• We talked about your passion: the genuineness, the presence, the transparency. We also felt that the passion is incredibly powerful, but what made it work was that it was controlled. It was very tightly disciplined. There weren’t extra words. The silence gave us space. You used that space. And it held a lot of its own music.
  • You made clearer the need to focus on what is passionate for us…searching for that passion, searching for that which we have almost a childlike commitment to do. Each of you as a musician, as an artist, has a beautiful talent. And the ensemble is so much richer in the diversity. Without one of you the ensemble is not the same. We need that diversity, that richness. We need that community for learning.
  • We really like the way you took your ideas and your ways of presenting them and stuck with it and did a totally different form of entertainment, stimulation, and inspiration. That took a lot of guts to push through with that, and it’s left us all touched. It’s inspired us to have faith again in the ideas we have as teachers. Thank you for helping us along with that.
  • In Boston there is a bridge that goes from Harvard Square to the other side of the river where there is a stadium. On that bridge is an inscription: “May this bridge be a symbol, a link, between scholarship and play.” You have bridged that today, and you did it so beautifully.
  • I liked the use of literary, scientific, and cultural texts together. It encourages me to cast a wider net. I appreciate the musicianship, discipline, and creativity of the performers. It reminds me that teaching is not simply about transmitting a discipline; it’s also about inspiring creativity in myself and in my students. And I’m reminded it’s good to bring many rich sources of insight to teaching…to bring a wide range and different sources of insight.
  • A couple of us talked about how this brought back memories of childhood and kindergarten, first, second or third grade. Even the most cynical student, even the most cynical adult student, has some kind of fond memories of those earlier years in school. If we could just capture part of that feeling, that moment, it would make learning for them a lot easier, and therefore teaching for us a lot easier and more effective, if we could just connect with that emotion we’ve all felt, watching things around us.
  • Your concert really put me in touch with why I became a teacher. It brought me back to a memory of the very first course that I taught. It was a course called “The Limits of Knowledge,” and it was about the limits of the rational mind. I taught this course as a graduate student, to students who drove about three hours every Saturday morning to classes they were taking for no credit. In about the fifth week of this course, I received an anonymous note from somebody who said, basically, to summarize it: “I’ve been thinking of committing suicide. But what I’ve been learning in these classes has taught me there’s something else, and that I don’t need to go through with this act.” And so for these decades since, I’ve remembered this student. I never learned who it was. But what it showed me was just how powerful the profession of teaching can be. And I’ve had maybe four or five thousand students since. So in your concert, what you do, is exactly that beauty of reaching out to the imagination, showing the possibility of who and what we can be, even in our very darkest moments.
  • We were struck by the deep appreciation that you had for each other; the enjoyment that you showed in each other’s gifts; the way in which you affirmed and supported each other in the performance. We were struck by how important that is and what a difference it makes to be a community of people working at this together.
  • To paraphrase one of your comments: “When art works, play’s the thing”… To substitute another word: “When teaching works, play’s the thing!”
  • One thing that came to my mind was the idea of connections. How things can be connected. There are two ways this can occur: one is you can say, “See the connection.” The other one is you can have people make the connection for themselves. When we teach, we tell the students, this is something you have to figure out on your own. I think your message helped remind us to be introspective as well. In terms of that: we see you’re all from very diverse backgrounds. I think that plays a very important role in being creative, and being able to see each others’ perspectives. When we teach, being able to foster that kind of diversity is really good. To have students have different points of view, and being able to see other ways of seeing. That’s part of the learning process. When we’re transmitters, we’re also receivers as teachers. We learn, even though we’re sending the message—that’s part of the whole process, is that it goes back and forth. And that’s the whole connection.
  • The image of the net has come back to me, and I see us standing here holding the net, and look what’s in it! We’ve found tennis rackets and books and physics professors and percussion instruments, opera houses and southern Baptist preachers and Welty and Einstein…The neat thing about this is that all of this is teaching material!
  • At the beginning, you were singing, ‘tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free…and I thought, what a gift it is to be alive at this moment here, with colleagues over the years, with this joy of music and art and poetry. And I was thinking of the image of Creative Leaps International performing at Ground Zero. I was there in November. It is a gift to be alive at this moment, here at this conference in California with you as artists. And I was feeling this sense of aliveness. In the Langston Hughes song—which was so touching it made me want to cry—I sensed the privilege that we have to be here in this moment, at this place in this time. That we are not the poor, and we are not suffering in those ways that Langston Hughes is speaking of. What you spoke to was this commonality of life and its struggles…you were talking about art and science and complementary…There was so much profundity throughout, and you wrapped it all together. I want to thank everybody here for sharing these wonderful moments, and I want to thank the board for bringing this group to us, and bringing us this gift.
  • On the plane here, I reread Parker Palmer. I read it first four years ago. I think you’ve made it live in this moment in this theatre. The piece that lived for me was, you put the mystery in the center of the stage. You are not the center, although you sparkled around it. But you put the words, the music, the harmonies, the mystery at the center. I found myself writing: I don’t have to make sense of this now. All I need to do is to be willing to hear it. I did an exercise, which was ‘fill in the blank’: “In your presence I feel…(not think, but feel…)" And I feel: Drawn to the mystery. Drawn to the ideas. Drawn to listening. And I want to thank you for that.