At a CART site visit last night, Jonett led a great closing activity. She read this text that compares blue whales (like big institutions) to sardines (groups that can change direction quickly. This text is really worth reading.
http://web.mac.com/iajukes/thecommittedsardine/Sardines.html

At the close, she passed out cans of sardines to remind the group members to swim against the group, and eventually the group will change.

This essay was reprinted in the program of Amanda’s flutophone concert. This especially struck a chord with my thinking since I've been reading Eisner lately. I agree wholeheartedly and wanted to share it with the two people who still read my blog.

Why Teach Music?
. . . from the Southwestern Musician/Texas Music Educator, March 1990

Music is mathematical.
It is rhythmically based on subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.

Music is a foreign language.
Most of the terms are in Italian, German or French; and the notation is certainly not English—but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete universal language.

Music is physical education.
It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, cheek and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control to the diaphragmatic, back, stomach and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.

Music is science.
It is exact, specific and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor’s full score is chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.

Music is all these things, but most of all Music is art.
It allows a human being to take all these dry, technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing that science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.

THAT IS WHY WE TEACH MIUSIC!
Not because we expect you to major in music.
Not because we expect you to play or sing all your life.
Not just so you can relax.
Not just so you can have fun.

BUT—
so you will be human
so you will be sensitive
so you will have something to cling to
so you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good—in short, more life.

Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live?
THAT IS WHY WE TEACH MUSIC!