Okorie Johnson:
In order for you to be a good conversationalist, it really requires not just speaking, but listening, right? It requires, as a teacher being able to walk into a classroom, and while you understand that you have perhaps marching orders in a curriculum, you have to be clear about what is it that actually needs to be taught. And this particular moment on Tuesday at 10:30 AM, what does this class need? What conversation does this class actually need to have? Sometimes that's a conversation that's specifically about the curriculum, and there are lots of different ways of starting a conversation. Some of them are literally with language, some of them are with reflection, some of them are with journaling. Some of them are with creating an experience. But the reality is, at every moment you are, as a teacher, asking yourself, what does the conversation need to be? And how can I, as the facilitator of the conversation, create an experience that makes a rich conversation for all of us?

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I'm Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Okori Johnson, who performs his OkCello. He also taught high school English for 10 years. Okori performed and spoke at the PBL Leadership Academy last week, and teacher, musician and producer Ben Krueger sat down with him to talk about music teaching and community. And appropriately, they talk about how all three of those are themselves a form of conversation. Let's get into it.

Ben Krueger:
Okori Johnson, otherwise known as OkCello, is a cellist, a former educator, English teacher. He has collaborated with a Georgia Symphony Orchestra to compose and play music live. He has been featured on the Tamron Hall Show. He's collaborated with tons of artists, notably India Ari, and many others, and is just a wonderful musician and educator, and we're so pleased to have him here. So welcome, Okori. Nice to see you today.

Okorie Johnson:
Thank you, Ben. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to be here.

Ben Krueger:
Thank you. So I wanted to start by just talking a little bit, you're so focused on stories, and I wanted to just talk a little bit about your origin story. And so, I was hoping you could tell us how you transformed from Okori Johnson to be known as OkCello, at least professionally.

