Leave a comment Posted on Joan Walsh Anglund, Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou, U.S. Postage Stamp

Angelou U.S. Stamp Quotes Another Writer

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”   Screenwriters James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck wrote this famous line for the John Ford directed 1962 film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” starring John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.

Such a sentiment was most recently on display when the United States Postal Service (USPS) unveiled its Maya Angelou stamp on Tuesday with First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey in attendance. On it is a quote: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

Unfortunately, those are not Angelou’s words.

The Washington Post broke the story on Monday after contacting the correct author, children’s book writer Joan Walsh Anglund. Here is the original quote as it appeared in her 1967 collection of poetry “A Cup of Sun”: “A bird does not sing because he has an answer. He sings because he has a song.”

Besides the change in pronoun gender, the correct quote has proper punctuation; the USPS’s version requires either a semi-colon or period to avoid being a run-on sentence.

Google the quote and Anglund’s name nary surfaces with most sources including Brainyquote attributing the words to Angelou.

Before laying blame completely on the dubious USPS fact checkers, the misquote was often used when introducing Angelou at public appearances without a word of clarification by her, so admirers naturally assumed it was hers.

As a teacher who has his students study her works, I was hoping to discover an explanation why Angelou never cleared that up. As of yet, I have been unable to find a reason.

Another quotation controversy occurred in 2013 when the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C. had to be revised less than two years after officially opening because one of the quotes inscribed was shortened resulting in a different connotation.

Here is what King said in a 1968 sermon:

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other things will not matter.”

Here is what was originally inscribed on the memorial:

“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

Among the critics who took umbrage with the abbreviated version was none other than Maya Angelou.

I had a similar experience happen to me. When the College Board released a report on the teaching profession in 2006, a large quote appeared on the front page attributed to a former IBM CEO.   Except that he never said those words.

The quote came from my book, The $100,000 Teacher, verbatim without a single modified word. I guess quoting an executive from a large corporation carried more gravitas than a classroom teacher even though the subject was teaching and not computers.

No telling if the USPS plans on correcting its mistake or at the very least offering a public apology to the 89-year-old writer who has taken the high road with her graciousness about the blunder, telling the Post “I love her [Angelou] and all she’s done.”

The whole brouhaha could have been avoided in the first place if instead of using a 16-word quote that is not even her own, the postal folks selected the title from one of her best known poems that also embodies Angelou: Phenomenal Woman.

Leave a comment Posted on doctors, Public Education, standardized test scores, students, teachers, teachers' unions, teaching, using test scores to evaluate teachers

Student Test Scores Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers

A lasting legacy of the No Child Left Behind federal legislation has been the notion of tying student test scores to teachers’ job evaluations. Due to the controversy of such an idea, the school districts around the country who have implemented it have limited its impact on a teacher’s overall performance.

Now, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is proposing to make test scores the primary factor in rating teachers, increasing the weight to 50 percent and downgrading the impact of traditional principal classroom observations to a scant 15 percent.

Teachers’ unions are not happy about this development especially considering that many of the politicians who support this trend are Democrats, the party that teachers financially support.

The question is: Is it possible for students to perform poorly on tests but still have a skillful teacher? The answer: absolutely. Is it possible for patients to be in poor health but still have a skillful physician?

Let’s say a doctor gets paid based on how healthy his patients are. Looking at this nation’s fitness statistics, an awful lot of physicians would be taking a pay cut.

Some aspects of a person’s health are based on lifestyle, while other ailments come on randomly or genetically. A doctor can only control a small amount of the choices a patient makes. And the same concept applies to education.

Yes, brilliant teachers can make a difference in some students’ academic life. But there will remain others that a teacher can’t reach, reasons entirely out of the influence of the educator. Teachers are not miracle workers. Learning is a two-way street.

An Advanced Placement teacher may falsely appear as a master of pedagogy since his students score high while a special education teacher of higher quality could have her job in jeopardy since her students score low.

As noted education writer Diane Ravitch said on her website, “ The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.”

To primarily use test scores to determine teacher quality is insulting. Education should not be so finely defined to view academic success as a high score on a test. I have had plenty of hand-raising young people who stimulate discussions, yet who struggle with expressing themselves on paper.

