Season Three
Episode 88
Play Parties and Folk Songs with Kathy Kuddes
Kathy Kuddes holds Bachelor and Master degrees in Music Education from Millikin University and the University of North Texas respectively, a Kodály training certificate from the FAME/University of Texas program at Festival Hill in Round Top, Texas Supervisors Certification and ESL Supplemental Certification. She is currently the Director of Fine Arts for the Plano Independent School District, a school system of approximately 53,000 students with Kodály specialists in all 44 elementary schools and award winning band, choir, orchestra and music theory programs. She is the Founder and Coordinator of the Plano Kodály Teacher Training Program, and Folk Music Materials Instructor for the companion training program at Southern Methodist University. Kathy has fourteen years of classroom experience and more than twenty years in fine arts administration. She is an active presenter including presentations for the International Kodály Society Symposia in Australia, Hungary, and Scotland, former member of the board of the Kodály Educators of Texas and the Organization of American Kodály Educators. She was the recipient of the 2010 OAKE Outstanding Administrator Award and was named the 2016 Outstanding Administrator by the Texas Music Administrators Conference.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Okay so within folk song collection I love play parties. I love anything that adds movement and singing and that element of fun and games. Can you share a little bit about play parties and the history behind them and the purpose behind them?
Kathy: Sure! Play parties are really fascinating. Fairly unique to America. One of the few genres that I'm aware of that are really uniquely American. And they really came out of our fairly strict religious background in the United States. You know lots of the early settlers on the east coast came from very conservative religious sects who weren't being treated well in Europe and were looking for a place to come and practice their brand of Christianity here and so a lot of ... one of the things that connected some of those groups together were the idea of singing without instruments like the Church of Christ for example. And the use of instruments in worship was frowned upon and then they extended that into kind of real life and so dancing with instruments was also forbidden and that there was a lot of mythology around the fiddle as the devil's instrument and all of those sorts of things and so the idea of play parties is really - I like to think of it as what teenagers do always with the previous generation, you know. They find a way to skirt the limitations - the social limitations - of previous generations in such a way that they think the older generation doesn't know they're getting away with, right?
So play parties really came sort of grew out of the childhood practice of singing games where children would sing and play and pass things and clapping games and that sort of thing. So play parties were really intended for the young adult, in the early periods, 14-20 or something, you know. The young adults to older teenage group who were very much interested in socializing with the opposite gender, but weren't allowed to do so without supervision. And they couldn't go to the dances because there were instruments there and that was forbidden so they started taking those tunes and putting words to them and bringing over the dance moves and just calling them games. Out of that sort of singing game tradition. So then the singers and the musicians became the singers who were also the dancers and that's kind of how they got away with it. And usually a play party was sometimes went on for hours, but typically happened on the weekend where you sent out through word of mouth - through the proper channels in the community - and a lot of times people would literally clear the front room of their house, put all the furniture on the front lawn so they could dance in the living room and the older married generation would sit around with them and supervise while the young people sang and danced and the little ones would sit around and watch and learn all the tunes just by being in their presence and figure out most of the dance moves just by watching and by the time they were old enough to be include in the games they didn't really have to be taught them. They just sort of absorbed them through the skin. And so one of the things I always tell teachers about play parties is first of all they were intended for teenagers so they tend to be a little more intricate in terms of their structure... A little bit of dance vocabulary is helpful: sashays and promenades and those kinds of things tend to come in...But also the intent was that it was this social activity and you didn't - it wasn't a dance in the sense that you came with an escort and you were expected to dance with the escort. You came by yourself to mingle so most play parties involved switching partners so every verse you end up with a different partner which was most of the point. So in going to the play party gives you a chance to engage with all of the eligible friends in the room.
Jessica: I think that's part of the reason that it works well with older students because they're not with the same partner the whole time. When I do them with my middle schoolers I like it because it does make them mingle and it does build that community too because they're with, you know, at least half the class most of the time if you're only switching on the outside or the inside. You're not with every single student, but you get to mix and it works really well.
