Growing up, whenever I would ask my parents why they didn’t pay me for my good grades like some of my friends’ parents did, they would always remind me of the monkeys. Yes, the monkeys. Not the musical group, but the actual hairy, chattering, swinging-from-trees primates.
My sociologist father had told us about “the monkey study” so many times, we knew it by heart. According to my dad, the monkey study went something like this. Scientists taught a group of monkeys to put together a puzzle. They rewarded half of the monkeys with bananas each time the animals accomplished the task. The other half received nothing for completing the puzzle. The monkeys who were rewarded lost interest quickly in the puzzle and stopped putting it together. The monkeys who were not given bananas continued to put the puzzle together again and again, significantly longer than the other group.
In essence, the external reward (bananas) stifled the monkeys’ intrinsic desire to learn and their internal sense of accomplishment. My parents wanted us to love learning for learning, not for rewards. Thus, much to my youthful dismay, I received no money for my good grades.
I recently attended the funeral of my 96-year-old voice teacher and dear friend, Betty Jeanne Chipman. As her friends and family summarized with clarity her full and beautiful life, I reflected in wonder how this woman never stopped learning. Not because someone required it of her, or because some immediate reward awaited her, but simply because she loved to learn.
Betty Jeanne was a lifelong member of NATS and attended every workshop she could. She took copious notes and filed everything away for future reference when needed. She read everything she could find on pedagogy and teaching. She studied with pedagogues she admired in the states and abroad.
From that constant study, she developed her own teaching methodology and vocal exercises. Her aim was always to help her students achieve a free and healthy vocal technique that liberated each singer’s natural voice. Teaching was as much about sharing what she knew with her students as it was about learning from them.
I studied with Betty Jeanne during the last decade of her life. During those years, she was still inviting other teachers into her home to learn from them. She was always adding to her toolbox of exercises, maintaining the basics, but adapting as needed to address each singer’s unique needs. I had the singular opportunity of assisting her in preserving those ideas in her book, Singing with Mind, Body, and Soul: A Practical Guide for Singers and Teachers of Singing.
In her ’90s, when many might ask, “Why learn now?” Betty Jeanne was always open to learning new skills. Though at times daunting, she continued to use her computer and was an avid e-mailer. She even joined Facebook—and actively used her account!—before many of her children and grandchildren. Some of our last correspondence was about the value of turning her book—now used as a text at many universities—into an eBook.
Betty Jeanne often spoke of retiring from teaching. Such talk always got a hearty laugh from her children. And indeed, the week before she died she taught her Tuesday lessons, cancelled her Thursday lessons (something unheard of), was admitted to the hospital on Friday, and passed away one week later. She never had a chance to retire, and I think that’s just how she would have wanted it—anxiously engaged, always learning, to the very end.
I have often thought to write about Betty Jeanne in relationship to other issues of Classical Singer. She set an example in so many areas—balancing work and family, being the kind of teacher every singer should have, becoming a true expert in her field, the list goes on. But as her brilliant life has come to a close, I hope more than anything to follow her example of lifelong learning for the pure love of it.
May this small, inadequate tribute—along with some monkeys and our annual University issue—inspire you to the same.
