Shared Experiences That Are No Longer Shared

I was scrolling on my Instagram feed, the way that I do, and saw a post from a teacher speaking about using a kite flying analogy to teach a math concept to her high school students. They did not understand, and the teacher finally realized that it was because her students had never flown kites. She bought a bunch of kites and had the students fly them outside to get that experience.

This post made me think a bit about experiences.

One of the things that all humans do is assume that their lived experiences are similar to the lived experiences of all humans. In fact, there is a developmental process where children start to be aware of similarities and differences between them, their families, and the families of others. It is easy to assume that every person has flown a kite at least once in their lives, and this assumption also applies to us in the music therapy world.

As a vintage music therapist, I have been involved in the music therapy world as both a student and professional for 38 years. I started my music therapy journey in a world where there were no laptops or tablets, where the library was a good friend, and where I typed all of my assignments several times due to mistakes. I have had to expand my concept of what being a college student is often because the world where I was an undergraduate does not exist anymore.

Undergraduates today do not know the stress of needing a specific book just to find that a classmate got there first. They do not need to sign up for one of the few computers on campus so editing projects are easier. These differences do not negate the challenges that they experience, but it makes it a bit more difficult for me to understand completely. Their challenges were not my challenges, but that does not mean that the experiences of today's music therapy students are not just as important than my own.

The problem comes in assuming.

Do you know the saying, "Never assume. It makes an ass out of you and me"? I can't assume that you do, but it is a good thing to keep in mind when you work with human beings.

One of the things that we are taught (and that I have to be reminded of constantly) is that all people have biases. A bias is simply a thought that an individual has about others - we often use this in a negative context, but we have biases that are not based on negative judgements. When I see a group of loud people coming towards me, I automatically move to the side or turn the other way until they move past. Why? That much energy makes me nervous. It doesn't matter who the group of people are - I move aside. My biases take over my emotional mind and insist that interacting with this group of people will just end up in the same bad situation that I have been in before with other large groups of people.

So, knowing that I am an amalgam of my experiences, biases, and physiological responses, I move into the world trying my best to understand the lived experiences of others.

I was kinda sad when I read about the group of high school students who had never flown kites. I have made my own kites out of paper and fabric before. It is always interesting to see how long my homemade kites survive. A plastic kite from the dollar store lasts much longer in the winds that whip around my home. It breaks my heart a bit to realize that most people today have not spent weeks outside playing in the dirt or roaming around their local library, sneaking books that their family members would NOT have approved of. (Fortunately, my mom was not that family member - I could ask her anything and check out any book without criticism - others in my family, though...) Some people have never had the freedom of a bicycle to use to roam around the town.

I have always found that it is best to ask than to assume.

I want to keep this in mind as I move into the world as a music therapist in a changing situation. Ask, don't assume. Time to get going. See you soon.