read other teachers’  and experts’ accounts of how they organise and deliver their teaching. Like so many, teachers,  I am eager to learn about new research in voice science. I like the challenge of new approaches -  and the comfort that comes when I  having my own approaches endorsed.

 Maybe as singing voice teachers, we are all looking for the safety-net of a definitive text to support our teaching?

Perhaps this is the holy grail searched for! The definitive text for the teaching of singing!

I had a lively discussion with Robin Pascoe about this. What follows is a summary of our thoughts and his distilling of the same onto the page:

There are so many sources of information to support our teaching, and none more so than those that we can find on the Internet. Rather than looking for the perfect text, we should be thinking more about the kinds of knowledge that we should be ensuring in the learning of all of our students.

Whatever the form, the information we base our teaching on needs to develop in our students the following kinds of knowing and understanding.

There are different texts for this complex bundle of learning. But the above are useful checkpoints to seeing how well a text suits our needs. 

Ultimately, our own teaching needs to be our own set of strategies to meet an agreed goal.

Your thoughts?