I started teaching in 1973. For my birthday in 1974 a friend of mine gave me a guitar. I knew some basic chords that I had learned when I was a teenager and this new guitar inspired me to sing folksongs and incorporate them into my teaching. Granted the students (6th graders) that I was teaching were not going to be impressed with the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley”, but they did get into songs like “This Land is Your Land”, “The Titanic”, “Ballad of Jesse James”, and “Battle of New Orleans”. The summer of my third year of teaching a fellow teacher, Jerry Silverstein, took me to the Philadelphia Folk Festival for the first time, and I was introduced to a whole new set of tunes to use in class. Singing with kids became an important part of my teaching. I continued singing throughout my career.
July 2010
I’m sorry, what did you say?
As I get older, it seems that my hearing has become more sensitive and less accurate at the same time. The same thing goes for my family. Obviously aging has something to do with this. Heredity plays a part also (my mother became hard of hearing when she was older). Part of my hearing sensitivity has to do with the environment I married into.
I married a woman from Iowa. She was very sensitive to things that were loud. She enjoyed quiet evenings in quiet places, which might have had some influence why she doesn’t like to go to movies. I grew up in New York right next to a subway train yard, loud radiators, in an apartment that had street sounds and light flashes all the time. My wife and I settled in a suburb in Long Island. The longer that we lived together the more used to quiet I became. Then we had my son. He grew up with a sensory integration issues. Too much stimulation, especially noise, made it difficult for him to do things. Hence there was even more quiet. The more used to quieter things I became, the more sensitive I was to louder sounds.