As a teacher, I use multiple measures to determine if my students meet language arts standards.   This includes class participation, speaking ability, writing competency, as well as test-taking skills.   A student can’t be judged solely in one of those areas and be given a grade that meets all the standards.   And neither can a teacher be judged competent on a test that is not even created by that instructor.

Numbers drive our society and No Child Left Behind with its standardized test scores that determine rankings of schools fed into that mentality. Remember when schools were rated according to their Academic Performance Index or API scores? Parents in Glendale bragged about their children attending the La Crescenta schools with the highest API numbers in the district. Did that mean that the teachers up on the hill were better than those in the southern part of the city?

No doubt looking at test results versus having principals make classroom visits takes less time. But it also reveals less information. Having humans observe a teacher live in front of students is a much more accurate assessment tool. The dynamic between teacher and student, the energy level in the room, the enthusiasm of the student doing work all don’t appear in a test score.

Those in charge of change in education, i.e., non-educators, should wake up and realize that there is a growing sentiment among educators and parents to lessen the influence of standardized test scores in classrooms.

Job number one is to attract people to the profession; job number two is to ensure that those good teachers already in classrooms remain there. Teaching already has enough negatives to dissuade people from entering the field. We don’t need to worsen how educators get evaluated to further erode the confidence of this country’s faculty.

Leave a comment Posted on hit and run drivers, pedestrian deaths

Strangers Doing the Right Thing is the Neighborly Thing to Do

Call me old-fashioned but I’m the type of person who believes in doing the right thing. It is a philosophy that flows through the way I conduct my life, including my teaching.

So it never ceases to boggle my mind when others don’t do the right thing.

Take, for example, the suspected driver of the car who killed the four-year-old girl in Glendale last week. No one can fathom the depth of that family’s grief. And no one can fathom what goes on in the mind of a driver who upon hitting another human being decides the best action to take is to flee the scene.

One can debate whether the driver or the girl was at fault. One cannot debate, however, about the one indisputable fact—the driver did not stop.

It goes beyond cowardice. How can a person treat another person like that? What kind of people are amongst us?

It was amazing that the individual turned himself in . . . the next day. All the more remarkable considering that the majority of hit and run drivers never get caught.

Based on an internal LAPD memo last fall that Channel 4 News obtained, “nearly four out of every five hit-and-run cases are never solved” with arrests made in “less than 20 percent of the 20,000 hit and run cases that get reported each year.” So, 54 hit-and-run events occur each day in Los Angeles. That is a lot of people who are menaces to society while driving around in 2-ton vehicles.

A few weeks ago the Florida Supreme Court ruled that hit-and-run drivers can’t be prosecuted if they have no knowledge that they were in an accident. Yes, read that sentence again. The case involved a 15-year-old skateboarder who was dragged 90 feet by a truck and whose board was cut in two with witnesses observing the truck going up and down over it. Yet the driver had no clue what had happened.

Glendale is ranked 194th out of the 200 largest U.S. cities in terms of safe driving in the 2014 Allstate Best Drivers Report where there is a 72% chance of a driver being involved in an accident.

Hitting walkers is not just an L.A. thing. Pedestrian incidents have gotten so out of control in Chicago averaging 3,000 a year, 30 of them fatal, that hundreds of signs were posted actually using drawings as to what drivers need to do when encountering them—stop—and we’re talking about marked crosswalks. Wow, do we really need to have a sign to remind drivers to stop for those walking? Evidently since over 250 of the nearly 350 signs costing $500 apiece were damaged by cars.

Another kind of do-they-really-need-to-spell-it-out signs can be viewed on Kenneth Road in Glendale where an electronic message board flashes a reminder that bicyclists need to obey all traffic rules. Unfortunately, such a memo needs displaying. Think about how many times you have actually noticed a bicyclist slow down (forget about stopping) at a 4-way or signaled stop. It occurs so rarely that when I actually see it I feel like high-fiving the rider if only he would slow down long enough.

It used to be “share the road” meant that drivers should take caution when passing bicyclists. However, the new slogan should read “share the road rules” for so many cyclists seem hell bent on never stopping while on a bike.

Pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers make up the traffic mix that we all traverse. When my son passed his behind-the-wheel driving test last week, I felt like celebrating his achievement until I realized what jungle he will have to survive in as a solo driver.

As a community, we depend on all of us to obey the laws. When just a small number don’t, all of us get impacted. And when accidents happen, we count on adults doing the right thing.

Leave a comment Posted on college ready, homework, vocational education

Free Community College Tuition is Not the Answer

What does $1,400 buy nowadays? One year of cell phone service with T-Mobile, one year of television with DirecTV, or one year’s tuition at a California community college—for 60% of students, that is. The other 40% pay no tuition.

Which is why the chorus of support for free community college tuition as proposed by President Obama in last month’s State of the Union address makes one pause.

It is one of those proposals that on the face of it sounds opposition-proof, a people-pleasing idea that would affect many: four out of every ten students attend a community college. The percentage is higher among Glendale students. But the President’s plan is for something that is not really needed.

Community college tuition is not the number one obstacle for most students. States with much higher tuition than California’s actually have higher completion rates.

Sure, some students have to work to pay for living expenses and are unable to attend college full-time, precluding them from finishing their college studies.

However, many attending community college are not stellar students.

Community colleges used to be the domain of those students whose income would not allow entrance to a state university campus.   After attending a junior college for two years, they would transfer to a 4-year institution to finish their degree.

Today, barely ten percent of community college students finish a bachelor’s degree within six years based on a study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. They struggled in high school and now need remedial coursework. Their past academic record of poor grades and easy classes did not meet the prerequisites of the state university system.

The solution isn’t to keep pushing these unprepared people into college. A kid who doesn’t fit the mold of a successful student—good grades, sits and listens attentively, does homework—doesn’t suddenly succeed by continuing assembly line-like in that traditional, passive environment.

Recall the old days when high schools provided viable vocational education alternatives for students skilled in other ways than book learning?

True, a person earns more money with a college degree than without one. However, not all jobs require them.

So having the federal government pay 75% and states the remaining 25% of the annual $6 billion needed to fund Obama’s project is not a smart investment.

The City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) goes beyond paying for tuition, providing textbooks, subway passes, and closely monitored individualized counseling.

No wonder that the ASAP has worked so far, with the disadvantaged students’ graduation rate nearly doubling, but costing 63% more than students not in the program, as reported by the nonprofit group MDRC.

Free tuition may help out a bit, but there is no funding in the President’s plan for the support services that have made ASAP successful.   If there were, the allocation would rise astronomically.

At the very least, any tuition-free proposal should ask something of its recipients. How about having students perform community service projects during their high school career in exchange for tuition? Tuition-free should not mean responsibility-free.

There is nothing wrong by having individuals make sacrifices in order to achieve goals. That is what makes attaining the goal so worthwhile. Giving people money doesn’t solve their problems. Just look at the lives of lotto winners.

Focus should be on rethinking the role of high school that still accelerates the notion that all must attend college. Of course, that is a much more complex problem to solve than simply providing people free tuition.

Leave a comment Posted on Capitol Records, Freddy Cole, Nat King Cole, Ralph Carmichael

The L-O-V-E of Nat King Cole

Since this column is being posted around Valentine’s Day I thought we would examine L-O-V-E. No, not the word “love” but the classic Nat King Cole record of 1964.

If it weren’t for Cole’s holiday perennial “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” people under 50 would have little awareness of him and his legacy in popular music.

Yet anyone who drives by the iconic Capitol Records building on Vine Street in Hollywood should know that its nickname is “The House That Nat Built” due to the amount of money Cole made for the record company since its inception in 1942.

Starting out as a pianist in his jazz combo the King Cole Trio, Cole soon transitioned from jazz musician to popular vocalist. He was the first African American to host a network television show in 1956. “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66,” “Mona Lisa,” and “Unforgettable” represent a sampling of his memorable songs.

“L-O-V-E” was written by Bert Kaempfert and Milt Gabler, becoming a hit in the summer of 1964. The rest of the album (named after the song’s title) was recorded in December 1964. Released in January 1965, Cole died the following month.

