One thing I have appreciated about being involved in a community choir again is the learning. I love to learn. In fact, I took a little test on strengthfinder.com and realized my #1 trait was “Learner.” I had never thought about it as a character trait before, but have since tried to hone the skill of learning.
One way to learn is to take in a ton of information. Another way to learn is to somehow process that information.
In choir, when you take in information, it may or may not “stick.” In my experience, because of the sheer amount of information in this world, most of it goes in, bounces around a little bit, and then gets shoved in the back of the closet, under the shoe box behind the bottom rack of hanging clothes. Know what I mean?
One way I try to continually work on the things I’m learning (as opposed to only always learning new things) is to take good notes. I’m not great at it (really, I’m not even good at it), but I want to work on it.
Taking great notes—for our purposes—means when you are given a vowel sound, for example, write the exact vowel sound OVER the printed vowel. Instead of “Joy to the world,”
write (in pencil, of course): J-OHee tOO thə wUH-rld, thə L-OHrd IHz cUHm. Make sense? Probably not if you are silently reading it. But if you sing it with these vowels, it will be beautiful. Try taking good great notes today.
-Bro. Ryan