Ep 59: How does MUSIC learning impact OTHER learning? With Dr. Anita Collins

I'm Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhanced Life with Music, a look at music's effect on our everyday lives. I am thrilled to be bringing today's guest to you. I first became acquainted with Dr. Anita Collins' work through the 2014 short film she wrote that has become one of the most watched watched TED Education films ever made. It's called How Playing an Instrument Benefits Your Brain. I'll include a link in the show notes. It's phenomenal. It's less than 5 minutes long. If you haven't already seen it, do yourself a favor and check it out. Dr. Collins is an award-winning educator, researcher, and writer in the field of brain development and music learning. She is internationally recognized for her unique work in translating the scientific research of neuroscientists and psychologists for parents, teachers, and students. Thank you on behalf of all of us laypeople everywhere. Anita regularly presents her research on television, radio, and through her scholarly and popular writings. She is an education advisor and research expert for numerous orchestras, schools and universities, companies, and nonprofits. She is the founder of the Bigger Better Brains Education Program and a founding director of the Rewire Foundation. She joins us today from Australia, Welcome to Enhanced Life with Music, Dr. Collins.

So wonderful to talk to you. So far away, but I love the fact that we just seem right next to each other on the phone.

It does. It does. It doesn't even seem like we have the, what, 12-hour difference or whatever.

No.

Well, here in the US, we are ramping up a new school year and in a much different way than usual because of COVID-19. This has been a highly unusual year, and as kids head back to school in whatever form that takes, parents are focused more than ever on not just their child's academics but also their well-being. A great resource for this time is your new book, which was just released September 1st. It's called The Music Advantage: How Learning Music Helps Your Child's Brain and Well-Being. Can you start us off by telling listeners a little bit about the book and how you came to write it?

Okay. It's so hard to encapsulate it. It's basically a book that shares the neuromusical research, which is what this field is called, in a way mainly for— firstly for parents so that they can start to understand what's happening inside their child's brain when they're learning music, but also possibly what happened in their own brain when they were learning music or also when they observe things, what they might mean. And I kind of go from birth, the very first day, even a little bit before, right through to sort of adulthood and looking at how music learning plays a different role at different stages and different parts of the brain that it enhances at different times. So it's very much done in a way that— I love this research and I love reading the original research, but I know that's absolutely not for everyone. It's actually hardly for anyone because it's so hard to read. But I love being able to take it and then as a music teacher myself, look at my students that I teach or look at my own daughter's development or my development and go, okay, well, how does this research help explain what I'm observing? And what's more, how could it make me possibly a better parent or a better teacher by understanding this? So there's lots of stories, there's lots of jokes, there's lots of things in there that hopefully it makes it a really pleasant read, but also something that you can get to the end and go, I know so much more about how my child's brain is developing right now.

Was there anything specific that motivated you to write this particular book when you did, or was it just kind of an organic growth of the research and work that you've been doing?

Yeah, it was one of those wonderful serendipitous sort of experiences. There was a show here on our ABC, which is the same as your ABC, called Don't Stop the Music, which was— I was really lucky to be involved in. It was 3 episodes and it was following some kids in a really challenging school. And the staff and the principals and the parents as they put a music program in place. And the very day after the first episode aired, I got an email from a publishing company saying, look, I think you have a story to tell. I think you have so much information, but you're really easy to understand, and would you like to write a book? And it had always been my absolute life dream to write a book. So the fact that it's all coming together and I can see it on bookshelves now and people are reading it is—

Amazing.

Beyond my wildest dreams. So it was— it was— I was asked to do it, but also it was something that was very deep inside of me and something I wanted to do.

Now, this is not the first book that you've written though, is that right?

Yeah, I, um, I've written a few— I've written a lot of different things, um, but I wrote a— I've spent 12 years in academia, and when you're an academic, you have to write in that really specific kind of way, um, and it's very dry and it's very factual, and you have to be very careful about how far you or sort of what you say and how far you push your thinking. And when I made a choice to step away from academia, I wanted to write for everybody, but I said, I'll set myself a project. And I wrote this little tiny book called The Lullaby Effect, which sort of came out of a podcast series that I'd done with some— with a radio station in Sydney. And I wrote it the first time and I gave it to a very trusted friend who was an academic but is also a story writer.

Mm-hmm.

And he said, Hmm, it's good. He said that qualified, it's good. He said, but there's not very much of you in it. And then he said, try doing it again. And at the moment I went, oh God, I thought I was finished. And try doing it again. He said, this time write like you speak.