Kathy: Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. Do you have one that you could share?
Kathy: Yes. I had one, but I'm changing my mind midstream. So this is a fairly - in terms of being a ... in terms of the movement itself it's pretty simple. But it's a really fun tune. So it's called Going to Boston. (singing) It's a longways set where's there's a first time around it's just a castoff and then it's a reel down the set, which takes a little practice so when dancers reel down the set they mean that the head couple is going to spin themselves and then take a partner from the outside - from the lines - turn them one time around, meet their partner in the center, go back out to the line so they work their way down to the end of the set. Reeling or reeling with a left arm swing all of the players in the set so not only do you get to dance with your partner a whole bunch of times, but you also get to turn all of the other partners.
Jessica: It's a fun one.
Kathy: It really is.
Jessica: I like that one. The other one that came to mind when I was thinking about these is Push the Business On. I think that one is fun too because you've got the side partners and you're switching within the circle. That's another one of my favorites.
Kathy: That's another really great one.
Jessica: Yeah. We talked in the last episode about folk music and I wondered if you could share a song or tell a story behind one of the folk songs and how you've used it with students.
Kathy: Sure. Well as we were getting ready for this you mentioned The Whistling Gypsy.
Jessica: I love that one.
Kathy: It's one of my favorites so Whistling Gypsy is an Irish love ballad. It is in the States it's a part of a collection called the Child's Ballads which is always very confusing to students in my summer course because we tend to think that's a descriptor and really what that means is that it was one of the texts that was collected by Francis Jameschild who was an English professor in Boston interested in the poetry of these extended English language ballads and collected a whole bunch of them in the Appalachians and when he published them he gave them numbers. So there's nearly always a reference to a child ballad with a number connected, but ballads especially in the English world from Ireland and Scotland and England are really the tellanovellas of the 16th century so they're really most of them are not really classroom appropriate. You have to really work to find 'cause there's a whole genre called murder ballads and yes, they're called that for a reason. And they were all really cautionary tales. Important lessons for young girls to know about walking along riverbanks with men ...
Jessica: Hard to explain to parents if you've taught them, right?
Kathy: So this is a love story and it has kind of a nonsense. One of the things I like about it is that it has this nonsense chorus that kids will pick up really quickly. And usually I'd play my dulcimer but I wasn't sure that it would pick up well. So I'm just gonna... and instruments are not super typical with traditional ballad singers. They tend to sing pretty straight ahead unaccompanied. And as you'll see it's sort of a narrator telling the story. And not getting too caught up in the emotion of the story so... here's the Whistling Gypsy.
(singing the Whistling Gypsy)
Jessica: Thank you. I love that piece. When you sang that with your dulcimer in our Level III course, that - I don't know if it was that night or a few nights later - Jeremy and I take turns putting each girl to bed so we take one girl one night and switch off. Julia was just struggling to get to sleep. She was really upset so I pulled out my iPad and searched through your collection and found that song and started singing it to her holding her hand and she fell right to sleep so it now has a special, you know, it's just ...
Kathy: That's great.
Jessica: It's just a special song. I just love it. It's beautifully done. Not just acapella, but with the dulcimer. Even though those songs might now have been done with instrumental accompaniment I think sometimes simple - it really adds so much.
Kathy: You don't want to get too busy with them because they're really beautiful gems all their own.
Jessica: So how did you - with the folk songs and the play parties - how do you search out the meaning of the texts and the stories behind the songs.