Ralph Carmichael was the arranger and conductor in Cole’s final recording years.

Still active at age 87, Carmichael has worked with some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century including Count Basie, Glen Campbell, Ray Charles, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, Dean Martin, and Johnny Mathis.

Carmichael has “fond memories” of Cole describing him as having “a natural gift of music.”

He vividly recalls those December sessions. Nat King Cole had an engagement at the now defunct Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos so Capitol brought up musicians from Los Angeles to record in San Francisco on December 1-3.

I asked Carmichael if he detected anything at all not well with Nat.

“He had quit smoking, but during breaks he would smoke a cigarette,” Carmichael recalled. Other than that, “Nat showed no hesitancy, no weakness, he was amazing.”

Carmichael remembers that Cole “came dressed in a suit and that was unusual. Later I realized that that was his way of celebrating whatever life he had left.”

If you listen to the whole “L-O-V-E” album, you would never detect from his singing that he had only 72 days left to live. His vocals are strong, his holding of notes impressive at the end of songs.

Knowing how little time Cole had left, there is a melancholy eeriness to some of the lyrics.

From “Thanks to You” he sings “each day that I’ll be living.”

From “More” he sings “I only live to love you more each day.”

From “Three Little Words” he sings “to hear those three little words that’s all I’d live for the rest of my days.”

From “How I’d Love to Love You” he sings “you’ll always be with me till life is through.”

Freddy Cole, Nat’s youngest brother, still performs live in concert at age 83 singing some of his sibling’s songs. He fondly recalls his older brother as “a hell of a nice guy.”

So, while exchanging Valentine’s Day gifts, listen to some Nat King Cole.

Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of his death at St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

If he had lived, he would have been 95 years old.

Leave a comment Posted on measles, parents, public school, students, teachers

Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Children Are Abusive

What began as a curious story of a small measles outbreak in, of all places, the so-called Happiest Place on Earth, Disneyland, has stretched to nearly 100 cases across 8 states and into Mexico.

With all the health problems that can befall people, the last thing we need is for people themselves to harm each other by not getting vaccinated against scourges that modern medicine has already eradicated.

Parents who choose not to give their children vaccinations due to irrational mistrust of medical science not only put their own children in harm’s way, but allow diseases which should remain in history books to resurrect.

As an educator who works in a public school, I have no choice but to be tested for tuberculosis every 4 years. Why? So if I am infected I don’t pass it along to children. I can’t opt out.

However, parents do have that option by filling out the California Department of Public Health’s Personal Beliefs Exemption to Required Immunizations or PBE. Last year, the PBE was revised to require the signature of an “authorized health care practitioner.” While this requirement was intended to make it harder for the form to be completed, all a parent has to do is check off the “religious beliefs” box which requires no medical employee to sign it.

A few short months ago the Ebola hysteria consumed the nation.   Yet there is much more likelihood of a child catching measles than Ebola in this country, a disease with a 90% chance of transference when in contact with an infected individual.

Luckily, the Glendale-Burbank area has been spared thus far. Glendale Unified School District Health Services Coordinator Lynda Burlison said that in the nearly 20 years she was worked in the district, “the last case of measles that I can recall was back in 2000.”

Very few parents have submitted PBEs. Still, there are some schools which have a significant number of children who do not have all their shots.

By visiting the California Department of Education’s (CDE) website and navigating to the Shots for School link, anybody can type in a zip code and click on a specific preschool, elementary, or middle school to receive immediate information.

Schools with fewer than 70% of fully vaccinated students earn a “most vulnerable” rating by the CDE.   Based on the most current information available from the 2013-14 school year, Burbank has one such school, Walt Disney Elementary (how ironic), with 62.8% of the kids there vaccinated.

Glendale, however, has four elementary schools ranked “most vulnerable” with an “increased risk for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases”: Thomas Jefferson at 68.7%, John Muir at 63.8%, Benjamin Franklin at 60%, and Columbus Elementary at 56.1%.

Just south of Glendale in the Los Angeles Unified School District is Fletcher Drive Elementary where just 40.4% of children have all the required shots meaning more than half of the student population lacks full vaccination. There is an outbreak ready to happen.

