What makes a good song? What kind of teaching makes learning sink in and stay with us? Recently, as these two spheres in my world began to overlap, I realized making music and teaching my students had more in common than I originally thought.
This story began as I was making a ukulele out of Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), while researching the restoration of cranberry farms to freshwater wetlands, and Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides) swamps. The instrument came from a 16-month apprenticeship with local luthier John Fabel, which I wrote about in Earth Matters last spring. In homage to the wetland cranberry plants (Vaccinium macrocarpon) I love, I chose to inlay my instrument with their fruits and leaves, and brought the finished instrument out to the swamp to sing to the trees.
Perhaps it was a little silly, but then again, maybe there’s a throughline.
A good song has a hook: literally the part that catches you, the riff you remember, the lyrics you sing over and over again. An educational experience should have a hook too. I’ve had many former students write or visit me years after graduation; telling me that spending time out in the environment, making real measurements for projects that matter, has changed the course of their lives. Many learned these field skills incidentally, as part of an extraneous activity that wasn’t even part of their major course requirements — only to find that they were essential later in their careers as they repeated them over, and over again.
Practice makes perfect. It takes a while to master an instrument (musical or scientific, it turns out), so it’s a good idea to start off with some basic rules of thumb. Perhaps begin with a I-IV- V7 progression with easy chords and repeat until you get a reliably good sound every time. Perhaps make the same measurement until you train your hand and your eye to get within one millimeter every time. Repeated observations within a known framework help hone your skill, and develops your intuition about what sounds good, about what makes sense.
As an educator, I believe developing intuition is one of the most valuable things we can teach, and one of the skills we should never cede to machines. Just like there’s no substitute for live music, complete with endearing human mistakes. A little risk, some stakes, make the outcome all the more thrilling.
It’s pretty boring to follow instructions and get a perfect result the first time. If something is off, if it doesn’t work out, you might start asking interesting questions: Why didn’t it work? What went wrong? What could I try differently next time? Errors and failures are essential to learning persistence and resilience. These are good skills for science, for songs, and for life.
I often tell my students that field work is 25% measuring the thing we set out to measure, and 75% problem solving. Things go wrong and we have to think creatively to find new ways to achieve our goals. We may set out with one hypothesis in mind, and instead discover we’d been asking the wrong questions. Having the flexibility to change course midstream requires a certain amount of humility (I was wrong) and vulnerability (I’m open to hearing new ideas about what might instead be right).
Performing a song is vulnerable too, and requires connection and communication with your bandmates to produce one sound in sync with one another. Everyone’s ideas are considered, because none of us knows the answer: we’re a team.
On our last trip, while installing a piezometer (a small well), my students and I encountered a very resistant layer which produced a clangy catchy beat with the slide hammer. My students started rhyming along, “Our beats go harder than the hard-pan layer/ depth to water 4.1 centimeter …” What fun! I relished it. And this went on all day!
Between installations and measurements, we recorded sound samples of our plastic bucket, a metal rod and waders splashing as we walked. Lyrics flowed and were captured in our notebooks along with the data.
In science, like a song, the whole is more than the sum of its parts — the goal is to bring all the disparate data together in a coherent story. With this data we hope to tell a story of recovery from a heavily tile-drained and farmed cranberry bog to a diverse and thriving freshwater wetland. And with our song lyrics we told a story of a group of scientists, novice and professional, young and old, making observations and beats and enjoying the day.
Before dropping everyone off, we pulled out a recorder and pulled the “bog song” together right there in the van, and you’ll have to take my word for it — it was a banger!
Christine Hatch (she/her) is research-extension Liaison for the Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, and Extension Professor of Water Resources and Climate Change in the Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences Department at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She works on ecohydrology, river flooding and wetland restoration of cranberry bogs.
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