“You know, if you ever decide not to be a music teacher…” said the middle school choir teacher I worked with while I was student teaching.

I probably should have listened to the important part of that sentence, but I was too sure that I would be teaching children music and dreaming of lesson plans until I keeled over. That did not work out for too many reasons, and I haven’t taught another person in almost four years. 

Around the same time I stopped teaching, I stopped singing too. I lasted about a year without a real “creative outlet” before I popped and started collaging. Everything I was feeling had to go somewhere. 

Making something where I had no “experience” or “training” was unnerving. What if when I glued the last bit of paper down, I hated what I made? Or it was “bad?” To keep that criticism at the edge of my mind, I chose to just play with what I was making. I treated myself with love just as I would treat a student. “Craft” could come later.

When has pointing out every shortcoming or lost opportunity in a student’s art or music making ever made them better? If anyone reading this knows of an instance, please tell me. From my experience on both sides of the student/teacher relationship, it only frightens a student and can only hinder their pursuit of art. 

Now, I play both student and teacher, tempering mild criticism with unconditional love and play. I think it’s been the right approach. I keep trying new things: sculpting with wax, producing music, DJing, and now… I feel like I’m pulled back to singing, with a new perspective. Do I know if I’m any “good” at any of it? Not really, but would you ask a student that? Talking to friends for criticism, or even just for insight on what I made, feels so free.

My music teacher education was centered around critical pedagogy. The last bit of my philosophy as a music teacher: Teach children how to understand the way the world is set up and how they can change the world, through music. Corny, but true! That ‘critical’ piece is critical too: how could your students change the world if you don’t change the system that taught you how to teach? 

That constant critique carried over to my art, whatever that is: what standards am I holding myself to? Are they worthwhile, or are they constraints, part of an old world that needs to be wiped away? What can art do to change the world, even if the impact is like a pie falling off a ladder or whatever Vonnegut said? I don’t know, or I wouldn’t keep asking.