Oh.

He said, give yourself permission to write as you speak. Because you're— by that time I'd done my TED Talk and I'd done a huge amount of presenting and everyone sort of really seemed to resonate with the way that I present. And I said, okay, well, I'll give it a go. And again, it was just one of those fun projects you kind of do on the side to say, what can I do? And it was freeing. It was amazing. It was permission to be myself on the page. And yeah, that was the way to sort of find my new writing style after academia. And then this book is just an extension of that.

Neat. Well, I've always thought that publishing a book and having it released must be similar to bringing a child into the world.

Yes.

Although I just, I just, we just dropped our 18-year-old daughter off at school about 2,000 miles away. And I will say that after that experience, I thought, you know, putting a book out in the world is probably more like putting your 18-year-old out in the world. I'm like, okay, there it is. I've done what I can.

Yeah, it's very, it's very, very similar. I think it's, it's, it is a creative baby. And I've often thought when I was writing my PhD, I thought of that as my brain baby. And then when I had my little girl halfway through the PhD process, which is not advised.

Please don't do it.

Wow. But I was kind of— I was balancing this. I'm having a baby with my body and a baby with my brain, and they can't coexist. And the baby with the body is coming, and I can't do anything. So I had to find ways of managing the brain baby to do it. And this was really, really similar. This is— I'm doing a huge amount of Consulting work to help state governments here in Australia do great things with music education. And then I was diving into writing the book every time I could find a spare couple of hours.

I'm sure you had to make a spare couple of hours because they don't just come to you and hand it to you on a silver platter.

No, they have a color in my diary which is bright red, which is don't touch me.

Well, I was fortunate enough to be able to get an advance copy of your book and was able to read it. Absolutely loved it. And you do You start off with talking about the birth of a baby and how at birth a healthy full-term baby's sense of hearing is the only sense that is primed and ready to go and ready to start taking in information. And I, I thought that was really interesting and how, wow, I hadn't thought about that. And it reminded me of recently I've heard someone talk about how the sense of hearing is the only sense that is constantly on. So even when we're sleeping—

Yeah.

It's on. And in your book, you talk about how sound is food for the brain. It's a cognitive nutrient that helps babies begin to understand their world, including their caregivers. You talk about how every person's voice has a unique musical signature, and you are your baby's favorite rock star. Loved that. Anything else that you want to say about that real early stage and the effect of Yeah, I think what amazed me most—

I think I was actually very lucky to have my baby in the middle of this process because I was reading all the research in relation to a living being and starting to observe her, but also observe other people and their babies. And it just suddenly struck me, it's like there's all this information about, you know, visual stimuli for children and tactile stimuli and what they can see and everything, but there was just nothing on sound and music. Nothing about auditory processing and all this incredible information they're taking in through their ears. And then I started thinking, well, isn't it— our world is noisier than it's ever been before. The low level of noise that our brain has to constantly, without our knowledge, it's constantly processing, is part of what may be leading to this cognitive fatigue that we have all the time. Because actually, we're a little bit on all the time because we have so much noise around us. What's that like for a baby? What's it like when we have habits of maybe leaving the television on in the background just at a low level when we're at home, but for a baby, that is auditory information and they're like sucking it in to understand it, but that means they get quite cognitively tired. So there's this wealth of knowledge about— and I think also it showed me that we're neglecting our ears. We're neglecting— not about keeping them healthy, we're neglecting and understanding that— They are such an important part of every child's education right from day dot. And we don't really know, or we don't talk as much about it. So one of the things, especially with that young sort of first 5 years of life, is helping parents to understand the auditory environment that their kids are in, the sound environment that's around them. And it's not about always being silent. They actually need the nutrients. They need the sounds. But what they need is variety. They don't need the same thing all the time. And it's just like food. It's just like food. Our bodies grow. and flourish with a variety of foods, our brains flourish and grow with a variety of sounds.

And you mentioned that age of birth to age 5, you talk in your book about the concept of a sensitivity period for brain development. Tell us a little about that.

This is a fascinating area because it is— it's constantly changing and updating. And even since I've sort of started in this field, it's changed so much. But this idea that We have— and anyone who's watched a child grow knows that they sort of suck up information very, very quickly. And even when they're learning how to speak, they take on our own inflections when they are first speaking. And you sort of hear your child say something and you go, oh my God, that's me!

Yeah, that is scary.