If one occurs, those with waivers would be expected to remain home for up to 21 days, the incubation period for measles. This Wednesday nearly 70 non-immunized Palm Desert High School students have been required to stay home for at least two weeks due to an infected teen.

It is a cruel irony that since diseases such as polio and measles have for the most part been eradicated for so long, there exist few eyewitness accounts of people who have had to battle these ailments, leading some to think they are safe.

Maybe the government needs to blast billboards and websites with photos of children afflicted with measles to get people’s attention.

Ultimately, parents who don’t immunize their children exhibit the highest form of selfish behavior. They are taking for granted that the herd immunity of the community will protect their own children.

These militant parents are more than just anti-vaccinators—they are anti-society. As a parent, yes, job number one is protecting your child. But once a parent’s actions go beyond the boundaries of one’s home and will cause harm to other people’s children, the concept of one’s right to do whatever you want no longer applies.

It’s a small world after all.

Leave a comment Posted on journalism, students

A Student with a Go After It Attitude

I often encourage my student journalists not to feel fearful or intimidated when selling advertisements or speaking to adults for articles.   However, it remains challenging for many of these young people to assert themselves.   A small minority do have a natural “go after it” attitude. One such person is Melody Shahsavarani.

A senior at Hoover High, I have known Melody for three years, first as an honors English student and now as a budding journalist working for the school newspaper, the Tornado Times. She always has a smile on her face that attracts the listener to whatever topic she is discussing.

During winter break, Melody emailed the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team to see if she could cover one of their games as a sports journalist. After not receiving a reply back, she remembered how welcoming new Clipper owner and Microsoft billionaire Steve Ballmer was to the fans so she contacted him directly.

Within a couple of days, she was sitting in the back seat of her friend’s car when she noticed an email on her cell phone with the words “high school” in the message line.

“I thought it was an ASB thing,” Melody said since she is a member of the Associated Student Body serving as Senior Class President.

When she opened up the correspondence, she could not believe the opening words “Steve forwarded me your email.”

“I died right there,” Melody said with an excitable cadence.

President of Business Operations Gillian Zucker responded on behalf of Ballmer and was impressed with her spunk and tenacity so much that Melody was indeed invited to cover the Clipper game last week against the Dallas Mavericks at Staples Center. She would be afforded all privileges of the working press, from the media parking lot to attendance at press conferences as well watching the game from the official press box.

Like a dream, Melody found herself sitting in front of head coach Doc Rivers at the pre-game conference and Chris Paul and her idol Blake Griffin at the post-game conference. While she was unable to ask a question due to a prior selection protocol, she still found the event fascinating.

“I couldn’t believe how tall Michael Smith was,” Melody said of the 6’10” Clipper radio and TV color commentator who does the Clipper games alongside legendary play-by-play announcer Ralph Lawler. “I stood right at his waist.”

She describes the experience as the biggest thrill of her life, with a clearer understanding of “the adrenaline rush of what it’s like to be a sports journalist.”

What these students may not realize is how much more excited I am for their accomplishments.   Few things bring more pleasure to teachers than when students have breakthrough moments.

Hopefully Melody will continue pursuing other endeavors with the same zeal as she did with covering the Clipper game. Her only regret was not being able to take a photo of herself with Griffin.

“They told me that as a reporter I had to be neutral,” Melody said even though she wore her Clipper sweatshirt to the game.

“Honestly, I almost died when Blake Griffin looked at me courtside when he was practicing before the game.”   In fact, she requested that I change her last name to Shahsavarani-Griffin, but that would be inaccurate (at least as of press time).

Leave a comment Posted on teaching, winter break

What Happens When You Have Too Much Time on Your Hands

Writing a blog post right between the end of one year and the start of another is tricky.   Typically writers come up with “the list of the [fill in the blank] of 2014.”   I thought about selecting the top education stories of the year but got a bit depressed.

So before we continue examining challenges of public education for 2015, allow me to share how I spent part of my winter break.

While I am not a fan of starting school in early August, I do like finishing the semester before Christmas.   Students take final exams in middle and high schools so when they return on January 7 they don’t have to turn in projects since a new semester will commence (though a few of my students did mention work assigned by some teachers over vacation).

