Like lots of the kids around me in my humble Midwestern elementary school, I started playing a band instrument just because. Because the instruments were shiny and mysterious and because it meant being singled out as special three days a week to converge in the lunchroom for a cacophonous 45 minutes. I chose the trumpet because it seemed a magnificent luxury, like something from Cinderella, and because my brother had started playing one a few years before, so I figured my parents had to say yes to me too.
Just to be perfectly clear, I chose neither band nor this particular instrument because I loved music or the sound of brass. In fact, all the way through high school, I continued to plug diffidently away at the trumpet as if it were any other task, like making my bed or mowing the lawn. At no point — neither in practice at home nor public concerts— do I ever recall being moved by the actual experience of making music. Instead, I played out of habit and because it was something I’d agreed to do, giving it just enough time and energy to avoid totally embarrassing myself.
I ponder this now, because here in the throes of middle age, I have picked up the trumpet once again. It’s a used student model, very much like the one I had decades ago, cold heavy brass that is both strange and familiar in my adult hands. The scent of valve oil and the chill circle of the mouthpiece against my (still) slightly crooked front teeth propel me backwards in time, reminding me that I am both the same and different from the kid who once ran the chromatic scale with such habitual mediocrity.
Shockingly, after just a few months, I find that, in one important sense, I’m already playing better than I ever did as a distracted kid. Adult-me, it seems, is motivated by an actual desire to make actual music. Though I rarely have an audience, I find myself making an effort to play with heart, drawn to the promise of making beauty with my mouth, breath and hands. The irony is that, having fully embraced the low stakes amateurism of playing the trumpet late in life, I am actually getting good at it, at least by my admittedly low standards. And I know this is because playing has become more about creating meaning than about merely mastering a skill set in order to operate a shiny machine.
My childhood failure to connect to the music-making aspect of playing the trumpet was, no doubt, due partly to a relative lack of cultural or artistic appreciation in my working class home. Like most of the kids around me, I grew up almost completely incapable of taking my creative potential seriously. It pretty much never occurred to me that I might be able to make beautiful music or art, because I simply could not fathom being special or worthy enough to approach these rarified realms. Journalism? Maybe. Poetry? Never. Why open myself to ridicule, then, by exerting steady and sincere effort to achieve something so impossibly far out of reach?
I am left now with an incisive pedagogical lesson that I suspect most everyone else already knew: In many subject areas, especially those associated however obliquely with high culture, U.S. working class kids may never make it out of the starting gate. After all, admission price for even the bare possibility of genuine learning is a basic sense of one’s own belonging in the grand humanistic scheme of things. And how can those who cannot take themselves seriously as potential cultural creators ever embrace the requisite vulnerability? We must feel sure enough that we belong to throw ourselves into it again and again, failing spectacularly, without being overwhelmed by imposter syndrome or falling into what Tara Brach calls the “trance of unworthiness.”
In short, it’s pretty clear that great pedagogical potential is unleashed when we plug into our own sense of cultural self worth. Though the energy that flows from such cultivated aesthetic self-regard may be no more magical or mysterious than electricity, it can be just as transformative. It can mean the difference between a lifetime of stepping self-consciously and disjointedly from one note to another and one spent making bonafide music. Permission to take oneself seriously as a human creator, then, can nudge the sidelined outsider into the heart of the ballroom, into the chaotic dance with the muses that has long nourished the human soul.
The Virtual Pedagogue 