Okorie Johnson:
Yeah, yeah. Well, as OkCello, I'm a cellist and a looper and an improviser, and a composer, and a storyteller. And a lot of my work is informed by my personal relationship to the African diaspora. But that iteration of my kind of artistic identity is only about 10 or 11 years old. I started playing the cello when I was six, and I think at the time most people imagined that I was going to be exclusively classical, although I don't even know that my mom imagined that I was going to play after high school. I ended up not playing at all in college, which I think made my private teacher kind of sad, or at least the most accurate way to say that is I decided not to go to music school. I decided not to go to a conservatory. And for typical reasons, I think some people might identify with that.
I was a teenager and I wanted to do a whole bunch of things. And I think my teacher wanted me to practice two, three hours a day, and I wanted to play basketball or talk on the phone to girls, or be in the play and just do things that at least at the time, I thought were representative of a more well-rounded teenage life. And I guess the other reason why I didn't want to go to music school is I was interested in a lot of music and it felt like if I went to music school, I was pretty much going to be very specifically focusing on classical music. And while I like classical music, that's not where I was at 17, 18. So honestly, Ben, I was pretty content to put the cello down my senior year of high school. And I don't know that at that time I thought I was going to continue to play.
I think I might've been thinking that I was stopping. I guess little would I know that that was the end of one chapter and another chapter was about to begin in college. I was at Morehouse and I brought my cello my sophomore year to school. I think I brought it my freshman years to school too. I was playing in an orchestra for non-majors. It was an okay orchestra, but it was just people, there wasn't an orchestral major. There wasn't like a cello or a violin major or just a string or woodwind kind of major at Morehouse at all. And I was walking back from that rehearsal one day, and a guy that I maybe knew a little bit, but didn't know well, was standing on the balcony of his dorm room playing Stone Temple Pilots, playing plush, which is a very strange occurrence at an historically Black school.
You know what I mean? It wasn't the '90s, it was '94, you know what I mean? But still, just wasn't particularly common. But I loved it, fell in love with what he was playing. And I walked into his side of the dorm, listened to the music, staked my way all the way up to where I thought he was. I found his room, and I just sat down and listened to him play outside of his room. And I think you get bits and pieces of a story the more you are telling it, or the more you engage people. So apparently his roommate across the hall saw this random dude that neither of them knew, sitting outside of his door, and he was like, "Dude, I think you should go check out your front door. There's somebody out there sitting down with an instrument too. I don't know what's going on."
And so he poked his head out and said, "Hey, how you doing?" I said, "I'm fine." And he said, "Can I help you?" And I was like, "Yeah, no, not really. I'm just sitting here listening to you play. Is that okay? Can I sit outside your door?" And he's like, "Yeah, that seems a little weird. No, I don't really want you sitting outside of my door." And then he saw to the right of me that I had my cello with me. He said, "But you can come inside and bring your cello and we can just jam." And I'd never jammed with anyone before. I never played with a non-orchestral person, really. And I kind of told him, "No, it's cello. It's not really what we do." And he was like, "It's whatever, man. Just go figure it out. You'll be fine." And I was like, "Okay."
So I went inside and I started jamming with him, and it was amazing. I ended up having a part to that song that he was playing Plush maybe about an hour later. Then we kept playing for another two hours, and I had a cello part to two of his original songs. Then three hours later, we had three songs that we could play together. A week later, we played those three songs, I think, at a music fraternity concert. And then a week after that, we decided to make ourselves a band. That began one chapter or phase of my career as a cellist that played with singer-songwriters. He was a singer-songwriter. We became a band. So I guess I kind of became a singer-songwriter. It was the first time I started writing songs, but for the most part I played with him. And then India Arve was shortly there afterwards. And then there was a woman named Doria Roberts was shortly after her.
And then there was a woman named Leah Morgan. I met her in Washington DC, India and Doria were in Atlanta. I moved to Washington DC. Then I came back to Atlanta, another phase of my life, and played with a woman named Callahan. And so that phase of my life from say 19 or 20 until about 40, was a combination of playing gigs with musicians. And I loved it. And at some points in my career, I even endeavored to do it full time, but it was always one of the things that I did, for the rest of my life up until 40, I would probably also either be a teacher or something else. So that's the story of how I started playing the cello outside of the classical world and how I ended up becoming OkCello was about 11 years ago now, almost 11 years ago.
In this period of time when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, I left the classroom to go produce a film. The short version of it is that the film was plateauing and probably failing, and I was trying to keep the lights on by doing session work and lessons and all that kind of stuff. But then there was this moment when I had been experimenting with a looper and I ended up writing a song that changed my life. It changed the way I related to my instrument. All of a sudden, I saw myself as a primary artist, as opposed to supporting artist. I found a process through which I could tell stories on my instrument with the looper, which was really new to me, of just being able to build a song from the bottom up and to invest in a melody, a narrative that could speak, was new.
And then all of a sudden people saw me differently. Like, "Oh wow, we'd love what you're doing. We'd love you to come and play here." I played maybe 11 or 12 solo concerts, which I'd never done before. Two of those were outside of Atlanta, one was in DC and one was in London. And then by the time I finished that year, people were like, "Yeah, you're a thing. You're an artist. We're interested in your voice." And then maybe about a year or two later, I'd stumble into the name OkCello, and I went and record my first album, [inaudible 00:08:52]. It's been moving in that direction pretty significantly ever since. That's a long answer to your question, but that is the origin story of OkCello for the most part.

Ben Krueger:
I want to ask you about one part of that that seems like quite a turning point, and it was about the story about you sitting outside of your friend's door before you had met him. I think that's something so interesting, and I would love to hear your perspective. For people that are non musicians, the difference between improvisation and creating parts and playing classical music, because not everybody knows that distinction. And I want to talk just a little bit about the distinction and how that experience was for you, going from a very more scripted, stricter, classical background, into something that was more free and involved, taking risks and making errors in order to achieve what you wanted. I would love to hear your views on that with music, because I think that also relates to the classroom.

