Flying vs. U-haul

My mother is in Minnesota (a long way from North Carolina) this week because her husband’s daughter is graduating from St. Olaf’s. (Well-done, Katie!) When I saw that my mother was to be out of the area for about a week just for one graduation ceremony (I didn’t even go the less than two miles to attend my last two, but that’s me), I asked her if they were driving, thinking maybe they were moving Katie out or something. No, they’re flying. You could not get me to fly to anywhere you couldn’t drive to. Before 2001, my flying experience has been expensive, hectic, uncomfortable, and unreliable (lost luggage, etc.). Since then, I’m not even going to try. Somehow I would be detained as a terrorist because I have screws in my neck that I could no doubt take out and poke somebody to death with in my last remaining seconds. Too much trouble. But no, they’re not driving that far. How crazy am I? (I thought maybe they were bringing Katie’s stuff home with a U-haul or something.) So I asked why she was staying all that time away from home, since she and her husband are flying. Her response was weird to me. She said she’d never been to Minnesota before and wanted to see as much of it as possible. What, she’s going to a giant mall? I always thought that the whole point of flying was that you could leave North Carolina Friday, see the ceremony Saturday (let’s say it’s a Saturday), and be back home Sunday.

Weird.

I’m feeling better but a bit butchered after Tuesday’s minor surgery. They always make it sound as if it will be just a little “discomfort” and not screaming pain -- and I always fall for it. Some of us never learn.

Arlo on Teaching Methods

From the album Precious Friend, by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. Arlo introduces "Garden Song" with some thoughts on how we learn. I wish I'd had Arlo to fall back on in grad school, because by the time I got there, they figured the "boring method" (i.e., some rote memorization from which you can draw new conclusions, create new ideas) was very much looked down upon. I think there's some middle ground.

This’s a kinda easy song, let’s hold one second, let’s learn this song, ‘cause this is, I mean, I know everybody likes singin’ with Pete, but I learnt this song from Pete, an’ it’d be almost the same thing. So, now I know, I mean, the difference, I know, I’ve been watchin’ Pete now for a few years, and he does somethin’ I can’t do, which is, he sings the songs twice at the same time. That’s what we were talking about before, celery consciousness, an’ Pete can do it. It’s the same –it’s – he sings the song once in front of the song and then once with everybody. That’s hard. So, I’m gonna try it, but first, let’s do it the normal way, which is the way we all learnt stuff in school. Now I know, people wanna forget about that, because you don’t figure you can learn anything that way, but it’s wrong; you’ve been learnin’ new ways to learn stuff an’ it don’t work. Right? So. Go back to the old way. It’s the old, what they call the “borin’ method.”

Teaching Styles

My guitar teacher insists that I am doing better than I think. I don’t know if that’s so I don’t have a nervous breakdown over a transition to a D chord (almost got that without buzzing now). I guess I quit classical guitar mostly because I went to them with a sinking feeling and drove home in tears. I was probably more sensitive to criticism then, not having had nearly as much time to fail at things. The classical guitar teacher (whose name I don’t even remember) was like a drill sergeant. The only nice thing I remember him saying about me is that I could sight-read well. Having been in the band, in high school, I guess I could.

When I taught, I didn’t grasp the concept of “good enough.” I should have. I could have taught my students something about writing instead of putting the bar at English major grad student level, which I think I did. I’d do it differently if I had it to do over again. The thing was, it was hard to find something to praise in those papers! I mean, I got reduced to saying things like, “nice use of semicolon” or something. (They didn’t get punctuation or parts of speech, and we were banned from teaching them. I did anyway, surreptitiously.)

Of course, a guitar lesson that you’re paying for because you want to play the guitar well (or well enough) is hardly the same thing as Freshman Composition. That, you’re taking because you have to if you want to graduate. Not everyone there – and I know this will come as a shock – wants to learn anything; they just want a diploma they can barter into a job offer. That makes me sad. The reason I worked was to pay for a lifestyle in which I could continue to learn things for the sake of learning them.

A cynic might suggest that any private teacher does himself a service when he praises mediocre work by making the student like him through false praise. I’m generally not cynical, sometimes to my detriment. In any case, I don’t think that’s the case with my teacher. I’ve heard about her from a friend and an uncle. I think I’m awfully demanding of students, and moreso of myself. Anyhow, that’s what I’m going to tell myself while I keep practicing at home, where I can cuss at myself freely, and sing along. I sing okay, I think, when nobody can hear me. Kaye doesn’t count as an extra person after twenty-three years. I’m pretty much the same person around her as I am by myself. Not necessarily good, just consistent.

In theory, theory and practice are the same . . .

In practice, they aren't, as Yogi Berra noted.

Less than one week into the guitar lessons, and I am frustrated as hell. Oddly enough, the fretting doesn’t hurt my fingers like it did some twenty years ago when I was studying classical guitar with nylon strings rather than steel. Well, as I said before, I suck at this. What is maddening is that I have never sucked at a musical instrument. Practice wasn’t practice so much as playing. They gave me a recorder in the 4^th grade, and I could play all the songs in the book by the next day. I was hooked from then on. In the 7^th grade, I got to join the band, I think because Gran-Gran had played clarinet and sax by ear and surely considered music one of the most important things in life. Anyway, the next band day, I could play most of the book. The teacher gave me an extra book to play around with. I never got good at piano, mainly because we didn’t have one at home for the most part, but I could either play it by ear or practice the hell out of music. I guess I have a knack for sight-reading. But chords I do not really understand. I’m thinking maybe I should go back to the classical guitar along with the acoustic and read up on this music theory for the guitar in a book I bought recently.