I know, it is kind of scary. But it's just such an important time. And again, it's that understanding of the sensitivity is not just what they see and what they feel and what they taste. We've got these ears too. And anytime I go through a parenting book or I listen to someone talk about parenting or listen to someone talk about child development, auditory processing and our ears and our hearing are kind of like maybe one paragraph or a slight mention, whereas actually this research is showing us that they should be right up front and center and we should help everyone to understand the importance of our hearing in our whole cognitive development.

Well, one thing I have to bring up early in our conversation because I want to make sure we talk about it, and that's my favorite chapter. probably was chapter 8, Connecting the Dots: Why Keeping a Beat Is Vital for Reading. Now, I have to tell you, I've been trying to find someone to talk on the show about this topic, and I really haven't been able to find someone. And I— you kind of answered that question a little bit in the book where you said that this is a topic of hot research, and we're kind of at the beginning of this exciting field of research. But you talk in this chapter about the connection between learning to read and musical training. In fact, you said, quote, I think my PhD and all the work I have done since in the field of neuromusical research has been trying to answer one simple question: did learning how to read music help me to learn how to read words? End quote. Tell us about your experience learning to read and how it was affected by learning to read music.

So, my journey to reading was a very— I don't know, it was just a very bumpy one. I learned how to— and I could read, but I would make lots and lots of mistakes, or I would— I became extremely good, especially between about 5 and 8, about picking up signals from other people about what the word might mean or what the meaning might be, and distracting people as well. I was a fantastic actor. And one of the problems was, I was the firstborn in my family, and my mother is a— or was a reading teacher, remedial reading. So she helped kids who couldn't read. And yet she had this child, her firstborn, who was really struggling, and I was finding lots of ways to hide that I was not reading as well as I possibly could. And reading out loud for me is still the most difficult thing I have to do. I was just struggling through and I was making my way and I was trying to read and I was just finding it very difficult. It was very cognitively taxing for me to read something. I'd mix words up, I'd do all sorts of things. And then at the age of about 9, there was a music program in the school and I was really lucky to get selected for it. I had very high auditory processing, I knew that. That wasn't helping me with my reading and I was really conscientious on the outside, like I was really looking like I tried really, really hard. And I was lucky enough to be offered a position to learn— originally they wanted me to learn a flute. And I still remember I got to the door of the storeroom to say, they've said I can learn a flute. And the person on the other side said, oh, we've got no more flutes. How about this? Have a clarinet. And so I took a clarinet home. And I was good at it and it was one of the very first things I was good at school at, which I found that changed my whole understanding of myself or belief in myself as a learner. And that's such an important thing for a young child.

Yeah.

But then I learned how to read music, and music is a symbol-to-sound system. So what that means is there's a symbol on the page, and we— as soon as we look at that symbol, we hear the sound that symbol makes, if that makes sense, in our brains. We hear it like a little— like the best iTunes library we ever could have is all in our brains. And then we tell our body how to make that sound, and if it's on music, it's through an instrument. And then as soon as the sound comes out of the instrument, it goes straight back into our ears and we And check it with the brain recording that we've got. So it's a really incredibly quick cycle.

And is that what we refer to when we hear the word audiation?

Yeah, audiation is the hearing it inside your head part of it.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, so the other— if there's literacy people listening, this term is also known as the phonological loop. So it's the loop of see the symbol, hear the sound, make the sound, check the sound.

Okay.

But that's in music, and it's the same process in reading. So, about 6 months after I started to learn how to read music and started to play the clarinet, I started to find reading easier. And I don't— and I'm very honest in the book. I think I'm trying to answer the question, did learning how to read music really help me with my reading of words? If I hadn't been given that opportunity to learn an instrument and learn to read music, my life might have been really different.

Mm-hmm.

It was one of those pivotal moments where I think it's changed— I think it's changed my whole life trajectory because I learnt how to read and I had some confidence in myself as a learner. And I think I keep studying to constantly prove to myself that I can still read and I can still do that process, which is very— It forms you as a learner when you're very, very young. So now, and I can watch kids now and go, you're pretending, aren't you? You're not actually reading. I can spot them really well.

Well, you mentioned that when you learned the clarinet, that was kind of like the first thing in school that you felt like you were good at. And so I can see that it really did make an impact because you've now gone on to spend a lot of your life in school, in academia, whether Yeah, it has.

It was a— it changed where my life was going. And I think I just want to know as close as I can what might have happened.

