Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I don’t like the taste of tabasco sauce on…anything, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a story about parent night at my daughter’s school.

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What I Learned Yesterday:
For most of us school is now back in session. Some of you may still be waiting until after Labor Day, but for my family, school started last week. We now have a 5th grader and a 6th grader.

Last night was parent night at the middle school that my daughter attends. We spent nearly two hours going room by room meeting each of her teachers and hearing them tell us about their teaching and grading style, what they expected out of their students, and what they hoped to teach our daughter by the time the school year is completed in May.

She has most of the classes you’d expect: English, literature, math, and science. Our time with her science teacher was fun. He had each of us perform an experiment and then discuss the differing results. He did in five minutes what other teachers didn’t do in twice that time. We fully understood his teaching style and effectiveness when we left. It was really cool and made me wish I’d had him as my 6th grade science teacher.

Addison also has a leadership class that will help her learn about character, helping others, performing community service, and putting others before herself. All of those are great things to know as a leader.

Our school system has a rule that I think is a bit odd, even if I do understand its purpose. That is, if a child ever wants to be in band or orchestra, that child must join in 6th grade. If they skip band or orchestra in 6th grade, they are out of luck and can not join up any other time, even during high school.

They want the kids to have gone through the same process and be playing at the same level. It’s hard enough to teach a class of 40 kids to play an instrument. It’s harder still if you have a handful of kids that are a year or more behind the rest of the class.

Because Addison expressed an interest in playing an instrument, we made sure she joined now. She can always opt out along the way. She chose to take orchestra, and she chose to play the violin. Of course, I live in country music territory, so the music store made sure to call it a fiddle when we bought it a few days ago.

Addison will have 3 performances this year. The first one will be in just over a month. That seems a bit soon, don’t you think? Will they actually be able to play anything? Yes, they’ll be able to perform.

You see, perform isn’t always what we think it is. At her first performance Addison will not be picking up her violin, placing it under her chin, or sliding the bow across the strings. She won’t play any songs or any notes for that matter.

Instead, she’ll be teaching Kari and I those things. Her first performance will be to teach her parents the fundamental elements of unpacking and preparing her instrument. This is intended to reinforce the things that she’s been taught and help solidify the teaching.

The second performance will come around Christmas. This time the sixth graders will be playing…nothing. Instead, they will attend the 12th grade orchestra performance. They will see kids perform that were sitting in their middle school orchestra room just 6 years prior. They will see their potential. They will see what 6 years of work will earn them. They will have a clear vision of what they can become.

The third performance will come in May. Guess what? For this performance they will pick up their instruments, put bow to string, and serenade us. I can’t wait.

I love this teaching method and here’s why.

We have all felt the frustration of trying to learn a new skill. It almost never comes easy and it seems like the older we get, the harder it is to learn new things. However, even as kids we often get frustrated by our failures and want to quit.

By learning through this process and seeing what others have accomplished, the kids will be encouraged and inspired. Of course, there will be days that they’ll want to give up and be frustrated beyond consolation, but they’ll have the memories of the 12th graders to help get them back into the right frame of mind.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

As I sat there listening to Addison’s orchestra teacher talk about the music book they’ll be using, I was a bit excited about it. I can’t read music. I’ve often wished I hadn’t dropped out of band when I left middle school and I’m hoping that I can learn along with Addison. Sounds cool, right?

No. It sounds ridiculous.

Why does it sound ridiculous? Because I have no excuse for not knowing how to read music. This may shock you, but I’m pretty good with a computer. I even discovered this really cool search engine called Google. If I type, “learn how to read music” in to Google, it will give me an endless supply of resources that I can use to learn how to read music. Many of them will be free.

You know what else? I found this really cool website that has tons of videos on it. It’s called YouTube. If I made a bit of effort to search for videos that teach people to read music, I would find plenty of them. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that there’s even a video with a cat teaching you how to read music. Perhaps there’s even a video of a cat playing a keyboard. Who am I kidding. That’s even too crazy for YouTube…probably.

Will I try to learn how to read music with Addison? Yes, I probably will. But the truth is that all of us have all the resources we need to learn new skills and if we aren’t using those resources, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Here’s the good news. Unlike my daughter, we have the option to sign up any time. Did you miss an opportunity to learn a new skill or study a subject? Who cares? Let’s not be people of “if onlys” or “what ifs.” Let’s be people of action. Carpe diem.

I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.

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