Teaching with music in mind.

At one point in this week’s reading Aaron Copland explains that a gifted listener is a “listener who intends to retain his amateur status.”   He goes on to say that he, as a composer, is excited by the thought of someone listening to his music and will react to it in a completely spontaneous and unpredictable manner.  This, to me, sounds much like the payoff teachers receive from their students and that wonderful moment when the metaphorical light bulb of cognitive discovery lights up.  If we approach our teaching content as music, as something meant to invoke imagination and creation then we might be able to draw students to subjects such as biology or algebra with the same zeal as most humans are drawn to one type of music or another. 

Can you imagine a lesson in History constructed in a musical form?  Think of the depth of music, the layers of new experiences overlapping redundant rhythms and circular scales.  The Rhythm is what you really want your students to learn; you bang on it over and over and over again.  On top of that you lay exciting details that push the learning process forward while keeping the listener on their toes.  As a person lacking musical knowledge it is a hard idea to put into words, but if I close my eyes and listen to a piece of music, then imagine a lesson structure in the same form, it starts to make sense to me.

DUB STEP.....WHY?

DUB STEP  SHOWS I’M GETTING OLD

I have read all of the twilight books, subscribe to people magazine, and listened to more Skrillex than is advisable for any single human being , all for the sake of staying connected to my students and building trust through mutual experiences. 

For many of my students music is a large part of who they are.  In fact, I am convinced that some of them will eventually have to have their iPods surgically removed from their ear canals.  There is perhaps one form of music that my students love but I personally cannot wrap my head around.  This, as the above title implies, is dub step.  Dub step is defined by wikipedia as:

“a genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London, United Kingdom. Its overall sound has been described as "tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals"^[

This is how I define it, “crap.”  I know that this seems like a closed minded and harsh interpretation but I view it more as a rite of passage, it is the same definition my father gave to hip hop and his father gave to rock and roll.  After reading the  assigned passages I now have a new arsenal of knowledge with which to attempt to understand this type of music.  It is my sincere hope that I’ll be able to engage my students in evaluating the nuances of their favorite music because in my experience, when I’m open minded to what they are telling me, they are more likely to be more open minded to what I’m teaching them.  I don’t have to like dub step to understand it, all I have to do is figure out what makes it so compelling.

Interior Design Project

My Project

The Muppets

    

The other day I had the good fortune to come across a documentary film entitled, "Being Elmo".  This film chronicles the journey of Kevin Clash, the puppeteer who created the Sesame St. character Elmo.  This film had CEP 882 written all over it.  Viewers are given an inside look into the process and thinking behind the creation of some of the most beloved Muppet characters as well as the motivation and personality of the people who bring them to life.

    In the film, Kevin recalls the first time that he saw Sesame St. on his television.  Oddly enough his first impression was not of the actors or the Muppets themselves.  Instead Kevin reacted to the setting of the show and how it resembled his home, an impoverished Baltimore neighborhood. I immediately thought of the genius of the set designers and how hard it must have been to design a space that was both visually unique and familiar to the audience.  The designers used lighting and proportion to give Sesame St. the illusion of a much larger and complex space.

    How does this relate to education?  Think of the importance of the environment created for this show, a show designed for the express purpose of educating children.  It is a place children want to inhabit, to become a part of.  It is a comfortable place because it resembles home and it becomes an interesting place due to the new and interesting characters that populate this space.  As educators we could learn a thing or two from Sesame St. about the importance the physical environment plays in the learning process.  We need to create environments that are simultaneously comfortable and engaging in order to get the most out of a student.  Perhaps we could spend some time populating our classrooms with a character or two and if we are lucky a child will be too busy having fun to realize he/she is actually learning.

Not so NICE

All that I have previously known about interior design I have gleaned from many hours spent in my recliner, reading books, while my wife watches HGTV.  One particular show that she likes to watch has couples searching for their perfect house.  As the couples are shown a house that they enjoy, they almost always reply with something similar to the following statements:

1.       “Wow! This is nice!”

2.       “This fire Place is nice”

3.       “I really like this kitchen, it’s a nice kitchen”

4.       “The bedroom has nice square footage”

These are just a few out of millions of responses from couples on this show that have highlighted, emphasized or suggested how nice something is.  In Sarah Suskana’s introduction on home design she mentions the lack of a common vocabulary to describe why a space feels like home.  I could think of no better example of this than my wife’s favorite TV show. 

The connection to education is one of vocabulary, when the teacher lacks the proper tools to describe an experience or fails to build a fundamental vocabulary related to an experience, then that experience will become extremely hard for the student to reproduce.  How could someone ever make a house feel like home if all they know is that home feels “nice”.