Hmm. Well, you mentioned in the book that reading and music use many of the same areas of the brain. They use overlapping neural networks. And so that's sort of an indicator, one way it may make sense that one would influence the other. You actually say in the book that Interestingly, music is easier and more innate to the brain than reading.

Well, it's less complex and it's got more rules that we stick to. So particularly with English, there's more varied options in there and it's like this sound is this thing, so it's a very quick connection. And if we think how quickly we end up, once we get sort of notes under our fingers, how quickly we end up learning music and processing music, we're actually doing it faster. So it's kind of like— one of the researchers said to me, it's like kids who learn to read music before they learn to read words, their brain goes, oh, hang on, I've done this before, I've already got this pathway.

Mm-hmm.

So the transition is easier or more— it has sort of less bumps along the way for them. And I think that's— and going back to— I'm sorry, I didn't answer your question about beat, but what fascinated me about the beat thing is beat and what's called rhythmic entrainment, which is a really long way of saying our brain being in sync and connected, that is an external expression, so a way on the outside of a child's body. If they can keep a steady beat, then it's kind of an indication outside our bodies of what's happening inside our brains. And that indication is that everything that needs to be connected for reading is connected before they have to start. So it's like they're cognitively prepared, cognitively ready, they have the cognitive foundations, however you want to think of it, that are needed for reading. But it's a musical thing. And if I think about keeping a beat, your body has to have enough control to keep a steady beat and stay with the beat. And anyone who's seen a 5-year-old will know that's pretty hard. They can do it for maybe 4 beats, But then keeping that control, maintaining that attention and the stamina in that is actually really, really hard work. But they have to be connected with their body, with their eyes to be watching what's happening and putting those 2 things together. But then if there's music going and there's a beat going, their ears have to connect to their eyes, which have to connect to their body, then to have huge amounts of control to keep a steady beat. So when I started to dissect what beat was, it's like, yeah, that's really hard. And I can see why that connectivity needs to be there. So it's the best piece of— my favorite piece of research because it helps us understand how music learning creates a foundation for other learning rather than just being for the learning of music itself.

Yeah, well, I definitely noticed that you mentioned that several times in the book, that that ability to keep a beat is a foundation stone for many other learned skills, including reading. And children need to be able to keep a beat To be ready to learn to read. Yeah, so that is really fascinating. You say in the book that being able to keep a study bee is an indicator that learning to read is ready to happen in the brain. As a piano teacher or a music teacher in general, if, if a music teacher were to have a young student who is finding reading words to be a challenge, they're struggling a little bit with that learning to read process, Mm-hmm. And they are struggling a little bit to keep a steady beat, do you recommend that they— that the music teacher really kind of get back to basics and like, let's just really focus on being able to keep the steady beat?

Yeah, but as all music teachers would, keeping a beat can be done in probably a billion different ways. So it's about that focusing on the one skill but not doing it the same way any particular day. It helps that sort of variety or novelty that our brain loves be used on a skill that is quite repetitive, if that makes sense. We, as human beings, we love repetitive things and comfort of— it's like routines. We love routines. But then very quickly we get bored of a routine and we want to do something different.

Yeah.

As soon as we do something different, we want to go back to our routine again. But that's actually what the brain needs. It needs to oscillate between comfort or repetition Mm-hmm. And the new and the different all the time. So yeah, and I've seen this research, particularly here in Australia, there's a lot of schools around Australia who the music teacher and the classroom teacher are coming closer together to sort of work for the benefit of the child. So instead of being 2 separate subjects, they're kind of going, well, let's see what their beatkeeping skills are like, how are they going in their reading progression at the moment, how can we help them, how can the teachers work together to help this child? And I'm hearing incredible I heard one just yesterday, a principal who has a child himself who's dyslexic, and they got him started on piano lessons and it's been 18 months, but he's now reading at grade level.

Mm-hmm.

And just that transformation through something that doesn't automatically seem or obviously seem connected, but I think this research allows for that sort of understanding of how music and learning language, reading, all sorts of parts of language are connected together.

Yeah. Well, and I think that's a great point that you make about the routine versus novelty and something new. I've heard it said that we feel most comfortable when things are the same, but we feel most alive when they're different.

Yeah.

For some of us music teachers, tell us some of the creative ways that you've seen other music teachers help children synchronize and get that entrainment so that they can keep a steady beat when they're really struggling with that. Because I know as music teachers, It can be easy to just whip out the metronome. Students see that metronome come out and they're like, no, please, no, anything but that.