Kaye, a good piano student who also plays the clarinet and recorder, assures me that music theory will make practice positively fascinating. Maybe, but I like to know why I’m doing something – what’s the core truth behind it all. Just like any other discipline, perhaps more obviously, a real study of music is making order out of chaos. I noticed that the three fields I studied (Math, Computer Science, Medieval English Lit) all try to do the same thing, which is to make order out of apparent chaos. I call that quest for meaning religion. Talking about religion gets me into all sorts of trouble, though, so don’t mention this comment to anybody.

My whole right side hurts, and the only excuse for it I can come up with is that I’ve been holding my body in an unfamiliar position and there are screws in my neck on that side, making it less flexible than it thinks it ought to be. I figure I can overcome it, but my teacher may be dismayed by my lack of progress.

My frustration is partly at my incompetence, to be sure, but, as I say, I don’t get it. It’s just “put your fingers here and strum. This is called a D chord.” One of everybody’s first questions is “Why?” I got frustrated as a teacher over this phenomenon. I wanted them to take whatever I told them on faith, given that you have to start somewhere, and they wanted me simply to pour my knowledge into their ears. Having been on both sides of the desk, or lectern, I realize that most of the onus (at least on college students and beyond, and, ideally, before) is on the student – the teacher can’t do much beyond provide direction and carrots and sticks.

I know I gave out a disproportionate number of sticks in my stint as a teacher. I’d do things differently now.

Well, I guess I’ll drag out the classical guitar, so I can feel some semblance of competence, and then be happier to practice chords.

Guitar Lessons . . . Wish Me Luck

I spoke with my new guitar teacher last night, and am set up for weekly lessons. I’m really enthusiastic about this, mainly because it is something I’ve always wanted to do but somehow never had the time, energy and money for all at once. Now, I don’t really have the money, but I think this qualifies as a need – certainly more than my Starbucks habit does. When I listen to music, it does something to me that apparently isn’t true for everyone – the song becomes an active part of my being. It seems like what I imagine as “being in the zone.” I wonder if that’s partially related to my temporal lobe epilepsy – does it serve as a metronome for my brain as well as give my mind something to focus on? It probably doesn’t matter. That it makes me feel at home in my head is very important.

But I know it’s going to be a long time before I can play anything well. I hope my passion fuels my discipline.

I Wonder as I Wander

I talked with my mother this afternoon. I talk with my mother on a more-or-less daily basis. She is willing to take my calls once a day. It sounds worse than it is, I guess. I mean, if I had to listen to me go on about nothing every day, I’d never answer the phone if it could possibly be me. Today, I was going on about the guitar and methods to try to use to learn it. She said, basically, that I start a bunch of things but never finish them. To a certain extent, this is true. To a certain extent, it may be a neurological quirk. Whatever the case, though, it is a characteristic my mother believes I should work to get out of. And, I might add, it is characteristic that she believes it. She is very goal-oriented.

“Say something in Italian,” she says, mocking the fact that I have worked at Italian (to read Dante), Spanish (because it’s everywhere) and French (because I am of French descent, actually have college and graduate credits proclaiming that I should know something, live with a French teacher and am close friends with a French woman). I also went through a short-lived Hebrew phase when I was considering converting to Judaism. That venture is a story in itself. “Ciao,” I said. What’s it to her, I ask, if I shift gears now and then? I’m not a great multitasker. I tend to take to one thing for almost my entire waking hours and really immerse myself in it. I am trying to make myself do at least a bit of this or that unless I have a really good reason not to, but I’m not expecting to win a Nobel or anything at this point. The thing is, my mother hasn’t done anything like play the guitar or learn a foreign language. She went from high school to marriage and business school to motherhood to bookkeeper/secretarial work to college to teaching high school to retirement and remarriage. I’m not saying she didn’t accomplish anything; I’m saying she’s lived a normal life, worked very hard, and kept two kids and a husband under control. Well, I never burned anything down or got arrested, anyway. No one’s had much luck keeping me under control, which is what this is about, I guess.

The fact that I earned a BS, BA and MA mean nothing because I am not using them to make money (because I am disabled). She hasn’t said that, but I think that’s what she thinks. My brother and sister-in-law have said as much. While I did expect to be working after graduation (and I did work – for five years as a programmer and seven as a college freshman composition teacher), I went to college primarily because I like to learn. I had hoped to keep learning and helping others learn.

What I devote my time to now is learning. What I try to do is observe and learn the mechanics of things I appreciate so that I can create something. To me, the observation is at least as important as creation. Anything tangential that comes from it is purely that: tangential. To that end, I’ve played at the Personality Forge building chat-bots and becoming obsessed with how other bots work, am studying and gradually putting into play Internet languages and trying to learn usable programming languages, since what I know won’t get me anywhere in Windows, and I did enjoy programming. I was actually good at it once. I’m working on and off with paints, charcoal, pencil, digital camera and camcorders, guitar (leaving banjo, sax, flute, clarinet, piano and recorders on the back burner due to the passage of time), doing close readings of various literary works as well as reading for knowledge and perspective. (I consider pretty much all reading fun.) I play at chess. I watch movies on DVD, and, once every twenty years or so, I go to a concert.

The thing is, I’ve felt pretty bad about the whole “you can’t do everything” situation since about the time I turned forty. Click here if you want to see a typical self-centered English major take on the situation. Suddenly I realized that time is passing and I’m all over the map. I am working on and culling a lifetime to-do list. But I think my mom, who is a responsible, decent human being – don’t get me wrong (she might read this) – needs to have an itinerary for everything, whereas I start off somewhere and explore. For instance, I might start off with the Arlo concert to reading a book about Woody to learning more about Huntington’s disease. Then I might volunteer some time for an organization about Huntington’s disease. I never know what I’ll be up to from day to day.

But what is life for? I wonder as I wander . . .