My brother and his spoon

I’ve wanted to write something about how this class has affected how I am looking at the world around me.  I keep thinking of my brother who is an engineer.  Growing up he was always analyzing simple objects.  He would pick up a spoon at a diner and ask why it was shaped the way it was, what material was it made of and why and what are the decisions one makes when creating a spoon?  Of course I always thought he was kind of weird, a spoon is just a spoon. 

Now here I am asking these same questions about all manner of mundane objects.  How could that object be photographed to make it more interesting?  If I made a video of that hallway could I use it in an interesting video?  It has become a short term (hopefully) obsession the result of which is that I have begun to annoy myself in the same manner my brother used to.   

I am reminded of initial class discussion about art as an approach to learning.  I am starting to make strong connections between artistic approach and curiosity.  What teacher wouldn’t jump at the chance to make their students curious about the subject matter?  So I am seeing the importance of the artistic approach in the classroom. Keep in mind that this class is about the "nature and design of compelling experiences." With that in mind, I'd like you to focus your discussion about the Super Bowl Commercials on these two broad areas:

Nature: In what ways is the experience of this ad compelling or not? Focus on the experience and its qualities. In other words, what adjectives would you use to describe your experience during this 30-sec commercial. What were you feeling/thinking at the beginning, the middle, the end?

Design: How is the design of the ad related to your experience of the ad? What design choices have the creators made in creating the experience? The materials they work with include images, sounds, sequence, pace, timing, words, and so on. They are masterful at creating feelings that we associate with their product or idea. Consider the feelings/thinking you described above. What features of this commercial may have evoked them?

Post at least twice. Try not to post twice at the same time. Try to make it more like a natural discussion, if possible. Feel free to include links to other commercials to support your comments.

Video Project

 

You can also click the link to view the video:

  http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10151270544015436#!/video/video.php?v=10151270544015436

Commentary:

The idea for this video started more or less by shooting with limitations.  Being stuck in the Neonatal ward of the hospital almost every minute that I am not actually teaching made for a tough environment in which to find compelling video.  There is a strict photography policy in the hospital that allows photos of only your child and their environment as well as hallways and generic hospital environments.  Couple this with specific instructions to stay away from the sentimental (and babies were used as a specific example) and I was feeling sort of hemmed in.  Due to the time limits I chose to approach the video as kind of commercial for the neonatology wing of the children’s hospital. 

                Everything in the hospital is numbers, people are hooked on to various monitors, there are clocks, charts, percentages, and counts of everything that is happening and could happen in the future.  When a doctor talks to you, most information comes in the form of numbers, measurements and readings.  There is a sense of anxiety that comes with these numbers, they bring good news and bad news, move slowly, or quickly.  I wanted to capture that sense of anxiety as well as the feeling that as the numbers come and go, are given and taken away, life continues to fight on. 

                I picked the washed out drawing effect for the video because I thought that it helped reinforce the sterile feel that hospitals tend to give off, also it helped to provide continuity between shots that had drastically different lighting and colors (the elevator numbers as opposed to the clock).  Also the white quality gives an impression of hope to the viewer. 

                I tried to edit the different shots so that they were somewhat the same length but not chronologically symmetrical.  For anxiety to happen we cannot know the exact moment of an edit.  I slowed down the speed of each segment by half to make the viewer hang on to each number change, again an attempt to build anticipation. 

                The captions are an attempt to give context to the video without giving away exactly what the point is until the very end.  I would have liked to have replaced them with a great voice over; unfortunately I did not have access to a trained actor.  The placement of the words as they appear was a bit difficult to get right with the software that I was using.  I wanted them to add to the film but not distract from the video.  I tried to have them appear and then disappear within the span of a single shot and be located in a place that keeps the eye searching for the next set of words but does not draw attention away from the video itself.  I feel like I got this mostly right except for the first clip and the image of the zeroed out digital clock.  I fiddled around with different fonts and coloring but in the end I kept it simple because it seemed easier to read and carried a serious tone with them. 

                At first, I tried to incorporate music in to the video but I was having a challenge finding something that struck a somber tone but then finished off on a high note all within the span of fifty seconds.  Instead I chose to leave the film silent until the very end, where I faded in a subtle heart beat.  I wanted to show the ability of the video to be compelling on its own as well as use the lack of noise to increase a sense of anticipation.

                I chose not use the drawing effect on the very last shot because using it made the image of the baby hard to make out and in doing so, the final “reveal” less impactful.  The black at the end of the video gives the viewer time to reflect on the video and I left the heartbeat sound in there to help spur the viewer into further thought.