Okorie Johnson:
Well, what's interesting is that I to this day, really feel like I owe a great debt of gratitude to my best friend, who was my best friend now, he wasn't then at the time, who basically said, "Just sit down and figure it out." As a classical musician, you are pretty much taught to play what's on the page, and there is a real intensity to the way that people prepare you to play and expect you to play what's on the page. Not only are you expected to play what's on the page, but you're expected to play what's on the page in the style and the tradition and the convention that it has been performed or perfected. And you are measured against that standard. And I don't want to poo, poo on the classical tradition, but there's a lot of anxiety for professional musicians, because so much of their worth is pretty much measured on how exactly they can reproduce a performance of a known canonical piece.
And that means that there are clear right and wrong notes. And you grow up with a fear of playing wrong notes when you're a classical musician and you are really, really invested in knowing what the right notes are. I mean, I've never been formally trained as a composer or anything like that, but I think composing requires a lot more trial and error. And most classical musicians are not trained as composers. But more important than that, the kind of contemporary world of music performance, which includes jazz and maybe everything from rock and roll to pop, is not actually rooted in the classical world very much at all. It's rooted in an improvisational world. Improvisational, perhaps the most ambitious extreme of being able to play an amazing solo in the middle of a jazz stand or something like that. But perhaps the most common standard is can you make up your own part? Right?
Here are the chords. Here's the melody, here are the words. As the cellist in the group, what do you hear? How would the cello compliment this arrangement? And that's what was happening for me in those early years, playing with my buddy Julian, and then playing with India and not just playing with those leaders of the band, but the band, right? The keyboard player, the bass player, the drummer, the saxophone player, the trumpet player, because everyone in the room, and it's really collaborative and you're playing. And first off, you have to learn how to amplify your instruments, so that you can be heard amongst all these other loud instruments. And then they're like, so where are you going to fit in? You got to know what the strata is for a band, and are you going to play at the bottom? Well, if there's a bass player, that might be hard, are you going to play at the top?
Well, being at the really top is sometimes really hard. Or are you going to play in between the spaces when the vocalist is singing or not singing? There's all this stuff that you have to figure out, and there's no one answer. It just depends on the song, on the ensemble, on the genre. And then so that process of learning how to fit in as a solo orchestral instrument into the band world, was intense and stressful and wonderful, and the people who taught me were really loving and supportive, but the stakes felt high all the time, because the changes are the changes, and they're moving as fast as they are. So that's very different than the classical world where someone gives you a part, you go home, you learn it, you bring it to the rehearsal, and you perfect it. This is on the fly, in the room, what do you hear? How does it work with what I'm doing? How can you change it real time? And how can you remember it, so that we can perform it?
And then there's another layer of, well then, now that you can write your own part, are you able to write a song where you can imagine most of the parts, or at least be an inspiration for the other parts? And can you imagine a song, can you imagine a musical communication that conveys an emotion or a sentiment or an idea, or at the very least, takes the listener on a journey? And as classical musicians we're generally not invited into those last two worlds. And I was invited, but it still was a kind of wilderness. And so, that invitation that Julian Tillery, my best friend, gave me outside of his dorm room was really massively important, because I'm honestly certain I probably would not have walked through that door, had not someone insisted and had not many other musicians over the next 20 years or so, insisted that I take another step towards professional audio, or that I take another step towards playing by ear, or I take another step towards soloing in the middle of a song, or I take another step towards this moment of the show is just you.
What do you want to play? What do you want to do? Or even just when I was teaching cello lessons and teaching with a bunch of jazz musicians, they're saying, you need to learn this standard, because you're going to be in it and you're going to walk the bottom and we're going to look to you for solo. And it sounds stressful, particularly any classical musicians that are listening to it, they're like, I don't know that I would ever want to do this, particularly without the safety or the structure of a canon and teachers and a tradition, which all of which I didn't have the benefit of. But it was probably the most rewarding fumbling around and sound that I could have imagined, because it not only gave me a career, but it gave me a voice and a relationship with my instrument that I think is really different. And I like to describe it as unchaperoned by a composer, by a teacher or a conductor.

Ben Krueger:
I hear themes of listening.

Okorie Johnson:
For sure.

Ben Krueger:
I hear themes of experimentation, vulnerability.

Okorie Johnson:
Absolutely.

Ben Krueger:
And the willingness to put yourself out there without knowing the outcome. I want to focus on listening a little bit, because I think it also has so many parallels to the classroom. One thing that I think people that are not experienced musicians underestimate, is how large of a piece of playing music, and as you said, composing and fitting in with others is listening. And you mentioned it in kind of long form talking about how you fit in. I want to talk a little bit about what role you think listening plays in music. And I want to hear for you as someone who's an experienced English teacher, as well as a musician, how those themes apply to your classroom and your teaching methodology too.