Yeah, and in many cases, metronomes aren't the best because it's an artificial beat. And I know when I said keeping a steady beat is what we need to do, but a metronome is actually artificial because no one's that synchronized. That's why we have machines to help us with it. So what keeping a steady beat is, is actually Hearing the beat to start with. So it's— I've seen people do it on, you know, anything. They can do it on really expensive musical instruments through to they can go outside and use the railing outside the classroom and they can just bang on that. It can be anything. But keeping a steady beat is about hearing the space between the beats, so how far apart each beat is, but then adjusting. So when a group of people— I love doing this with CEOs are my favorite because they hate getting it wrong. They're like, no, I've got to get it right. But you say, let's all clap a beat together. Very simple thing that most music teachers will do. And for about the first 4 to 6 beats, it's steady and everyone's really concentrating. But then someone starts to maybe get a little bit faster. And it's that question of adjusting to, do we get faster with that person? And often groups who don't know each other very well will just get faster because it's easier.

Mm-hmm.

Whereas actually making a choice to come back and go, no, no, I'm gonna watch what the beat actually is, I'm gonna hear what the beat is, and I'm gonna keep with the beat, I'm going to adjust. So that adjustment is actually also part of keeping a steady beat, 'cause music is not necessarily metronomically in time.

Mm-hmm.

Especially when it's made by humans, there's adjustments back and forth all the time about what it means to be on the beat. So anything from clapping to playing it on furniture to— I've seen great teachers do things you know, swapping classes and things like that, it's a very common thing to do, say, a rhythm or a beat as the kids move from one place to another in the classroom, getting some kids to initiate a beat themselves on like a pencil on the table, and then all of the other kids need to emulate that and keep in time for a certain, say, 32 beats, or if you're really ambitious, 64 beats. But the other thing I've seen when beat is incorporated into many different parts of the day is it's not just the keeping of the beat and the connectivity. Something happens when we all make a beat together. And anyone who's been at a concert where they've been dancing or jumping up and down to a piece of music with a heavy beat will know that feeling of feeling connected with everybody around them and feeling cohesive as a social group.

Yeah.

And exactly the same thing happens in the classroom. If you infuse beat all the way through, or if you're at high— you know, it might be listening to some music in the car with your own child and you're tapping along to it and your child starts to tap along too. Amazing things happen between humans when they keep a beat together. It's almost incredibly tribal. And some of the research is starting to show that our hearts can synchronize, our heartbeats can synchronize when we keep a beat together.

Oh, wow.

So that social cohesion part is not just a feeling, it's a real thing between human beings.

Fantastic. Great ideas there. You talk about how that skill of keeping a beat and entrainment and synchronization can transfer to music, to reading, and it's also possible that other skills like training an executive function skill through music can transfer to other skills, whether it's reading or other areas.

Mm-hmm.

One example that you give is inhibitory control, and certainly anyone who has learned how Yeah. —how to play a musical instrument knows what that frustration feels like when you know what you want your hands to do and you just can't get them to do it. And you talk about how that inhibitory control is really highly developed in adult musicians because they've had this constant exposure to frustration. Talk to us a little bit about that executive function skill, the inhibitory control, and how that skill that's learned through music training can apply to other areas of learning.

It's— as a music teacher, I find it one of the most fascinating sort of transfer effects of music learning because whether you use inhibitory control— that's the research word for it, a lot of people in schools use impulse control— but also it's present in things like persistence and resilience, which are very, very highly talked about sort of skills.

Or grit is another popular term for it.

Grit is another one, yeah, whichever way you want to— it's all the sort of— it has many very— they're slightly different, but they have quite similar sort of characteristics, you know. Persistence is sticking with that. You know, if I think about it from a musical point of view, I often use the idea of trumpeters. Trumpeters, they struggle to get up to a G, and it's just something that happens that's hard for them to do. And I often hear them in their practice rooms going, da-da-da-da-splat, da-da-da-da-splat, and they split the note. And persistence is that continuing to try and not going, God, I'm never going to get this, and giving up. So really it's associated with failure. But when they do get it and the note pops out, the reward network in the brain just fires off and it just goes, yeah, that was great, let's do that again.

Wow.

And that process is what I find fascinating because it's tiny amounts of frustration often So it's kind of like what we get told to do with exercise, you know?

Yeah.

