Credentials are important, and while I've enjoyed my formal studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels, I think that degrees oftentimes fail to show a teacher's effectiveness in the classroom. My desire for this site is that it will give potential employers further insight into my unique strengths and passions which can't be communicated on a college diploma or listed on an academic transcript.

One of my college choir directors recently underwent quadruple bypass heart surgery, and after the operation, he joked with the doctor about how insignificant music teaching seemed in comparison to medical work.  But the doctor quickly responded that while medical professionals patch skin and put casts on bones, music teachers deal with the human spirit!  Robert Shaw, considered by many to be the most influential choral conductor in American history, wrote that “music is great… because it calls out to something deep and persistent in the human thing… It carries something so native and true to the human spirit that not even sophisticated intellectuality can deny or destroy its miracle.” Music reaches parts of the human being which math, science and reading can never access, and this is precisely why it belongs in schools - because there's nothing else like it. Of what value is an education that merely fills our minds with information while failing to ignite our spirits? Albert Einstein, one of history’s most intellectually accomplished individuals, argued that “imagination is more important than knowledge."  I would add that music is a fertile flowerbed out of which imagination can blossom.  Plato said, “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."  Music stands alone as a body of knowledge, and therefore, it should be treated as such.

read my music education philosophy...