Okorie Johnson:
Absolutely. The older I get, the more I'm beginning to believe that almost everything for me comes back down to language and communication. And I think for me, another way of talking about community is the idea of conversation. And I think what we love about music, what we love about the classroom is that these are essentially just conversations. We focus very much on the kind of practical learning, the acquiring of skills and that kind of thing. But in order for us to do that, we are having conversations, and I don't mean just conversations around words. I mean, when a teacher constructs an experience, creates an opportunity for a student to have a deeper learning experience with an idea or with a skill set, they essentially are creating a conversation. They're opening a door for that student to walk into that conversation. So I really, really, really believe that in order for you to be a good conversationalist, which means you are a good student or a good teacher, that means you are a good performer or musician or composer.
In order for you to be a good conversationalist, it really requires not just speaking, but listening. It requires, as a teacher, being able to walk into a classroom, and while you understand that you have perhaps marching orders in a curriculum, you have to be clear about what is it that actually needs to be taught. At this particular moment on Tuesday at 10:30 AM, what does this class need? What conversation does this class actually need to have? Sometimes that's a conversation that's specifically about the curriculum, and there are lots of different ways of starting a conversation. Some of them are literally with language, some of them are with reflection, some of them are with journaling, some of them are with creating an experience. But the reality is, at every moment you are, as a teacher, asking yourself, what does the conversation need to be?
And how can I, as the facilitator of the conversation, create an experience that makes a rich conversation for all of us? As a student, as an adult student, when you take some of the responsibility for the things that you want to learn, the thing is being able to listen to what is being offered, and maybe even more important as an adult learner, being able to ask, well, what voice isn't here? Or what else needs to be said? Or what's the next note or what's the next thing? But as a musician, listening is so huge and there's so many audiences that you're listening to, but the first audience that you really have to be able to listen to is yourself. You have to be aware of what you're thinking and what you're feeling. I think as a musician, as an instrumentalist, you have to be aware of what your body likes on the instrument, what it likes to do, what it likes to hear, how it likes to feel.
And then you have to take that awareness and put it in conversation with either an idea, if you're a composer. Or with an ensemble, if you're in a band. Or with a moment, if you're a performer. And being able to listen and respond thoughtfully, sensitively, and in a way that creates space for another response. I think that's the magic, right? That's what the PBL work here is at HTH, right? It's creating a conversation whereas a teacher, I can maybe start the conversation, but I'm asking the students to finish it. As a musician, we love to talk about amazing performers. In the classical world, we love to talk about the yo-yo ma's and the manual axes, or in the rock and roll world, maybe we love talk about Van Halen's or the Herbie Hancock's and that kind of thing like that. But for a person who is not involved in music, you just really think that they're amazing, because of their output.
I especially like to talk about this with singers. We also think singers have these amazing voices. Singers are not amazing or beautiful, because of their voice, usually they're amazing or moving or effective, because of their choices. And that what they choose to do are almost always those choices are informed by what they're listening to and what they're responding to. They're never just volleying or leading. They are listening sensitively to the chords or to the musicians or to the moment or to the sentiment.
But a virtuoso that has no sensitivity and no connection to the world around them, isn't an especially effective or moving artist. And I think in the same way, a teacher who has an amazing command of a subject or a subject matter, but has no sensitivity to the room or to the brains that are there in the room to learn from the teacher or more important, has no interest in listening to the other brains, so that that teacher either can learn something more about their subject matter or they can learn more about how to foster or facilitate a conversation. It's not really a particularly moving teacher. So yeah, listening is massively important. I'm acutely aware of the irony of how long I'm talking or how much I'm talking, and the weirdness of talking about listening. I'm hoping that there's some grace or some patience in understanding the format, but that's what I believe.

Ben Krueger:
One thing I want to ask you about is something as a teacher you always felt was important was that the students hear their voice in the first 10 minutes of class, and I want to ask you about why that was important to you, and I want to hear about your perspective on why you prioritize that and what you saw as the results of that practice.