Stand up from your desk, walk in the stairwell, just do tiny bits of exercise but do it often. Music learning is a bit like that. It's tiny bits of frustration very often so we get very comfortable with it. It's like, oh, I know this feeling. I'm annoyed but I'm gonna keep going with it. So as I looked at, okay, why would it be that inhibitory or impulse control are very high in musically trained kids and adults? It's because Because the act of learning music requires so much failure so often. I think I say in the book, you get it wrong far more than you get it right. But when you get it right, it's like this massive reward and you want to do that again. So it's training. Angela Duckworth talks about musicians in her book Grit.

Ah.

And it's that training element that comes into it that becomes a discipline. And it's present in lots and lots of disciplines. The difference with music learning is that so much cognitive energy has to synchronize and connect in order to just make a sound. So it's just very, very hard to do and yet very rewarding. So that hard work, very rewarding is what makes it so good for the brain.

Fascinating. Well, love your book. Highly recommend it to listeners. I'll include lots of links in the show notes on ways you can get the book and connect with Anita's work and learn more. more about these fascinating topics. I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending. I call it a coda, by sharing a song or a story about a moment that music enhanced your life. Do you have a story or a song that you can share with listeners today?

I have, I have a lot of them. The one, the one that always comes to mind, I was really lucky. I was in the For the Sydney 2000 Olympics opening ceremony, they wanted to have a 2,000-piece or 2,000-person marching band. Now, marching bands, we do have them in Australia, but they're not nearly as sort of— they're not in every school as they are in the US. So that was quite a— and they wanted a marching band because basically it's pretty hard to get a band on and off into the stadium. So they said they have to walk, so we'll figure out how to do it. We had 1,000 kids from Australia and then we had 1,000 children from all over the world. So I do remember 300 American kids came over to join us for that as well. And we had 12 trumpeters from France and we had a whole bunch of sousaphones from Brazil and all sorts of things. It was an amazing experience. But I was on the field at the opening ceremony as one of the trainers. So I led on 500 of the kids. So I was one of the people at the front and I'd been training them for the last 18 months and stuff. But there was, there was a moment when you walk out and 120,000 people were all clapping and yelling and screaming and woohooing and everything else, and my whole body vibrated.

Wow.

It's— I've never felt it before, and I don't think I'll ever feel it again. But part of the vibration was absolutely the sound. I actually think that my whole body was just vibrating because of the sound they were making. But I had watched 1,000 Australian kids who weren't marching band kids learn how to march and learn how to play. And then I'd seen all these kids from all over the world come together, some of them having had huge amounts of experience from the States and some of them having also never done it before and not speaking English, had come together and had created this performance that was mind-blowing. And I was just so proud musically of them, but I was also— I still can feel it. I can still feel what that vibration felt like. And it's the mass of humanity always will always amaze me.

Oh, very cool. Well, and what a perfect story to give us a little bit of an Olympic fix right now when we're all a little disappointed or a lot disappointed about the 2020 Olympics being postponed. Thank you so much to Dr. Collins for joining us today and for putting this incredible book out into the world. I really appreciate Dr. Collins' skill in distilling and translating the scientific research in ways that are understood by the layperson who is not in the field. And I also appreciate the fact that in this book, she also lists resources at the end of each chapter for those readers who do want to dig deeper. Anita's book will be published in the US by Penguin Random House. In the meantime, it is available for global purchase and delivery through Book Depository. The link is in the show notes. As we kick off a new school year here in the US, I just want to repeat something that Anita writes in this book. She says that teachers in a challenging socioeconomic area are the teachers I enjoy working with the most. Due to their challenging professional environments and clientele, both students and parents, they are open to whatever works in education. They are highly attuned to different needs on any given day for each of their students. This is not to say that teachers in less challenging areas are not like that, but it has been my observation that when faced with higher levels of fluctuation and variety in your students, You become an intuitive, highly observational, innovative educator pretty quickly. When I have the great privilege of watching them teach, I feel like I am observing a true artist at work. I just want to end this episode with a shout-out to teachers everywhere, and in particular those who are working in challenging socioeconomic areas. My cousin Shannon is one of these, and I see these teachers as heroes who are doing so much unsung work. in making the world a better place for individual students and for our greater communities through their work. So thank you. You and your work are invaluable, and you are appreciated. Thank you so much for joining me today. I encourage you to enhance someone else's life with music by sharing this episode with someone who may find it helpful, whether a teacher, a parent, Or a grandparent, and whether you share by text, social media, or your own acoustic voice. Until next week, may your life be enhanced with music.