Monday, Nov. 25 at 6 p.m.: we arrived on campus. The field trip had begun. My piano students, five local children, followed me into Cummings. As we walked in the building, turned the corner and entered the stairwell, I pointed out the ducks appearing to swim above our heads. “Ducks?” my students asked. “Why ducks?” “Because this is an arts building,” I explained. “And art students are very strange people.” As a student of the creative arts, I knew what I was talking about.
I am a music major at Connecticut College and a children’s piano teacher of the Extreme Music School at Oasis of Restoration Church in my hometown of New London. This field trip was about smashing two of my worlds together and letting people in each of them inspire the others. I brought my kids to the College and invited two music education students and the pianist for the Chamber Choir to meet them.
Upon exiting the stairwell, we entered a classroom, where we met three real, live college students. My kids had been anticipating this moment for weeks, but they “played it cool,” introducing themselves nonchalantly, as if they weren’t incredibly impressed by the very existence of college students, let alone the concept of college students wanting to spend time with them.
My classmates Caitlin Kullberg ’16, Jesse Guterman ’16 and Lauren Marazzi ’16 shared their musical skills and motivations with us. The children applauded after Kullberg showed them a major scale and basic chord progression. Guterman wowed them with a piece entitled “Red Clay.” (I know he wowed them because they remembered the title of the song in their thank-you notes. As their teacher, I can vouch for how hard it is to get them to remember things.) Marazzi impressed them so much with her performance of a piece by Debussy that their spelling was adversely affected. (Their letters of gratitude to her included the words “enspired” and “musicianist.”)
As if giving us a chance to hear them perform wasn’t enough, my three classmates accompanied us to the piano lab in the Greer Music Library, where the children showed their new favorite college students what they had been learning in my class. A moving performance of “Gone, Gone, Gone” by Phillip Phillips was followed by applause and words of encouragement from the college crowd. I was truly touched by how willing my schoolmates were to connect with my kids. They talked with them. They listened to them. They learned with them and laughed with them. During a discussion on how to read a score, one of my young wards shared her unique way of remembering the names of the lines on the treble clef: Even George Bush Drives Fast. I don’t think any of us will ever forget that now.
We said goodbye to our special guests, and sat down to express our gratitude with the written word. A thirteen-year-old girl wrote in her thank-you note that she now wanted to play piano for longer, which means she had been empowered to see piano in her future, not just her present. Moments like that are why people become musicians. Moments like that are why anybody becomes anything. They are the reason I brought my students to visit my college.
Learning something well requires intrinsic motivation, and the best way to teach that sort of motivation to children is to introduce them to someone who shares their passion and believes in them. I can inspire my students as their teacher. But they can be so much more inspired by someone outside of their world stepping in for a moment and caring about them learning something. That’s what Caitlin, Lauren and Jesse did for them on that Monday evening.
I wanted my students to see the practice rooms before we left. Meandering down the hallway, we walked past Evans and interrupted the Conn College band during rehearsal. My students stopped in their tracks. A pre-teen reached for her smartphone to take a picture. Eleven-year-old eyes lit up and looked at me. “Can we stay?” I looked up and saw the conductor waving us over, inviting us to come in and listen. We went in. We listened. We heard a grand piano being played along with a full band. That was something I could have told my students about, but I could never have truly inspired them with from inside our little church classroom with our little electronic keyboards. It’s something that required a field trip, but not just any field trip. A field trip to somewhere inclusive, accepting and community-minded. I happen to go to school at such a place.
We walked down the hallway, hearts full and ears content. I casually mentioned that the cart outside of Greer holds free stuff that the library doesn’t need anymore. The children were upon the cart like a pack of wolves, and each walked out with arms full of Anthologies of Music and Dance on VHS (my students do not know the word “anthology,” but they do know the word “free,” and that was enough for them). The student who connected our former president’s driving to musical notation lamented the fact that her little brother had recently jammed crackers and toys into her VHS player…so how ever would she watch these anthologies? I didn’t know the answer to that question. But I did know that even if she never watched the videos she took away in her arms, we were both taking away so much more from that evening. She was leaving with the memory of an adventure that may very well impact her for the rest of her life. And I was leaving with a deeper sense of gratitude and appreciation for the community in which I have the opportunity to study.
Enjoyed you sharing this experience.