Kathy: Well, it's a little bit of hunt and peck to be perfectly honest. I've tried it, again if I'm searching in a quality resource with some of the recordings that I mentioned in the last session - at Smithsonian Folkways - all of their recordings are online, but also all of the original liner notes have been digitized to pdf and they are free download from their website so that's a great place to start 'cause there's... especially with the older the 1940's, 50's, 60's recordings there's a lot of important information from the field collectors in those notes. Sometimes it's sort of the first thing I do is just start looking at all the different variants of a song that I might have in my various resources. Variant is one of the big indicators that a song is authentically a folk song. That it's been passed around amongst enough people through enough situations and communities that find versions that all have some similarity and sometimes it's only the tune or a brand new text. Sometimes it's pieces of the text have survived and been mashed up with some other piece with some other song. Sometimes the text is exactly the same, but it's a completely different tune so trying to find all the different variations and where did all of those come from and sometimes you can see sort of a pathway of migration. A lot of the traditional cowboy songs are actually sea shanties, sailor songs, so they came across the ocean from Europe on the ship, got land locked, moved west, and became cowboy songs so sometimes it's that you can sort of see that historical migration. Sometimes not. You know, it's not always that clear cut. And then you know I start looking... I do do a lot of online research with songs that are from the English speaking world.
The Vaughn Williams Collection in the UK is another great place to go digging for variants and history because they've collected tons and tons of those and lots of nursery rhyme texts and all that kind of stuff with those collections. And there are more and more in this day and age really important collections of both print and recorded songs are starting to make their way to digitized online format and you know, you just have to keep digging. You have to keep... once you've been through the first 100 hits with the title of the song then you start digging into are there specific people or terms or little text cues that you can start using as your search perimeters. And you can go down a thousand rabbit holes and not find the answer to the question you're looking for with a particular song. With especially with teachers they only have so much time in their live. We didn't choose psychology for your field to study so you can't spend your whole life following the rabbit holes. You've just - we spend what time we have and you acquire the information you can and then you just keep your ears open for other things and you'll be surprised how you'll stumble across some connection that you need to know is there and you add it to your list of things you know.
Jessica: Yes! And can you access a lot of those online? Like the Smithsonian Folkways Collection? All of that.
Kathy: All of those things. The Cultural Equity Project is all of Alan Lomax's - sorry John - no Alan. Alan was the younger and spent his whole life really championing traditional music from all over the world and living on an absolute shoestring. I just finished listening to his biography recently. He never had $20 in his pocket his whole life because he was always trying to write another grant and go someplace else and record subculture of people that he felt like either needed to be heard and never had been and all of these things and all of his field notes. The photography. The video. Audio. All of it is now digitized and searchable on his cultural equity project website. So quick google search and you can find it.
Jessica: That's so nice 'cause you forget what it must have been like for them as they're preparing to create field notes and do everything without the technology, you know.
Kathy: Yeah absolutely.
Jessica: The work they poured into it and for him to take all of his resources to make that happen so we now have this amazing archive, you know. That's amazing. A little bit on organizing folk materials. Once we've, you know, have checked these online sources and put everything together, how do you catalogue it so you know where to find materials or so that you know what you have?
Kathy: This is important. This is so important. As we do in the training program, really I say step one is just to decide where you're going to put all the songs you really love and to just put them in alphabetical order because we tend to know the names of the songs that we love and so if I need Whistling Gypsy I know where to find that song in the W's. But after you've kind of got... so that's where the songs live when you need to reference them. But in terms of pedagogical organization I really think of my songs from a curricular perspective so I take my scope and sequence and I look at each of those new pieces of learning and go back through that song material and look at that analysis and say 'these are the best examples of that new rhythmic pattern/that new melodic feature' you know whatever that new piece of content learning is, then there's a group of songs that I've identified and labeled for that purpose. And I am not one of those people who says 'oh here is the one and only way to organize that' because I do think that part of what makes us unique as individuals is the way that we catalogue and quantify information and what makes sense to one doesn't always feel comfortable for the others so as you know, Jessica, we spent a lot of time in the summer wrestling with what is the right framework for that information and my own structure has involved several times over my teaching life as I grew smarter or just maybe more intuitive about what I wanted and what I needed from that information. It gets a little more detailed with each iteration of that, but if you just - I would say if you just starting out and particularly if you don't have a district curriculum that recommends song material for the purpose just start you a chart with the headings of those sequence of concepts and elements and just start a list of songs that you really love to sing for those things because again any structure/any organization really just has to push the business of lesson planning along. And if it doesn't do that it's a waste of time and effort because you need to be able to write great lesson plans as quickly as you can with as much efficiency as you can because you have a life outside of lesson planning. Or I hope you do.
