music, therapy, and me

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 3...

Over the past two weeks, I have been pretty sick which always leads me into strange thinking based on what I am consuming via television and all that. I have been watching true crime shows lots lately, but I have also consumed American Born Chinese  and Ms. Marvel  over and over again because I know the stories. I don't need any sort of thought process to watch these shows, but they also led me into thinking about bias. Stick with me here. Bias is something that pervades all situations. We all use our biases to structure our living and experiences. Every learning situation I have ever been in has had bias as part of the structure. Also, every work situation, every leisure opportunity, every single thing. While I was watching Ms. Marvel , I was exposed to the partition of India into India and Pakistan. I am sure that we spent about a class period on this time during World History, but the television show really shows the devastation that people felt in that era and illustrates ...