music: The Flaming Lips- Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
I was walking back into school today from a quick trip out for lunch and I stop to say hi to a student I had last year. He asks:
“So why didn’t you bike today?”
I thought it was going to rain and I told him so. (although I just realized that I haven’t gotten on my bike since I knocked into a minivan making a wild right turn two weeks back…)
“What about the windchill? You still would bike in the cold?”
I show him my jacket.
“You always do things the hard way, Mister. Why don’t you do things the easy way some time?”
um.
I mean.
There are a million reasons that I give myself for choosing to live the way I do, and I believe strongly in most of those reasons. But he’s undeniably right.
Back to work.
music: Fruit Bats- Spelled in Bones
It’s been about a year since Volker pronounced Missa Toss his hero for turning a chicken wing dissection for biology class into a meal. It’s an idea excellent in concept, but harder to really get into in execution. As roommates then would attest, things did not work out all that well stir-fry wise. This year, with the same activity on the horizon, Missa Toss came up with some improvements to the procedure. Today the plan was executed, and by all accounts it was a success.
The biggest change was to pre-cook all the chicken wings before giving them to kids for dissection. This made it easier to peel the meat off the bones, as well as ensured that everything was safe for eating. Then, instead of bringing the meat home and making dinner for my roommates I brought some veggies and a wok into class, borrowed a hot plate from the physics teacher, and did the stir-frying right in class. I went Mexican this time, adding some lime, jalapeno, cilantro, and garlic to the chicken, onions, and peppers. All that was needed after that were tortillas, cheese, and salsa. Easier than cooking dinner for 6 at Chowdahaus. Today biology students did a dissection, saw that everything in nature gets recycled, and got a lunch out of it.
Some teachers even popped by for food once they smelled it, and quite enjoyed their fajitas. I didn’t tell them that their lunch was made from the remnants of a dissection.
There were some ugly moments in there, mostly due to other kids trying to push their way into scoring a free lunch. Who can blame them? Many are forced to eat school lunch every day, which my principal (who has been in Boston Public Schools for over 35 years) says is the worst he’s had. It reminded me that food is really the source of interpersonal capital and the root of a society’s power structure, as well as being an amazing motivator. But to use food as a reward, especially for kids who are signed up for free school lunch, is highly unethical.
The difference between General Tso’s Dissection of last year and Fajitas Con Pollo De Dissection this year is a pretty good gague of how I’m doing this year as compared to last. In Biology at least. The Behavioral Science classes, while exhilirating, are an enormous challenge. It’s incredibly hard to build a curriculum from the ground up, and I find that I’m losing sight of the bigger picture for the sake of what has to get done for tomorrow. The kids are struggling as well, although I suspect that it’s mostly because they thought they could get away with talking about their feelings for a year. Now that they realize they have to learn some genetics and neuroanatomy they are balking; three dropped the class just this week. No matter. Those that remain will benefit greatly, and in ways that extend beyond grade point averages (which might not be that great…). Teaching, I realize, is a lot like cooking. With appropriate amounts of recipe and improvisation you can turn the waste products of a mundane activity into a nourishing meal.
music: Biosphere Sessions - 9/28/2005
I spend a lot of time thinking about improvisation, which is funny because I’m a planner at heart. It’s also funny because improvisation, by definition, is something you don’t think about beforehand. I think I’m attracted to the idea of improvisation because it is a creative act that in many ways rattles the cage of order, safety, and composition, and is a reaction against constraining structures.
When you improvise, you take risks. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t, but when things do click it is complete ecstasy. The more you improvise the more you can get things to work out in some way, but the more you need to keep pushing back the boundaries of your comfort zone.
My own musical endeavours over the past month or so have exploded with improvisation. We’ve been rocking the Biosphere since February, and over the past couple sessions I’ve been able to say to myself that we sound like a band who has played together for a bit and sounds tight, even in our improvisations. We are falling into musical pockets that, as they say in the field, get there. Moments where our improvisations fall into alignment are ecstatic, some of the best moments I have all week. With the most recent addition of a tenor sax we’re pushing in new directions and cultivating an adventuresome attitude towards music making. At the same time, though, our improvisational approach is growing more disciplined. In order to make the improvisation work there are needs for some constraints, some rules. Most of it is because our improvisations are communal; everything is interplay and reaction, and since none of us knows what is to happen next we have to be able to fall back on a little bit of agreed-upon structure. In some sort of paradox, the more we practice together the better our spontinaeity becomes. And strangely enough, some of the best moments of improvisation are when something completely new and unrepeatable slides into something composed, familiar, and recognizable. Our immediate goals, in fact, include expanding our repertoire of compositions and rearranging some of the tunes we already have down.
Music is a safe venue in which I can improvise. The payoffs are huge, and the adverse consequences for something not working out are not that bad. But trying to stretch improvisation to other corners of my life has proved less fruitful. I found that I have had to improvise with my teaching a little more this year than last, and while teaching will never be devoid of improvisation sometimes I think that the best thing to do is to avoid improvisation by planning as much as possible. But Missa Toss is trying his best to have a life of his own this time ‘round, and after a weekend full of friends and short on lesson planning, I found that I had to improvise a little more than I would have liked. It hasn’t blown up in my face yet, and has worked almost enough to convince me that I could get away with a drastic reduction in the amount of planning I do, but over the past day or two I’ve gotten some indication that kids may be suffering academically because of my lack of planning. This is more apparent in my behavioral science classes, the whole of which is, if not an improvisation, a work-in-progress, an uncompleted vision. The course is new to the district, something I applied to do, and since the suits downtown said I could do it I’ve been scrambling to throw things together in a satisfactory fashion. Due to time and energy constraints, it’s been mostly improvisation, and it’s been only me. No dropping out for a couple seconds to listen to the rhythm, get my bearings, and re-tune, no sitting back on the melody and letting the other instruments take over…if I’m not prepared then I suffer a tough day at school and the kids don’t quite click in with the material. A lot of the stuff of the last unit has been disjoint and organized poorly as far as theme. Because I haven’t done the course before and because I’m pulling together so many things from outside sources I’m finding that I’m dropping the ball every now and again. Even though I’m feeling like teaching is becoming more second nature and less performance, I still need to suck it up and spend the majority of my Sundays preparing for the week. In the teaching venue, I’m not the one that suffers if my improvisations don’t pay off. My students are.
Stopping to think about it is a bit overwhelming. I sometimes can’t believe that I’m managing to keep it together at all on the teaching front. But that is the way with improvisation: as soon as you start to think too much you are lost. Miles and Coltrane practiced so much because they wanted to engrave the basics into their heads, fingers, and mouths so much that they didn’t have to think about them. Whatever your improvisation is, your goal is to flow with it, to blur its boundaries and blend yourself into its stream, to skip into some sort of groove with your medium. And at the same time, your goal is to impose enough structure onto any system such that there is a coherent scope and theme, but leave enough room such that there can be some degree of improvisation. Be it music or teaching, or pounding out these weblog entries, I realize that I can’t achieve the level of organization I want on the fly just yet. And when the lives of others are at stake, I’m realizing, sometimes my own improvisational spirit needs to take a back seat to some solid planning.