Music has the power to connect disciplines on every scale. But for a teacher, music is an immensely useful tool. When I teach music, especially to young children, I teach with the connectivity of music in mind. Music is, of course, a lifetime's worth of study in its own right, but for children it contains pathways into other areas of study too; new ways to learn abstraction or to encode information.

When teaching music, I believe an educator has an obligation to teach the musical content first, but with an approach that rewards creative thinking and abstraction, problem-solving and self-reliance. Music is the antidote to standardized testing, but only if it is taught as personalized learning.