Okorie Johnson:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the thing that I'm committed to is that classroom space is communal space. Even if there is a facilitator, even if there is a content expert in the room, if you have 20 people in a room, and the goal is for the majority of those folks to have a learning experience and it's communal space. I think the second thing is that people learn better when they learn actively. And the way that you learn actively is by believing that you have permission to be active, that you have permission to be present. And the thing that is weird about schools and teachers, I remember doing parent-teacher conferences and I taught in some prep schools, and there were some parents who were actually really, excuse me, important and accomplished and affluent, and they would have to come into my classroom for a one-on-one conference about their student.
And I can't tell you how many people that out in the real world, I feel like could probably buy and sell me or, you know what I mean, who just had so much more power and influence than I did. But when they walked into my classroom, there was this muscle memory that brought them back to being 10 and being in the presence of a teacher that could get them in trouble. So I remember having these judges, or these CEOs and these accountants, really nervous or anxious and deferential. And we're aware of the power dynamic that the classroom, for the most part traditionally has existed in. And I don't know that the power dynamic is particularly effective for our more contemporary philosophies of learning. And so, if that's the case, then I think you have to allow students to hear themselves in the space, so that one, they realize that they themselves are owners of this space, to some degree.
And then in addition to that, that they can feel like the power dynamic doesn't inhibit their participation in the space, but that it invites and it encourages. So that's a huge thing to me. The first day of a class is not about curriculum for me. It's not about setting the tone and making sure that kids understand that they can't get away with things, and it's just not about that. It literally is about let's get to know each other. Let's see if we can build enough of a relationship with each other that you can trust me to help lead you on a journey. And you're going to have to be a part of this traveling journey, like looking off to the side saying, okay, there's a thing here that do we need pay attention to that. And then as the facilitator guide, I need to be able to say, that's important.
That's scary, that's wonderful. Let me tell you about that. And this is how that's connected to ultimately where we're going. And if I don't have voices, if I don't have eyes, if I don't have people who are doing that work with me, then it's not a really, it's not as powerful of an experience as it could be. That asks a lot of teachers, it asks a lot of students, but I don't know what we're doing in the classroom if we aren't asking a lot of each other. If not, we've got YouTube. You can just go and look it up. If it's just about getting the information, then yeah, you can go to YouTube and get it. You can go to any number of online resources.
Once we walk into a classroom, once we walk into a community, I hope that at the very least we're getting skills and engaging concepts. But at the most, that we're experiencing the magic of discovery and of community and of the joy of growth. And if we're not doing that, then that's not always a classroom that I'm super excited to be part of. There are very different philosophies of education. There are people who just like, we're here to get a thing. It doesn't need to be magical. I need to provide the thing that we're trying to get. You need to be willing to get it. That's not really my experience or philosophy of conversation as it relates to the classroom, the stage or anything.

Ben Krueger:
Yeah. You brought up a word somewhere in there just in passing, but the word was trust.

Okorie Johnson:
Yeah.

Ben Krueger:
You talked about listening and trust, and I think that so much, like truly listening with students is a incredible way to build trust, and it is a very deep way to build trust. I want to keep on that theme, but I want to talk a little bit about some of your performance. So for folks that haven't seen you, what you're doing is you're looping on the cello, which basically means recording yourself and creating parts. And a lot of your work is improvisational.
And what you were doing at our keynote yesterday was very participatory. It was not a one-sided thing. It was very much a listening and an exchange. You were asking people to come up and share things that can often be seen as vulnerable and you were performing live, based on their stories. I want to talk a little bit about what you're thinking in those moments and then after that, how that for you parallels to the classroom in terms of getting people to feel comfortable telling their stories when they can often come out a little shy and have to get over that hurdle of the vulnerability that comes with that and what you're thinking in those moments.

Okorie Johnson:
Yeah, I mean, some of it honestly, I think is autopilot at this point. It's just kind of like an awareness, like I am committed to an experience and a feeling, and I think I'm following moment by moment, these instincts on how to create this magical moment for myself, for the person sharing, and for the audience. But the other thing I will say is that I think classrooms are scary places. It's scary to walk into a place where you are acknowledging by being a student that there's stuff that you don't know. We just don't think much about it, because that's the first 20 years of our lives, 22 years of our lives, we walk into spaces, and by definition of the title that we give ourselves, walking to the space, we are emitting a kind of a vulnerability. One of the things that I believe I tried to do in the classroom, sometimes it worked really well and sometimes it didn't, is that in order for my students to be willing to take that risk of saying, I don't know, and I want to learn, I've got to model taking risks for them.
And so, I would act a fool sometimes in the first week. I had these mantras that I wanted people to say, and I would say them, and I would really go out of my way to be out of my comfort zone. I mean, I'm a performer, so there's some comfort with that. But the thing is I've really needed my students to see me taking communication risks, taking performance risks, taking intellectual risks, asking questions of them, admitting when I didn't know things. Because if I am able to take risks, if I'm able to model a way to take risks and a willingness to take risks, then at the very least I think I've given my students a genuine invitation to also take risks. I think it's sometimes weird to be the teacher that knows everything and it's completely in control and has everything buttoned up and doesn't ever look like you're taking risks.
And then you're asking students to take these massive risks. So getting back to the concert yesterday, I am putting myself out there in a performance to start the show, and then the next thing I'm doing is I'm taking words from them and tight roping, you know what I mean? Trying to create a song out of thin air based on these words. The songs that I performed yesterday, except for the ones that were composed were not songs I'd ever done before. It's not even necessarily structures that I've used before, because they're very specific to the audience. And for me, that is dangerous. It is terrifying, and it is a danger and a terror that I know that in order to find the magic that I'm looking for, I've got to walk through. So then, if I do that and I find the magic and I find something that people identify with or connect with, then I feel like that makes them just a little bit more likely to trust the process.
I think it's trusting me, but they're only going to trust me as much as I can demonstrate that I trust the process. And if I trust the process and we found something beautiful or wonderful and magical, maybe we can try it again, so that when I invite someone up, they have a confidence that they're going to be okay, because I've seen him take this risk. But as they're sharing, I think it's important for me to try and create some scaffolding, some holding of space for their emotional experience. So there was a woman that came up and she talked about a mentor teacher that had just recently passed, and I was so grateful that she was willing to share, and it was such a magical moment in the sense that sometimes when people share a person, it has nothing to do with what it is you're ultimately trying to accomplish in the group.
But it just so happened that the person that had passed was also a mentor teacher, so she had a chance to talk about why she really appreciated this person. We're talking about Letitia, and I think Henrietta. Letitia was the person that came up.