There really are only two times when my mind is not “on” when it comes to my job: winter break and summer break.   Since spring break occurs in the middle of the semester, it feels more like a pause in learning, rather than a true mental vacation.

Over the years I have noticed that it takes a few days for my body and mind to work at a slower more natural pace.   When I am in work mode, it is difficult even on weekends for me not to think about lessons or students.

So when I am at rest, one of the pleasures I indulge in is to allow my mind to wander, sparked with curiosity, on a number of topics.

In the past week, I read Billy Crystal’s memoir Still Foolin’ ’Em and Jane Leavy’s biography on Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy. How are the two connected?

It started with Crystal discussing his friendship with Mantle in the remaining years of the ballplayer’s life.   In fact, Crystal attended Mantle’s funeral in 1995.   I double-checked this by watching the video of the ceremony on YouTube and there is Bob Costas pointing him out in the audience.

Coincidentally in 2001, Crystal ended up directing the film 61* about Mantle’s and fellow New York Yankee Roger Maris’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s record (at the time) of 60 homeruns in a season.   This sparked an interest to watch again the Ken Burns’ 1994 PBS documentary series Baseball, a first viewing for my baseball-loving teenaged son.

I then read Leavy’s book on Mantle.   I found myself interrupting my reading in order to view aspects of Mantle’s life online such as a local television video of his retirement ceremony at Yankee Stadium on June 8, 1969.

This exploration of Mantle led me to the ESPN 2007 miniseries “The Bronx is Burning” exploring the tumultuous year of 1977 for New Yorkers through the dual stories of the Yankees’ World Series season with the Son of Sam serial killings. One of Mantle’s closest friends and fellow drinking buddy was Billy Martin who managed the team that year.

And as I watched the TV show, I found out that the lead New York City police detective on the Son of Sam case, Timothy Dowd, who is prominently portrayed in the program, died last week at age 99.

Whether the connections mean anything or not, they do mean that life can be quite fascinating once your mind isn’t preoccupied with regular daily duties. Or maybe I need to return to work before I began exploring other New York crime waves.

Leave a comment Posted on ASCAP, Christmas Songs, Mariah Carey, Walter Afanasieff

The Story Behind “All I Want for Christmas is You”

Nearly seventy years ago a music teacher filling in for his wife’s second grade class asked the children what they wanted for Christmas.   When hearing the sibilant sounds erupting all over the room, it inspired the man, Donald Yetter Gardner, to compose “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth.” Two years later, the song was number one in the country.

So I decided to ask my students the same thing. I told them to fill in the blank: “All I want for Christmas is . . .” and as if they had rehearsed their answer for hours, the chorus of voices came back loud and clear, “. . . YOU!” Obviously, the Mariah Carey song had left an indelible impression on their minds. To millennials, “All I Want” is their “White Christmas.”

“All I Want” is on the Top 30 Holiday Songs of the Century list compiled by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) [ascap.com/press/2014/1203-top-holiday-songs-100-years], the newest song on the list.

Commemorating its 20th anniversary, the 1994 composition was co-written and co-produced by Walter Afanasieff. If his name doesn’t ring a Christmas bell, look at some of the recording artists he has worked with: Michael Jackson, Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, Savage Garden, Beyoncé, Michael Bolton, Josh Groban, Luther Vandross.

Multiple Grammy award winner and nominee, Afanasieff won his first for producing Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” from “Titanic.” Within the last couple of months he has produced Barbra Streisand’s latest album “Partners” which is nominated for a Grammy Award this year, and Idina Menzel’s “Holiday Wishes.”  Menzel, who made a name for herself in “Wicked,” also sang “Let it Go” in the Disney animated film “Frozen.”

What’s interesting is that while Afanasieff worked on the Oscar-winning songs “Beauty and the Beast” and “A Whole New World,” the Disney executives who knew him had left the company so he wasn’t on the radar when “Frozen” was made.

He is currently working on a Broadway musical for Menzel revolving around Julia Butterfly Hill, the activist who sat in a redwood tree for 738 days back in the late 1990s.

