A Teachable Moment

This morning Twin B asked about the writing she found on an index card. It said this.

Am F C G
Am F C E

These were the chords from Iggy Pop's The Passenger. A friend and I played around with this several days before and I'd written them down to keep the complicated chord progression straight. It had been a rough week.

This struck me as what progressive educators sometimes call a teachable moment. I told her about how music is represented by letters, got out my guitar, and showed her how the same line repeated over and over with just one chord change at the end to make them a little different. She grabbed her African drum and started banging out a respectable rhythm and singing along.

"Try two hands," I advised. She nailed it. We rocked out while she sang along with me, totally going to town on the la-la-la-la-lalala-la's. Me and my five year old, at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning, sounding pretty good on a song by a sweating lunatic. Sweet.

"That was fun daddy," she glowed, "I'm going to be a musician!" I'll bet she is.

There's an awe inspiring version above, with the young 1977 Iggy glowing at around 10,000 watts. His class anger speech at the end is cool too. Wish I knew what he said.

Below is a photo of the girls and I eating strawberries at the Mercer Slough Nature Park today, where I learned that Lake Washington had once been lowered by 9 feet, that slough is pronounced "slew" and is a marshland connecting two bodies of water, and that there are bullfrogs there that eat mice, birds, and each other.