Before Kai Wang, a blind music student at Longfellow Middle School, could begin learning music on the violin, his sheet music had to be transcribed into braille, a process that initially took several weeks.<\/p>\n
Now, he has it in minutes, thanks to his music teacher Shannon Houston, who founded a program that allows him to translate the sheet music into braille for Wang.<\/p>\n
Houston is the most recent winner of the Chris Kindness Award \u2014 which celebrates people demonstrating exceptional kindness in their community. He was nominated by Wang himself, who said in the nomination that he is \u201cprobably the only music teacher in the country who offers this level of support to a blind student.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMr. Houston never lowered his expectations or made me \u2018just play by ear,\u2019\u201d Wang said in his nomination. \u201cHe also played and recorded my viola part in every piece we played, so I could hear it more clearly and memorize patterns. None of this was part of his job description. But he does it quietly and consistently, every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Chris Kindness Award gives $1,000 to a winner each month. It was created in 2022 in honor of Chris Walton, a beloved preschool teacher who passed away.<\/p>\n
It was created by UC Berkeley professor Alan Ross, who said he hopes the award will inspire people to \u201cgo out and do something on their own.\u201d<\/p>\n
Every month, Ross picks three finalists and people \u201call over the world\u201d vote on a winner. He said when he read Shannon\u2019s story, he immediately knew he had a finalist.<\/p>\n
\u201cShannon\u2019s work that he\u2019s done, both for the blind community and also just as a teacher, is awesome and totally something that should be celebrated,\u201d Ross said. \u201cThat someone would go to those lengths to help another, it\u2019s just a beautiful story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Outside of teaching, Houston is also the founder of the New Apollo Youth Symphony Orchestra, a nonprofit dedicated to making music accessible to young people of all backgrounds.<\/p>\n
After noticing very few students of color at youth symphony programs around the Bay, he wanted to create one where students wouldn\u2019t be excluded because of financial or audition barriers.<\/p>\n
Houston said he decided to \u201ccompletely take out those barriers and have a non-restrictive basis for getting into the program with (his) mantra \u2014 \u2018if you could play, you could stay.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In the past six years, the symphony has expanded to 22 orchestras, two bands and a full symphony.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s many things we talk about changing in the world, but then very few people actually put effort toward creating that change,\u201d Houston said. \u201cThe only way we all can go from here is up, as long as we all put our hearts into what we love in this community.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Kai Wang, a blind music student at Longfellow Middle School, could begin learning music on the violin,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[45770,45771,45772,192359,27762,192361,143,145,144,192360,149],"class_list":["post-494657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-alan-ross","tag-chris-kindness-award","tag-chris-walton","tag-kai-wang","tag-longfellow-middle-school","tag-new-apollo-youth-symphony-orchestra","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-shannon-houston","tag-uc-berkeley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}