Jessica: We hope we do. Right! Yeah. When you're talking about organizing it and everyone's being, you know, all of us being individual and how we do that, in class in the Level III I forget how many of us there were. I'll say there were 15, but I think there were a few more than that.
Kathy: There were seventeen.
Jessica: Seventeen? Okay. Yeah. So it was like all of us had similarities of course, but not a single one was the same. I mean you know so we still had what we individually needed so I think that's important - I agree - I think that's important that we still have that structure, but do it the way that would make sense to us. So it's valuable.
Kathy: Everybody is in a different place in their life journey, in their teaching responsibilities. I mean. In the course we had people who just taught pre-K and what they need out of a song collection and a retrieval is quite different from someone like yourself who teachers 5, 6, 7 or someone who's teaching K-6. I mean everybody... and someone who teaches largely in a Spanish bilingual school has very different needs from someone and might even have a slightly different sequence of concepts and elements because of the majority of needing more Spanish language song material and what the song material does is not exactly what English language song material does always so you might be at a slightly different sequence of elements in a situation like that so I try to be there to guide, but not get in the way of 'it has to look like that' because I don't know what it looks like everyday.
Jessica: Yeah I think that's really important. It's not stifling, you know. Well thank you for sharing all your wisdom - well, not all your wisdom there's still more wisdom, but thank you for sharing just your joy and love of folk song collecting and just all the valuable resources and how we can really make sure that we're bringing the best to our students.
Kathy: Well thanks so much for having me, Jessica. It was a pleasure always to visit with you and I'm happy to have follow-up conversations with any of your listeners. They can go to Kuddesmusic.com to connect with me and I'd be happy to send them in the right direction about song material or just talk for fun.
Jessica: That'd be perfect. Thank you!
Kathy: Thank you!
Episode 88
Play Parties and Folk Songs with Kathy Kuddes
Kathy Kuddes holds Bachelor and Master degrees in Music Education from Millikin University and the University of North Texas respectively, a Kodály training certificate from the FAME/University of Texas program at Festival Hill in Round Top, Texas Supervisors Certification and ESL Supplemental Certification. She is currently the Director of Fine Arts for the Plano Independent School District, a school system of approximately 53,000 students with Kodály specialists in all 44 elementary schools and award winning band, choir, orchestra and music theory programs. She is the Founder and Coordinator of the Plano Kodály Teacher Training Program, and Folk Music Materials Instructor for the companion training program at Southern Methodist University. Kathy has fourteen years of classroom experience and more than twenty years in fine arts administration. She is an active presenter including presentations for the International Kodály Society Symposia in Australia, Hungary, and Scotland, former member of the board of the Kodály Educators of Texas and the Organization of American Kodály Educators. She was the recipient of the 2010 OAKE Outstanding Administrator Award and was named the 2016 Outstanding Administrator by the Texas Music Administrators Conference.TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Okay so within folk song collection I love play parties. I love anything that adds movement and singing and that element of fun and games. Can you share a little bit about play parties and the history behind them and the purpose behind them?
Kathy: Sure! Play parties are really fascinating. Fairly unique to America. One of the few genres that I'm aware of that are really uniquely American. And they really came out of our fairly strict religious background in the United States. You know lots of the early settlers on the east coast came from very conservative religious sects who weren't being treated well in Europe and were looking for a place to come and practice their brand of Christianity here and so a lot of ... one of the things that connected some of those groups together were the idea of singing without instruments like the Church of Christ for example. And the use of instruments in worship was frowned upon and then they extended that into kind of real life and so dancing with instruments was also forbidden and that there was a lot of mythology around the fiddle as the devil's instrument and all of those sorts of things and so the idea of play parties is really - I like to think of it as what teenagers do always with the previous generation, you know. They find a way to skirt the limitations - the social limitations - of previous generations in such a way that they think the older generation doesn't know they're getting away with, right?
