The New School - Continuing Education

Mannes faculty member Wendy Griffiths discusses how she inspires students to find their voice. 

1. What classes do you teach and why do you like to teach them?

Music Theory, Ear Training, Piano Classes, Keyboard Harmony and Songwriting.

I like to help students expand their musical skill sets, enabling them to become the best musician they can be.

2. What do you hope to inspire and/or instill in your students with this class?

In the piano classes, I hope to reawaken their love of piano and discover some of its rich and varied repertoire.  In the songwriting class, I hope students will see the limitless possibilities of the genre.

3. Did a student ever say something in class that surprised you?

In the songwriting class I am often surprised that students have a favorite song or artist from the 20th (not 21st!) Century.

4. What piece of art (writing, visual, art, music, etc.) inspires your work?

Mathis der Mahler by Paul Hindemith is a favorite.

5. How does the environment of the city inspire/shape your approach to this class?

At the beginning of a class, sometimes I ask students if they went to any good concerts that week.

6. What turns you on, creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?

I love to dance, it frees up my mind.  I also enjoy playing for dancers classes, I love having to find music that makes them want to move in certain ways.

7. What is the last thing you learned (that you can’t stop thinking about)?

That Buddhists believe that your hearing is the last sense to go after you die.

8. What are your colleagues at The New School doing that you admire?

Composing great music! Playing great concerts!

9. What continuing education class at The New School, other than your own, would you like to take?

Composing for Percussion looks really interesting.

10. What’s your next big project?

A piano piece for a memorial concert for Zenon Fishbein late this summer.

11. One of Continuing Education's motto's is 'Learn Grow Repeat' because we feel that learning new skills and exploring different ideas is a lifelong journey. So, how do you #LearnGrowRepeat?

One of the areas I am always exploring is arranging or creating music for dancers.  Matching up music to dance movement is a complex interplay of many factors.  When I take class myself, I pay close attention to what pieces work for me so and use that information when selecting what to include in my own repertoire.  

An interview with Nathan Kochi on why he loves folk music, Mannes, and how to #learngrowrepeat with music. 

1. What classes do you teach and why do you like to teach them?

XMHS 1250 The Folk Process: American Folk Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries

XTOM 0002 Untangling the Dots: An Introduction to Music Reading and Listening

(I have also taught classes on 21st Century Notation and Post-Genre Music)

My current class load is quite different, but I really enjoy both classes. The Folk Process allows me to explore the notion of folk music from so many different perspectives. We do a survey of sorts of American folk music and talk about how music came to exist in this country, but my goal is for all of it to culminate in the present day. It's not so much about singing "old" music as it is examining how music exists in our lives as humans and as Americans. That all points to today and we still, thank goodness, make music together in a ton of different ways. Sometimes they look different than they did in 1908, but I would like to think that we still do it for many of the same reasons: celebration, mourning, storytelling, and community-building.

Untangling the Dots has been a really fun class as well, as it has really allowed me to remember how to get people in touch with the ground floor of musical language. Seeing lightbulbs go off in students eyes when you explain why a certain song looks a certain way on paper is pretty gratifying. It can be a bit of an uphill climb, because I have many students who are incredibly musical, but have always learned through aural methods, but it's important to realize the value of every method of musical communication. Getting some basic music theory, rhythm, and harmony going in students' brains is wonderful.

2. What do you hope to inspire and/or instill in your students with this class?

In both classes, I hope to inspire students to continue making music - to feel empowered to continue making music. The Folk Process allows us to think and discuss critically why we make certain kinds of music and see what precedents there are in our past, but it's all about empowering anyone with a voice to be a composer and a songwriter and a sound-maker. I'd like to think that the way I teach "Untangling the Dots" does some of the same thing. It's all about harnessing tools to make your own personal music.  

3. Did a student ever say something in class that surprised you?

I had an amazing student Dan Bi Ling in my Folk Music class in Spring 2015 (not sure if you want to use names or not). The assignment I had given the class was to take a pre-existing melody, and write a new ballad to sing to the old melody. Ballads in the folk music tradition are often very impersonal 3rd party stories, often with a gazillion verses, that spin these incredible yarns and describe amazing places. Dan Bi was really shy about her song and claimed to not understand the assignment, but then she sang the most  beautiful words just describing a place in Korea, her home country. I was completely blown away by the mood it evoked and the tribute it became for the place that was so vivid in her lyrics.

