Chillax

Fun anecdote, quotes, and more...

Good morning,

Each week at my teaching job, I lead a couple of music classes for different groups of students. The kids range from 3 to 6 years old, and since I’m the ESL teacher, the groups usually include at least one of my ESL students along with their classmates.

I jokingly call them “mini concerts” because there’s a performative element to them, but they’re educational in nature. People have compared what I do to giving kids cookies with vegetables baked into them. They don’t necessarily realize they’re learning, but through the songs they absorb lessons about opposites, synonyms, tattling versus reporting, ways to be kind, colors, emotions, and more.

As the year winds down, students and teachers alike are becoming a little more restless, especially as the weather gets nicer. I’ve noticed that one of my groups has become a little more unruly over the past few weeks. Not bad, just young kids being kids. They’re still learning the basic fundamentals of how to be in school. But their behavior during our music time has become more erratic. They wander around the room when they’re not supposed to or get into small scuffles with one another.

Last week, though, something remarkable happened. First, kids were requesting their favorites in between every song. The setlist usually includes a few staples, but some of the songs they were asking for were ones we hadn’t done in quite a while. I was surprised they even remembered them.

In that spirit, I said, “We’re going to do a song we haven’t done in a very, very long time.” Before I could even introduce the title, one little girl, without raising her hand, suddenly blurted out the name of the song. The song was called “Chillax.” (It’ll be on the new Future Hits record whenever that comes out.) I was gobsmacked. I said, “Yes! That’s the song I was thinking of. We are on the same wavelength.”

It had been many months since we’d done that song, and I was shocked that she remembered it at all. She’s probably five years old. But even more than that, I couldn’t believe she somehow knew exactly which song I was thinking about before I gave any indication of what it might be. I was beaming. I looked at their teacher and said, “This is unbelievable.”

Then I looked at the girl and said, “You’re amazing. I can’t believe you guessed the song we’re going to do. I feel so happy that you remembered that song.” The whole thing happened on the same day I released last week’s newsletter, the one about how people sometimes notice our work even if we are unaware of it. It felt like a meaningful little synchronous moment, so I thought I’d continue the theme this week.

This theme reminds me of two quotes I come back to often. One is from John Cage: “We do our work and then we step back. The only path to serenity.” The other comes from the Bhagavad Gita: “You have the right to your labor, but not to the fruits of your labor.”

I was also thinking this week about something I heard on a podcast with professor and life coach Brad Stulberg. He talked about how, after either success or failure, he gives himself a certain amount of time to celebrate or ruminate, and then returns to the work. Whether it’s two minutes, two weeks, or two months. He encourages giving yourself time to process what happened, to enjoy the success or mourn the failure, and then get back to work.

Part of me considered skipping this week’s newsletter altogether. Partly because I wanted to enjoy the small personal victory of realizing the songs had resonated more deeply than I knew. Especially because, just the week before, the same group had been crawling all over the furniture, running around the room, and generally seeming unable to focus at all.

This shift completely caught me off guard, and I was genuinely moved by it.

Not just because the kids remembered the songs, but because it reminded me that impact and influence are often invisible while it’s happening. Even being up close, I rarely feel like I get to watch learning take root in real time. Most days, I just keep showing up and trust that something is landing, even when it doesn’t seem like it yet.

Until next time,
Matt

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Listening: Andy Kershaw at the BBC playlist
Reading: All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
Watching: Jagged (the Alanis Morissette documentary)

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matthewleebaron.com