Afanasieff is no stranger to producing Christmas albums. The first one he did with Kenny G called “Miracles” has sold over 10 million copies.

A modest and gracious person, Afanasieff said that when he and Carey wrote “All I Want” in New York during the summertime they never expected it would become a classic.

“I thought ‘Miss You Most (at Christmas Time)’ was going to be the big hit off the album,” Afanasieff said.

“‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ is basically a simple song; it took form quickly, no more than an hour or so for the music, and Mariah had the lyrics soon after that.”  All of the instruments heard on the recording is “just me playing all of the parts sequenced from the keyboard.”

One quality unique about “All I Want” is that “we created probably the only uptempo Christmas love song . . . that everybody can relate to.”

Afanasieff feels “very appreciative of the legacy of the song.”

“When I hear the song playing during Christmas, in a mall or someplace, it makes me feel quite proud.”

Perhaps someone out there will end up writing a new Christmas classic that in 2035 will be marking its 20th anniversary, part of the canon of carols.

Perhaps it may even be Afanasieff himself.

Leave a comment Posted on Christmas Songs, mel tormé, teaching

It’s Christmas Time so Let’s Remember Mel Tormé

For years now on most Fridays I begin class not with a grammar or writing exercise but with a music lesson as a way to broaden my students’ musical knowledge by playing for them some of the great singers and composers of the 20th century, artists I know they don’t have on their iPods.   Why waste their time playing the latest Taylor Swift song from “1989” when I can introduce them to an entertainer born in 1899?

Around this time of year I usually do my Mel Tormé lesson.   When I ask my students if they have heard of him or know “The Christmas Song,” not an arm goes up.   However, when I play Nat King Cole singing the opening words “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” smiles and nods appear.

What especially gets my students’ attention is when I inform them that Tormé was their age when he wrote his first hit song. Then I tell them the story of how he visited his then songwriting collaborator Bob Wells at his house in Toluca Lake on a 100-degree day in 1945.

As a way of escaping the stifling heat (the house had no air conditioning), Wells decided to cool himself off by writing a poem about Christmas. Those 25 words ended up becoming the beginning lines to “The Christmas Song,” completed after just 45 minutes.

That composition has remained a part of the holiday soundtrack after 69 years and counting.

Following my own advice to my students about contacting famous people who they admire, I reached out to Daisy Tormé, one of Mel’s five children, and an actor and a singer in her own right, who frequently hosts KCET’s special programming.   I wanted to find out how special her family Christmases were considering her father had a great deal to do with making the season bright.

It is something that the public easily forgets when it comes to celebrities, that after their work is done, they go back to being husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.   And to Daisy, Mel was a daddy first, “the best dad.”

She has cherished memories of Christmas with her father who would purposely not schedule any work during the holidays in order to spend time with his family.   She describes “The Christmas Song” as “an American Song, magical for all of us.”

Wall Street Journal’s drama critic Terry Teachout describes “The Christmas Song” as “one of the most harmonically complex songs ever to become a hit.” Still, if it weren’t for Christmas songs heard on the radio and in the stores this time of year, how many people under the age of 50 would know who Mel Tormé or Bing Crosby were? It is a shame how quickly artists who were once extremely popular over the course of decades can be quickly forgotten.

To further illustrate this, Daisy related a story about her father who was at the storied Farmer’s Market when carolers strolled by singing “The Christmas Song” which they knew he had written though ignorant that he was a renaissance man in the industry: songwriter, singer, actor, musician.

After joining the singers in finishing the song, one of them told him that he “wasn’t that bad of a singer.” When Tormé said that he had recorded a few records in his time, the young man asked, “how many?” “Ninety.”

One of the main reasons why the song resonates so deeply is the line “and so I’m offering this simple phrase to kids from one to ninety-two,” an unusual use of first person point of view where the songwriter directly addresses the listener.

Daisy wistfully reveals that “every time I hear the song, I get emotional because it is like getting a hug from my father.”

And while Tormé never did make it to “ninety-two” having passed away in 1999 at age 73, his song has been around for almost as long as he was—and will certainly go on as long as people wish to hear beautiful music at Christmas time.   To quote Messrs. Tormé and Wells, “Merry Christmas to you.”