So play parties really came sort of grew out of the childhood practice of singing games where children would sing and play and pass things and clapping games and that sort of thing. So play parties were really intended for the young adult, in the early periods, 14-20 or something, you know. The young adults to older teenage group who were very much interested in socializing with the opposite gender, but weren't allowed to do so without supervision. And they couldn't go to the dances because there were instruments there and that was forbidden so they started taking those tunes and putting words to them and bringing over the dance moves and just calling them games. Out of that sort of singing game tradition. So then the singers and the musicians became the singers who were also the dancers and that's kind of how they got away with it. And usually a play party was sometimes went on for hours, but typically happened on the weekend where you sent out through word of mouth - through the proper channels in the community - and a lot of times people would literally clear the front room of their house, put all the furniture on the front lawn so they could dance in the living room and the older married generation would sit around with them and supervise while the young people sang and danced and the little ones would sit around and watch and learn all the tunes just by being in their presence and figure out most of the dance moves just by watching and by the time they were old enough to be include in the games they didn't really have to be taught them. They just sort of absorbed them through the skin. And so one of the things I always tell teachers about play parties is first of all they were intended for teenagers so they tend to be a little more intricate in terms of their structure... A little bit of dance vocabulary is helpful: sashays and promenades and those kinds of things tend to come in...But also the intent was that it was this social activity and you didn't - it wasn't a dance in the sense that you came with an escort and you were expected to dance with the escort. You came by yourself to mingle so most play parties involved switching partners so every verse you end up with a different partner which was most of the point. So in going to the play party gives you a chance to engage with all of the eligible friends in the room.
Jessica: I think that's part of the reason that it works well with older students because they're not with the same partner the whole time. When I do them with my middle schoolers I like it because it does make them mingle and it does build that community too because they're with, you know, at least half the class most of the time if you're only switching on the outside or the inside. You're not with every single student, but you get to mix and it works really well.
Kathy: Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. Do you have one that you could share?
Kathy: Yes. I had one, but I'm changing my mind midstream. So this is a fairly - in terms of being a ... in terms of the movement itself it's pretty simple. But it's a really fun tune. So it's called Going to Boston. (singing) It's a longways set where's there's a first time around it's just a castoff and then it's a reel down the set, which takes a little practice so when dancers reel down the set they mean that the head couple is going to spin themselves and then take a partner from the outside - from the lines - turn them one time around, meet their partner in the center, go back out to the line so they work their way down to the end of the set. Reeling or reeling with a left arm swing all of the players in the set so not only do you get to dance with your partner a whole bunch of times, but you also get to turn all of the other partners.
Jessica: It's a fun one.
Kathy: It really is.
Jessica: I like that one. The other one that came to mind when I was thinking about these is Push the Business On. I think that one is fun too because you've got the side partners and you're switching within the circle. That's another one of my favorites.
Kathy: That's another really great one.
Jessica: Yeah. We talked in the last episode about folk music and I wondered if you could share a song or tell a story behind one of the folk songs and how you've used it with students.
Kathy: Sure. Well as we were getting ready for this you mentioned The Whistling Gypsy.
Jessica: I love that one.
Kathy: It's one of my favorites so Whistling Gypsy is an Irish love ballad. It is in the States it's a part of a collection called the Child's Ballads which is always very confusing to students in my summer course because we tend to think that's a descriptor and really what that means is that it was one of the texts that was collected by Francis Jameschild who was an English professor in Boston interested in the poetry of these extended English language ballads and collected a whole bunch of them in the Appalachians and when he published them he gave them numbers. So there's nearly always a reference to a child ballad with a number connected, but ballads especially in the English world from Ireland and Scotland and England are really the tellanovellas of the 16th century so they're really most of them are not really classroom appropriate. You have to really work to find 'cause there's a whole genre called murder ballads and yes, they're called that for a reason. And they were all really cautionary tales. Important lessons for young girls to know about walking along riverbanks with men ...