4. What piece of art (writing, visual, art, music, etc.) inspires your work?

Plenty of contemporary folk musicians keep me smiling and singing along - just to name a few: Jean Rohe (NYC, New School Alumnus by the way), Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle (Virginia folk duo), Shovels and Rope (Charleston, SC), Bill Carson (Charleston, SC), Joan Shelley (Kentucky), Olivia Chaney (UK). They write new songs in old forms, and sing old songs in new forms, and it's all such a living breathing practice with all of them.

5. How does the environment of the city inspire/shape your approach to this class?

It's great and always overwhelming that NYC offers the amount of art and music and performance that it does. Being able to be surrounded by wonderful and creative people was really the impetus for the Folk Music class in the first place. There are so many folks here that make music that is informed by everything they see, so it immediately takes the concept of "folk music" out of the past and makes it present, makes it relevant, makes it reflect in its content what is happening around us all the time.  

6. What turns you on, creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?

Making music with other people. In a variety of settings, but really it's the only reason I do it, is to connect to other humans. To share time together and share stories and share experiences with each other.  

7. What is the last thing you learned (that you can’t stop thinking about)?

I've been reading a lot about the American Revolution. The extent to which nearly everyone avoided the topic of slavery in the founding of our country is astounding. In general, it's clear that pretty much no one has ever agreed on anything in America, from the very beginning. Except maybe for agreeing to not talk about slavery, which is Awful.

8. What are your colleagues at The New School doing that you admire?

Eric Dudley runs a mean New School Chorus!  What a wonderful group of singers. Matt Marks teaches some really interesting classes on the Beatles and Rock Opera and Sampling. Elliot Cole gets down and dirty with his Super Collider class. There are so many interesting people on faculty and they all are offering some truly unique courses. I wish I could take em!  

9. What continuing education class at The New School, other than your own, would you like to take?

Whoops - guess I just answered this. I want to take all of Matt Marks' classes. I sat in on his Rock Opera class last year and learned so much about a really astonishing art form.  

10. What’s your next big project?

I get to play accordion for Donnacha Dennehy's gorgeous opera "The Last Hotel" in January 2016 at St. Anne's Warehouse. Then I help plan and perform the 4th Annual Groundhog Day Concert in Charleston, SC with an all-star cast of Charleston-based folk, rock, and jazz musicians. Then I get to tour Southeast Asia with the unbelievably stunning company Dance Heginbotham in March 2016, playing piano, accordion, and more.

11. One of Continuing Education's motto's is 'Learn Grow Repeat' because we feel that learning new skills and exploring different ideas is a lifelong journey. So, how do you #LearnGrowRepeat?

Diane Nottle entered the TESOL Certificate program before leaving The New York Times and launched a whole new chapter in her life. Read on to find out how Diane has embraced learning as a lifestyle that continues to enrich her life.

1. When The New School was established in 1919, it was so with the passion and conviction to advance adult education through global citizenship and social justice. Continuing Education today is still dedicated to learning as a lifestyle. Can you tell me a bit about your background and your decision to transition professionally from journalism into teaching and languages?

Entirely selfish, I’m afraid. I’ve been studying languages all my life – Latin, French, Japanese, a little Mandarin, and whatever Polish and bits of other languages I could pick up from traveling. I was a newspaper editor for 35 years, from the age of 18, but by my early 50s I could see that would someday end. I thought about what I might do after, and one of the things that came to mind (along with freelancing, being a tour guide, working in a bookstore and ushering – which I now do, on Broadway!) was teaching English to speakers of other languages. My goal was to teach abroad as a way of financing my retirement travels. Well, “retirement” came about 12 years earlier than expected, in 2008, with seven years to go before pension age.  Luckily, I had finished my certificate the previous December, so I was ready with something I could do. Was it a fully formed new career? No. But within a few days of my putting in my buyout papers at The New York Times, I received invitations to teach that summer in Columbia University’s American Language Program and to return to the University of Lower Silesia, in Wroclaw, Poland, where I had done the New School practicum the summer before. So I knew I was onto something.

2. In your research, why did you choose The New School’s Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages certificate?

I think I had seen an ad for it and thought, “This looks like something I’d be interested in.” I went to an open house and came away thinking, “This definitely looks like something I should try.” About a year passed before I actually started, but when I took my first course, Polly Merdinger’s “Sound Systems of English,” I realized it brought together everything I had ever done in languages, and I knew it was the right program for me.

