Chicken Wing Special
Throughout the entire month of July my schedule was completely packed with drumming events, and once the injury happened, rather than cancel or postpone, I went ahead and facilitated them all. Twenty to twenty-five groups per week, plus all commuting, set up and clean up, every single weekday, with one arm functional and the other folded within the brace. The nicknames began immediately. Folks my age who remembered the television show Six Million Dollar Man began calling me “Steve Austin” or “bionic man,” while younger players snickered about my likeness to “RoboCop,” or “Tony Stark” from the Avengers movies. But the moniker that really stuck was “chicken wing.” Guess my folded up limb does look rather chicken wing-ish, and I quickly realized how therapeutic it was to make friends with my physical anomaly instead of loathing it. Within the first two or three days of hosting events with my wing in a sling I adopted the nickname into the introductory comments I shared with every group: “Hi guys. My name is Cameron, in Africa they call me Cameroon, but you can call me… (raise left arm…) Chicken Wing,” which usually dissolved any of the kids’ potential hesitation into giggles.
Experienced at one-armed facilitation from previous injuries or not, throughout those first events my learning curve was damned near vertical. Hadn’t realized how much I had come to rely on my decades-long rhythmic training to speak for me until that option was entirely silenced. No more dazzling and inspiring neophyte players wordlessly, no more bridging the language gap with the universal language of music, no more wide-eyed cheers of amazement. The wellspring of joy I had always shared freely was suddenly bone dry.
And that’s when I found myself swimming in new oceans of possibility. I learned to model as much of each demonstration as I could with my arm-and-wing combo and to constantly give the kids verbal reminders to use both of their hands even though I could not. Best of all, it forced me to find and praise the movements of the players who most accurately modeled the technique or pattern we were trying to learn. All the golden nuggets of progress came from the participants, not their instructor. I was physically unable to demonstrate anything adeptly, so one hundred percent of our accomplishments came entirely from them. “Just like that..!” and “She’s doing it perfectly!” and “Copy his hands!” became my most frequent instructions and underscoring every speck of their success became my new primary teaching technique. Maybe it took longer that way and perhaps we ended up covering less content overall but the quality of our cooperation and genuine teamwork was priceless.
By the second week of metaphorically flapping in circles my instructional methods were profoundly altered, and I began hosting some of the most beautiful events of my life. Beautiful from the potency of joy and confidence radiating from the kids and the quantity of cooperation we’d shared by the conclusion of each class. The new successes had nothing to do with my skills, other than the shift in priorities and newfound vocabulary of compliments. It all came from them. Every speck of progress and success came from the participants. True facilitation rather than teaching.
By the third week I found myself saying something to the director of the Fun in the Sun program that I never imagined might come out of my mouth: “Have to admit, it’s better this way,” as I described how all my previous demonstrations were now being replaced with the students’ and that the results were unimaginably successful. We both busted up laughing when she responded, “We’ll have to get you some crutches or a wheelchair so you can keep doing these techniques next year after your arm is healed.”
The lessons continue…
Published:
Sep 21, 2022
Updated:
Apr 24, 2024