Jessica: Hard to explain to parents if you've taught them, right?
Kathy: So this is a love story and it has kind of a nonsense. One of the things I like about it is that it has this nonsense chorus that kids will pick up really quickly. And usually I'd play my dulcimer but I wasn't sure that it would pick up well. So I'm just gonna... and instruments are not super typical with traditional ballad singers. They tend to sing pretty straight ahead unaccompanied. And as you'll see it's sort of a narrator telling the story. And not getting too caught up in the emotion of the story so... here's the Whistling Gypsy.
(singing the Whistling Gypsy)
Jessica: Thank you. I love that piece. When you sang that with your dulcimer in our Level III course, that - I don't know if it was that night or a few nights later - Jeremy and I take turns putting each girl to bed so we take one girl one night and switch off. Julia was just struggling to get to sleep. She was really upset so I pulled out my iPad and searched through your collection and found that song and started singing it to her holding her hand and she fell right to sleep so it now has a special, you know, it's just ...
Kathy: That's great.
Jessica: It's just a special song. I just love it. It's beautifully done. Not just acapella, but with the dulcimer. Even though those songs might now have been done with instrumental accompaniment I think sometimes simple - it really adds so much.
Kathy: You don't want to get too busy with them because they're really beautiful gems all their own.
Jessica: So how did you - with the folk songs and the play parties - how do you search out the meaning of the texts and the stories behind the songs.
Kathy: Well, it's a little bit of hunt and peck to be perfectly honest. I've tried it, again if I'm searching in a quality resource with some of the recordings that I mentioned in the last session - at Smithsonian Folkways - all of their recordings are online, but also all of the original liner notes have been digitized to pdf and they are free download from their website so that's a great place to start 'cause there's... especially with the older the 1940's, 50's, 60's recordings there's a lot of important information from the field collectors in those notes. Sometimes it's sort of the first thing I do is just start looking at all the different variants of a song that I might have in my various resources. Variant is one of the big indicators that a song is authentically a folk song. That it's been passed around amongst enough people through enough situations and communities that find versions that all have some similarity and sometimes it's only the tune or a brand new text. Sometimes it's pieces of the text have survived and been mashed up with some other piece with some other song. Sometimes the text is exactly the same, but it's a completely different tune so trying to find all the different variations and where did all of those come from and sometimes you can see sort of a pathway of migration. A lot of the traditional cowboy songs are actually sea shanties, sailor songs, so they came across the ocean from Europe on the ship, got land locked, moved west, and became cowboy songs so sometimes it's that you can sort of see that historical migration. Sometimes not. You know, it's not always that clear cut. And then you know I start looking... I do do a lot of online research with songs that are from the English speaking world.
The Vaughn Williams Collection in the UK is another great place to go digging for variants and history because they've collected tons and tons of those and lots of nursery rhyme texts and all that kind of stuff with those collections. And there are more and more in this day and age really important collections of both print and recorded songs are starting to make their way to digitized online format and you know, you just have to keep digging. You have to keep... once you've been through the first 100 hits with the title of the song then you start digging into are there specific people or terms or little text cues that you can start using as your search perimeters. And you can go down a thousand rabbit holes and not find the answer to the question you're looking for with a particular song. With especially with teachers they only have so much time in their live. We didn't choose psychology for your field to study so you can't spend your whole life following the rabbit holes. You've just - we spend what time we have and you acquire the information you can and then you just keep your ears open for other things and you'll be surprised how you'll stumble across some connection that you need to know is there and you add it to your list of things you know.
Jessica: Yes! And can you access a lot of those online? Like the Smithsonian Folkways Collection? All of that.
Kathy: All of those things. The Cultural Equity Project is all of Alan Lomax's - sorry John - no Alan. Alan was the younger and spent his whole life really championing traditional music from all over the world and living on an absolute shoestring. I just finished listening to his biography recently. He never had $20 in his pocket his whole life because he was always trying to write another grant and go someplace else and record subculture of people that he felt like either needed to be heard and never had been and all of these things and all of his field notes. The photography. The video. Audio. All of it is now digitized and searchable on his cultural equity project website. So quick google search and you can find it.