3. Can you tell me about your experience in the Poland Practicum?

It’s an incomparable experience, especially for anyone thinking about teaching abroad like me. I chose it for two reasons: I was still working more than full time and knew I could never manage the practicum in New York over the course of a semester; and I’ll do anything for a trip!

It’s a very intense experience; you teach three hours a day, five days a week, for three weeks. It’s an amazing amount of work, plus the fact that you’re still finding your feet as a teacher, and living in a foreign city and culture. But it’s finite, and at the end, you feel you’ve really accomplished something. Irena Shanahan, the master teacher, really is a master; her insights and observations are invaluable. And Ula Klobuszewska makes it all run smoothly, minimizing the culture shock.

When I did the practicum in 2007, it had always been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But that changed the next year, when there weren’t enough practicum teachers and some graduates were invited back to keep the program going. Now I’m on my way back for the seventh time. I do think seriously of actually retiring there – well, retiring and teaching.

The practicum program is incredibly important to ULS and its students. Wroclaw is in a corner of Poland that’s not on the tourist trail (yet – they’re trying, especially in 2016), so we may well be the only native speakers our students meet from one year to the next. That said, Wroclaw is fast becoming an IT hub; three of my four Skype students there are in IT and regularly do business with English-speaking countries. So the need is becoming even more urgent.

4. What advice would you give to those considering a similar transition?

It’s different for every person, I think. We all come to the field for different reasons: me because I wanted to travel with a purpose; recovering attorneys whose jobs were eating away their stomachs; an actress who wanted a source of steady income.  I’d say start slowly, maybe with one course, to see if it’s for you before you commit to the whole program.  Seriously evaluate your own English language skills. Take the training seriously; a lot of people think, “Well, anyone can teach his own language,” but as we know, that’s not true. Especially if you’re older, think about what form of teaching will be the best option for you; think beyond full-time, school-based jobs to things like private students and online teaching. And of course come join us in Wroclaw!

5. What do you think people would find most surprising about the certificate?

How readily you can put it to work. Again, you may not get a full-time school job, or not for some time, but if you think creatively, you can invent your own. Also remember that the teaching skills you learn in the certificate program equip you to teach anything, not just ESOL. That’s really useful for those of us who are now doing English for special purposes, drawing on our own professional fields and personal interests. I’m here in Guangzhou to teach journalism in English, not (mostly) ESOL. (I have one class a week of Oral English for freshmen, which makes a nice change.) You don’t have to teach straight English.

6. Did you have a favorite or notable experience with a professor that has stuck with you?

There’s were many, but the one that sticks out is the one I quote frequently to students (and in my book): again Polly Merdinger, on the first day of “Sound Systems,” when she said: “It’s OK to make funny noises in this class.” A lot of learning any language consists of making funny noises, testing out the sounds until you can hear what’s right and what’s wrong, and then making the right sound.

Also, I would never have had the Columbia experience without my Methods teacher, Babi Kruchin, who teaches in the American Language Program and arranged for me to do a writing workshop there as part of my Methods requirement. That led to several guest-speaker gigs and my three summers at ALP.

7. Tell me a bit about your time since receiving the TESOL certificate and how you feel it’s contributed towards your career change goals?

Well, let’s see what I’ve done with it in the not quite eight years since I finished: returned to Wroclaw to teach five times, going on six; taught two semesters in China; coached international students at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism for three years and counting; been commissioned to write a book on English for the media; taught three summers at Columbia; juggled as many as 10 private students at a time, in New York and on Skype; took preliminary steps toward creating an online course; and been awarded Fulbright Senior Specialist status and a grant. Oh, and twice I’ve been asked to give the Wroclaw practicum students an introductory class on Polish and Polish students! Any more questions?

When I took my first certificate course 10 years ago this fall, I could never have imagined the work I’m doing now. As Dr. Seuss said: “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”

8. How do you #learngrowrepeat? 

I’ve always been better at going to school than anything else I’ve done, and I’ve always been a voracious reader as well.  That’s just my personality. I remember a friend saying long ago, “Life is loss.” To me, life is learning.

Not that it’s always easy. Every day living in China is a learning experience, and a challenging one. When I need to, I pull back to regroup and absorb. And then, the next day, I can face the world again.

9. Is there anything else that you feel is important to say that I have not asked you?