A Conversation with David Wish

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David Wish is the founder and executive director of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides music education for students in disadvantaged public schools. Since 2002, Little Kids Rock has provided meaningful music education to more than 200,000 students nationwide thanks to the support of teachers, volunteers, and music icons such as B.B. King and Paul Simon. David Wish is a 2012 Utne Visionary; below is our email interview with Wish from September 2012. 

Christian Williams: Where were you teaching when you decided to start the after-school lessons
and develop the program?


David Wish: I was a first-grade teacher in the San Francisco
Bay Area and was very upset that my students were not receiving music education.
So I took matters into my own hands and started giving free classes after school
for my class. More and more kids wanted to get in on the fun so I kept offering
more and more classes. It got to the point where I had to start turning kids
away which broke my heart. So that’s when I started reaching out to other
teachers I knew to enlist their help. Not only did I no longer need to turn kids
away, I found their were tons of teachers who wanted to help.

CW: Little
Kids Rock has been around for 10 years now. Did you expect this kind of
longevity and success when you started?


DW: Time flies when you are having
fun! I really can’t believe that ten years have passed. I have never pursued
success; I have pursued fulfillment. It brings me such joy and satisfaction to
watch a young person’s life transformed by music. That’s where I still keep my
focus: reaching kids and making a difference in their lives. That’s something we
can all do every day of our lives: do something for other people.
I don’t expect success, I expect impact.

CW: What were your initial
goals or measures for success in the beginning?


DW: When I first started, I
just wanted to bring music into the lives of thirty first graders. That seemed a big
enough goal. Then my goal became reaching another group of thirty, then another. I
could see the impact immediately in the way the kids carried themselves, the
ways that they expressed themselves and the ways that they connected to school.
That’s what motivated me. Today, in year 10, over 1,300 public school teachers
have decided that they feel the same way and have brought Little Kids Rock
programming to over 200,000 kids.

CW: What has surprised you most about
the program and how it’s been received by kids and teachers alike?


DW: What
has surprised me the most is watching the impact that our teaching methodology
and training has on the teachers. I have seen teachers weeping during our
trainings because they themselves had internalized negative messages about their
own creativity. Our pedagogy validates and elevates them. They say things like,
“This has changed me entire view of myself as a creative person,” or “I learned
more from two days of training here than I did in all my years at the
conservatory.” That’s powerful stuff

CW: Your approach to teaching
music differs from the traditional approach in that you emphasize performance
and composition over reading notes. When did you realize that kids might be more
attracted to learning music this way?


DW: To people who do not make music
themselves, this may seem mysterious. However, music is a language and like all
languages, we learn to speak them before we learn to read them. We all learned
to speak before we went to school. And what did we speak about? Things that
interested us. We teach kids to play the music that interests them and we
approach it non-notationally, at least at first. When you teach people to play
by reading music, it is a mathematical approach. In math, there is usually one
right answer and an infinite number of wrong answers. However, when you teach
music as a language, there are many, many right answers and making music becomes
easier and less intimidating. That was the way that got me hooked.
Like so many other people from my generation, I did have music as a kid but the
classes I took did not speak to me and yet I loved music. I learned music
from my friends, from records and from the street. It became a passion and an
obsession but one that developed outside of the academy. Little Kids Rock is my
attempt to reconcile this approach with the academy and, in so doing, rock the
lives of a lot of kids.

CW: How were you originally able to get
celebrity sponsors like B.B. King and John Lee Hooker involved?


DW: Our
appeal to celebrities has always been very grassroots and organic. In the early
days I would send tapes of our students’ original compositions to artists and
ask if they’d like to get involved. Upon hearing our kids, people wanted to get
involved. I know that sounds so simple but it’s true. Once artists come out to
see our kids, once they got to see the joy in their faces first hand, once they
got to play with them and make music, they tell their other musician friends and
our artist outreach is all word of mouth.

CW: Anything else you like to
add?



DW: Yes. If you love music then you are innately musical and a
music maker. Anyone who ever told you otherwise was lying. 


Beyond Baby Mozart, Students Who Rock


,”
New York Times, September 8, 2011

Main site: LittleKidsRock.org

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