Ben Krueger:
Henrietta was the mentor, yes.

Okorie Johnson:
And then Henrietta was the mentor, and she shared so vulnerably and so fully. And I'm just always grateful and blown away by people's willingness to do that. My entire show is dependent upon people being willing to do that. And I have no guarantee that people will do it every single time, but for the most part, people do it every single time. And then for me, the role after she shared, and I have this task now of composing real time, a song that honors the memory that she shared, for me, it's like what was the essence of what she was sharing?
How did she feel about this woman and how can I find something that feels that way on the instrument? And so for me, she was a little emotional. There were some tears, but more than anything, she felt good about the woman. The woman made her smile. It lit her up. And that's what I wanted to find. I wanted to find a bottom, a groove of something that lit me up in the same way that made this memory lit Letitia up. And that is a lot of trust. That is trusting yourself to be able to find something of value. That is trusting the process, having done the work on what is the form of this experience and how is this form going to catch me when it's scary, trusting that people are more often than not participating in their lives and doing the best that they can, and with the greatest of good wills. Right? That someone who comes up to share isn't doing so to grandstand, isn't doing so to derail.
I mean, there's a bit of a vulnerability when you give a mic to someone at your show, you're also trusting that they will want to go someplace beautiful, and that wherever they go, that you'll be able to turn it into something beautiful. That's the classroom. That's the classroom. You are trusting the classroom as a process, as a place. You're trusting the idea of teaching as a process. You are trusting yourself as a teacher that you will be to help people find something beautiful. And then you are trusting that you will be able to hold space both intellectually and socially and emotionally for these people who are taking risks in your class. And then you are trusting that not only that the risks are beautiful and valuable for them, but that collectively watching other people in your classroom take risks and grow will be beneficial to other people who haven't necessarily taken that risks yet.
It's a lot of trust. I don't know, for anyone who's listening to this and feels like it's a little bit too woo-woo, the whole idea of teaching and music, I understand and I can maybe validate if you're hearing this, and it doesn't feel like procedural or linear or left brain, and not everybody has this relationship to music or teaching, and I can acknowledge that, but this is how I experience it. And I do find the classroom one of the most sacred places on the planet for me, I find the stage one of the most sacred places on the planet for me. And it's not like a religious denominational thing. It's like the coolest things I've ever seen happen on the planet happen in those spaces. And I believe in that. I believe in that passionately, and I miss the classroom for that. I used to get a dose of that every single day.
So now I only get a dose of that when I'm on stage. But when I'm on stage, I'm not looking for the, oh my God, he's so good, or oh my God, he's like a virtuoso. Oh my God, I don't really want that. I just want the magic of the connection. I want someone afterwards to say, that moved me or that touched me, or thank you for modeling that for me. I'm going to go and try and do something like this on my own. Or I feel like I know more about myself now. Those are the things that are, I mean, it's just really indescribable how good those things feel. And I am chasing that goodness. And I think teachers, it's a hard profession. It doesn't pay a lot. There are some very real dangers and pitfalls. On one end with the whole school security thing.
And then on the other hand, people walk into your classroom having very real mental health challenges sometimes, and you are the adult in the room that has to make the right decision. The stakes sometimes are really high. There's some things in this world that don't make sense, logical, linear sense to do unless there's some kind of passion behind it, unless there's some kind of love, unless there's some kind of magic. I think teaching is one of those things. I think music is one of those things, and I think that's perhaps where the connection is. There's safer things to do in the world.

