Dr Seuss and Bernstein

 A candidate we were interviewing, when I asked her about how she would teach rhyme and other technical issues about poetry, said she would leave that until a graduate course.  I was thinking, well, that is Dr. Seuss level information. Let's not leave the C major scale for advanced music theory.  Sure, things can get complicated, but how much is lost just from not knowing the basics? Rhyme comes before literacy and helps it along, since the child can use the phonetic recurrence to learn how to sound out words. The parent would have already taught them "one, two, buckle my shoe, three four, open the door, five six, pick up sticks, seven, eight, lay them straight, nine ten, begin again" and things like that.   

Then, before I got up this morning, I was thinking about Leonard Bernstein's educational concerts for young people.  He is aiming his pedagogy at little kids (apparently) but actually everything you really need to know about music as an adult is also there. I mean an adult who listens with some understanding, not a professional composer or musicologist, etc...  Someone like me. The kids in the audience, you can see, are responding to Bernstein's charisma and might retain something of this, but it is the parents who dragged them there who are getting what they need to know. I recommend these concerts, which you can stream on your favorite video streaming platform.