Jessica: That's so nice 'cause you forget what it must have been like for them as they're preparing to create field notes and do everything without the technology, you know.
Kathy: Yeah absolutely.
Jessica: The work they poured into it and for him to take all of his resources to make that happen so we now have this amazing archive, you know. That's amazing. A little bit on organizing folk materials. Once we've, you know, have checked these online sources and put everything together, how do you catalogue it so you know where to find materials or so that you know what you have?
Kathy: This is important. This is so important. As we do in the training program, really I say step one is just to decide where you're going to put all the songs you really love and to just put them in alphabetical order because we tend to know the names of the songs that we love and so if I need Whistling Gypsy I know where to find that song in the W's. But after you've kind of got... so that's where the songs live when you need to reference them. But in terms of pedagogical organization I really think of my songs from a curricular perspective so I take my scope and sequence and I look at each of those new pieces of learning and go back through that song material and look at that analysis and say 'these are the best examples of that new rhythmic pattern/that new melodic feature' you know whatever that new piece of content learning is, then there's a group of songs that I've identified and labeled for that purpose. And I am not one of those people who says 'oh here is the one and only way to organize that' because I do think that part of what makes us unique as individuals is the way that we catalogue and quantify information and what makes sense to one doesn't always feel comfortable for the others so as you know, Jessica, we spent a lot of time in the summer wrestling with what is the right framework for that information and my own structure has involved several times over my teaching life as I grew smarter or just maybe more intuitive about what I wanted and what I needed from that information. It gets a little more detailed with each iteration of that, but if you just - I would say if you just starting out and particularly if you don't have a district curriculum that recommends song material for the purpose just start you a chart with the headings of those sequence of concepts and elements and just start a list of songs that you really love to sing for those things because again any structure/any organization really just has to push the business of lesson planning along. And if it doesn't do that it's a waste of time and effort because you need to be able to write great lesson plans as quickly as you can with as much efficiency as you can because you have a life outside of lesson planning. Or I hope you do.
Jessica: We hope we do. Right! Yeah. When you're talking about organizing it and everyone's being, you know, all of us being individual and how we do that, in class in the Level III I forget how many of us there were. I'll say there were 15, but I think there were a few more than that.
Kathy: There were seventeen.
Jessica: Seventeen? Okay. Yeah. So it was like all of us had similarities of course, but not a single one was the same. I mean you know so we still had what we individually needed so I think that's important - I agree - I think that's important that we still have that structure, but do it the way that would make sense to us. So it's valuable.
Kathy: Everybody is in a different place in their life journey, in their teaching responsibilities. I mean. In the course we had people who just taught pre-K and what they need out of a song collection and a retrieval is quite different from someone like yourself who teachers 5, 6, 7 or someone who's teaching K-6. I mean everybody... and someone who teaches largely in a Spanish bilingual school has very different needs from someone and might even have a slightly different sequence of concepts and elements because of the majority of needing more Spanish language song material and what the song material does is not exactly what English language song material does always so you might be at a slightly different sequence of elements in a situation like that so I try to be there to guide, but not get in the way of 'it has to look like that' because I don't know what it looks like everyday.
Jessica: Yeah I think that's really important. It's not stifling, you know. Well thank you for sharing all your wisdom - well, not all your wisdom there's still more wisdom, but thank you for sharing just your joy and love of folk song collecting and just all the valuable resources and how we can really make sure that we're bringing the best to our students.
Kathy: Well thanks so much for having me, Jessica. It was a pleasure always to visit with you and I'm happy to have follow-up conversations with any of your listeners. They can go to Kuddesmusic.com to connect with me and I'd be happy to send them in the right direction about song material or just talk for fun.
Jessica: That'd be perfect. Thank you!
Kathy: Thank you!
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