Ben Krueger:
Yeah. I want to reference, one of the things you were talking about was you modeling the vulnerability on both the stage and in the classroom. And it brings me to one of my all time favorite quotes about education. I'm going to mess up the words, but I hope I get the essence right. It's a James Baldwin code. And it is something to the effect of it was either children students have never been good at listening to adults, but they've never failed to imitate them.
So it's around what we say versus them seeing what we do and what we demonstrate. And for me, that vulnerability and that I'm still learning and that I'm listening and that I don't know everything, and it's okay for me to admit that, and it's okay for me to be trying something or telling kids that we're going out on a limb together is what's always so important. And I want to ask you about just if you have a tangible story from, I've talked about ways you've modeled that in class, a way that you've seen that be effective in class, like a story from when you've modeled vulnerability and that has worked in your favor in the classroom.

Okorie Johnson:
Yeah. Well, I tell a lot of stories about my life, both as a student and as an adult, in my classroom. The one that is coming up is it's before I even was I considered myself a teacher, it was when I was doing some student teaching. It wasn't officially student teaching. I was teaching with a program called Summer Bridge, now called Breakthrough. And I was in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia chapter of Summer Bridge at Germantown Friends School, and it was my second year there, working as a now seasoned teacher, and I was an administrator for that group. And there's a very kind of PBL spirit to breakthrough into Summer Bridge, very much about exhibition. So at the end of the year, there are these performances that the kids do that incorporate their learning. And so, oftentimes, one of the biggest and most exciting performances is a song that they rewrite the lyrics to, that capture ideas or themes that they were learning throughout the summer program.
And I was responsible for teaching this song. And to be honest with you, it was the end of the year and people were tired. And the rising eighth graders now were different socially and culturally than they were as rising seventh graders, there's a different thing that goes on. It had been, honestly, for me as a new teacher, a harder year. And the last couple of days before this performance, I was really working hard with the students, and I expressed some frustration. I expressed some frustration and maybe some frustration with the students, to be honest, if I'm fair. But also frustration with my inability to kind of lead them where I wanted them to go, because the next day was the performance. And I don't think anybody felt that they were there, that we were there, but we did the best we could and we were going to show up that day.
So this is still back in the day of tapes and CDs. This is summer of 1997, and we were doing the Fugees', Killing Me Softly, their remake of, and we were using an instrumental of that, and we wrote new words to it, and it was the performance and the kids' parents were there, and it was wonderful. And it came time for that performance, and the tape wasn't working in the sound booth. The tape was not working. They would start the song and... And so, the kids are in formation on stage, and it's like, it's feeling like the worst possible thing. And I run up to the sound booth and I'm trying to fix it with them, and they're still on stage. And this is maybe 90 seconds have gone by and I can't fix it. And then I am like, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And then I just decide in the moment, all right, well, I'm going to get up on stage with them.
And then so I run downstairs out of the sound booth, down the middle of the aisle, and I jump up onto the stage and I get everyone to come around me and I'm like, "You know what? This is hard. This is uncomfortable. This is not where I wanted to be. This is not where we wanted to be, but you know what? You know this. We got this. We can do this. We're going to do this acapella." And they're like, "We're going to do a what?" "Yes, we're going to do an acapella. All right? You ready? And I'm going to be on stage with you and we're going to do it." And then so I go off to the side and everyone gets in formation, and then I kind of start a beat, and then they kind of pick up the beat, and then we start singing it. And then what was weird about it is that everything that they were not doing or we were not doing, we weren't able to do before, they nailed.

Ben Krueger:
Wow.

Okorie Johnson:
It was so good.

Ben Krueger:
Oh man.

Okorie Johnson:
It was so good. And I don't know that that's a story that represents vulnerability as much as it represents that we were in it together. That's what it is. I don't even know that it's modeling vulnerability as a best practices. It's not really what it is. It's like, hey, I'm in it with you. We rise and fall together.

Ben Krueger:
Yeah. Because you were part of it. You were there to fail or to succeed with them.

