larger view

Songs provide emotionally-compelling avenues for learning to take place.  It's not hard to find songs that illustrate key principles or points, and songs do it in a way that allows the material to be more efficiently digested.

Right now, I'm teaching a Personality Theories course.  My students are learning about personality through the personalities expressed in the songs associated with the Bakersfield Sound. 

Next week, I will perform the song you're hearing right now (if you've hit the play bar in the play station above), is a song I'll perform for my students next week.  It's an original tune in which the lyrics are an adaptation of the text content.  We will be studying Henry Murray, an important figure in the history and evolution of the psychology of personality. I wrote the song while the students were taking their mid-terms.  It mentions all of the 20 needs on Henry Murray's famous list of needs. 

As a psychologist who has adopted a perspective that is, to a large extent, humanistic, I believe that in whatever job we are in, we must never leave our personalities at the door.  So I bring my guitar through the door, and my personality too.  It works for me, and it seems to be working for my students. 

I approach education according to my 3E's.  Those three E's are something I've identified to be

ENTERTAINMENT

ENGAGEMENT and

EMANCIPATION of the imagination.

Entertainment captures a student's interest.  Presenting information in creative, stimulating ways, allows the second stage to take place, that of engagement.  Finally, though children are naturally creatures of imagination, society has a way of killing that imaginative, explorative spirit, and replace it with conformity.  So as an educator, part of my job is to emancipate the imaginations that were once active, but have fallen asleep.

I enjoy my work?  What do I do?  I'm a psychologist, no, a singer/songwriter, no, a writer, no an instructor.  Well, let me put it this way: I get paid to be me.