Okorie Johnson:
Yeah.

Ben Krueger:
That's such an incredible story of, you're right, it's not just vulnerability, it's community. And it's also, I think, just the willingness to put yourself out there. And I also see something that I think is really important, and it's about how really to that last quote, it's about how kids pick up on energy. Now, if you'd come down there and said, this is a panic moment and good luck guys, and you left and it was just put the kids out there, that probably would've been a completely different experience.
But it sounds like you modeled and you yourself centered yourself, and you came with a plan and you felt confident and you were in it with them. So that presence, I think, is so important with teaching, because kids pick up on energy. And if you can model that and feel that in your own self, truly, I think that really conveys in the classroom and the kids pick up on it. It's been amazing talking to you. We just have a couple minutes left. I want to just disclose on a little prompt that we give sometimes. And the prompt is, I used to think... Now I think... So I would love to hear from you, just I used to think, now I think.

Okorie Johnson:
Yeah. I used to think that there was a body of knowledge that you had to learn in order to be successful. I used to think that that's what education was about. You're coming to learn. There are these skills that we need along the way. And I'm grateful to all the teachers that taught them to me. And I know that there are things that I'm doing now that I wouldn't have been able to do if it were not for the magical and masterful work of teachers imparting skills. And I think that what we learn is never as important as how we feel about the process of learning and how we feel about our own relationship to the unknown. And long after you have learned or you've forgotten what was taught in pre-calculus, you remember how you feel about math. You remember how you feel about your ability to deal with that difficulty or that complication, and that stays with you.
Sometimes it becomes your destiny. I think in doing this work, I'm beginning to realize that what is really only temporarily important. It's the belief that you can learn, that you can grow, that you can fail, that you can rebound from failing, that you can find joy. I think all that stuff matters so much more. I need skills, I need opportunities. I need people modeling success for me, I do, but I also need to believe that it's all doable. And I think that kind of resilience, that kind of optimism, that kind of confidence in yourself, comes most specifically from those who teach us. Because I think they are establishing for us a process or a pattern that we will use to make sense of the world for the rest of our lives. And how we feel about that process or that pattern, I think has a lot to do with how we feel about ourselves in the world.
So I used to think that school was just about learning particular skills. Now that I am an adult, and I am looking back on the things that I got from school and the things that I wished I had gotten from school, realizing that what was important, but the certainty that I could was maybe even more important. Not even so much the certainty that it's doable or that it's knowable, but that I can do it or that I can know it. And it just depends on having the passion and the will to pursue it, and or understanding the best way of acquiring the knowledge of the thing. And that's it, right? Because I don't use sine and cosine anymore. I would love to. I'd love, have a reason to use sine and cosine, honestly. I'm not saying that facetiously at all.
But I do think that what I got from my school was this idea that there's real beauty and power in learning, and that I become beautiful and that I become powerful when I am bold enough to learn and when I'm bold enough to risk and when I'm bold enough to venture. And I saw that model both in my teachers and in the experiences that they created for me. And I hope that I modeled that in the things I try to create for my students.

Ben Krueger:
Beautiful. Thank you so much.

Okorie Johnson:
Thank you, Ben. This has been a great talk.

Ben Krueger:
All right, so we're closing up with Okori Johnson, otherwise known as OkCello. We will link his information below. We thank you so much for your time today and appreciate your perspective and just taking the time to share it with us. Where can people go to find out more about you?

Okorie Johnson:
Yeah, yeah. My website is O-K-C-E-L-L-O.com, and you can follow me wherever you follow people at O-K-C-E-L-L-O, that'll get you to me. That's everything from Instagram to Spotify, to Twitter, to TikTok. I've got albums that I'm really proud of, but I'm most excited about the fact that I've got a fourth album coming and it will be out fully in October, but I'm releasing singles along the way. And I don't know, I've never released a single before, so this is a new moment for me creatively. But I'm really happy about this moment. I'm really happy about this album, and it is in some ways, all the things that I have been talking about in this podcast, for me, the album is kind of a sonic pill of all of that. It's confidence and it's believing that you can do it, and it's mantra and it's community, all that stuff. So thank you, Ben. I appreciate it. And look forward to the next time I get a chance to come back to HTH.

Ben Krueger:
All right.

Okorie Johnson:
Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Ben Krueger and Okori Johnson for this conversation. Ben also edited this episode. We've got a link to the OkCello website in the show notes. Thanks for listening.