Posts Tagged ‘college’

Miller’s Habits: A Reflection

Thursday, August 22nd, 2019
Photo of a list on slightly rumpled white paper, stapled to a bulletin board.

My copy of Ms. Miller’s Habits of Mind, standing watch on my office bulletin board.

 

In the fall 1991, my tenth-grade year, I took an English composition class with Ms. Betsy Miller. Her class was the first class I ever took that only dealt with writing, and she ran it as a writer’s workshop: we kept journals, read, wrote papers, discussed them, edited each other’s work. She was a passionate and dedicated teacher who put in countless hours outside the school day: she joked once that as she lugged a carton full of our work out to the parking lot, Mr. Van Fossen, our geometry teacher, would walk by empty-handed and jingle his keys at her.

Ms. Miller was in her mid-30s when I knew her, and was one of those “cool” teachers: stylishly-dressed, with a house in Columbus’ Victorian Village, and progressive in her outlook—just try to call her Miss Miller or Mrs. Miller!  Her approach was frank, direct, and honest. She was able to set us at ease with her and with each other, which was crucial, because we would be sharing our writing with our classmates as we edited each other’s work, and discussed it in class. I hope that students come to college having had teachers like her and find more like her once they are there.

One day, as a journal prompt, Ms. Miller handed out a list of Habits of Mind. I love lists, and taped my copy into my journal, and wrote about it, not just in class that day, but off and on throughout the semester. At the end of the term, when composition turned into British Literature, which I took from a different teacher, I carefully removed my copy of Habits of Mind from my journal and put it in the back page of my planner, and from there to my bedroom wall. When I went to college, I left it at my parents’ house, but I kept thinking about it. It had made its mark on me.

The years passed. At some point after the dawn of social media, I reconnected with Ms. Miller—now married to one of her colleagues (although she kept her maiden name), and retired from teaching. I mentioned Habits of Mind, and how I would like to share it with my students, thinking she could just email me the file. Instead, a few days later, an envelope arrived with a hard copy, printed in early-90s Macintosh type. I was immediately transported back to her classroom in the south wing of my high school. It is stapled to my bulletin board in my office as I type these words.

I still think Habits of Mind is a pretty good list of the things a college-educated person should do. I often tell my students that their goal should be to get an education, not just a degree, and to me, an education means this set of behaviors: thoughtfulness, curiosity, self-discipline are the virtues that are behind this list, but the list itself is a set of tools that a person will need to navigate whatever future might be ahead. After a certain number of years, the facts we learn and teach in a course will be out of date: practices change, skills become obsolete, technology moves forward, and older research is supplanted by new. But these two dozen habits are timeless, and making them habits makes us permanently interesting and forever prepared to make our contribution.

Ms. Miller certainly made hers.

 

On Cool

Saturday, May 30th, 2015

Have I really not posted since February?  Apparently so, and it’s been a busy couple of months.

I’ve just finished reading Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World by Steven Quartz and Anette Asp.  Not the best book I’ve ever read–frankly, it’s a little bit scattered and tries to cover too much ground as it looks at “cool” from both the neurological/psychological and sociological/economic aspects.  It’s almost two books jammed into one cover.  Chapters 5 through 8, which deal primarily with the appearance of “cool” in the late-modern consumer culture are what intrigue me the most, though.  I’m fascinated by Quartz and Asp’s suggestion that the very notion of “cool” seems to have changed in the 1990s, and having just finished W. Joseph Campbell’s 1995: The Year the Future Began, I’m inclined to see this shift as partly the result of the mass use of the Internet as a commercial and social force.  According to Quartz and Asp, the shift from what they term “rebel cool” to “DotCool” is a shift from a reaction to a hierarchical society to a broader participation in a pluralistic society.

Whether we truly live in a pluralistic society, of course, is up for debate, but it is undeniable that even if, as Adorno claimed, mass culture is merely the illusion of choice, Americans have exponentially more choices at their fingertips today than twenty years ago.  I love Quartz and Asp’s way of showing how “rebel cool” sold itself out and became the commodity of mass consumer culture, the vehicle through which we are expected to encounter products.  The promise of mass individuality has always seemed phony to me–how can I be an individual by doing the same thing as everyone else?  Quartz and Asp also call out “alternative” music in a delightful way that echoes my feelings on it since I first heard the term.  I’ll be introducing the students in my Popular Music courses to many of the ideas Quartz and Asp touch on, primarily because so many of their examples are musical, and, of course, popular music has been one of the wellsprings of cool over the last sixty years.  (There is room here for more thought–Quartz and Asp suggest that cool has at least some of its roots in the rebellious artistic movements of the 20s–Schoenberg, Picasso, and the like, but I wonder what impact “oppositional subcultures” had on popular music before the “rebel cool” ethos embraced jazz and rock.)

I’ve never really thought of myself as “cool,” and this certainly stems from my experiences in elementary and middle school.  Quartz and Asp suggest that the American high school experience has morphed from the hierarchic structure explored in, perhaps, The Breakfast Club, to a more pluralistic approach in which cliques of students no longer aim at “status” or “popularity.”  I can’t speak to whether this is true–I confess to having a somewhat deficient “radar” for this sort of thing.  As far as I can tell, “cool” began very early–perhaps in around second grade, if not before.  I would say that my elementary and middle school environments were, for the most part, quite hierarchic and status driven, with all sorts of the symbols and signals that Quartz and Asp describe.  For the most part, I lacked these signals and symbols.  My family lived comfortably, but for whatever reason, I was content to let my parents choose my clothing well into high school, and I for the most part respected their rule that toys stayed at home.  These, in my experience, were the primary status symbols of my growing up in the 1980s.  My brother and I were dressed nicely, but never with the latest fashions, for the most part.  There were no alligators on our shirts, to borrow Quartz and Asp’s favorite image.  In my elementary school, for boys, the most important status symbols were Transformers toys, and while my brother and I had our fair share of these, they largely stayed at home.  Yes, the point of bringing Optimus Prime was so that you could play with him at recess, but I realize now that my peers and I were already dragged into the consumer culture in which it isn’t enough merely to own a thing, but it is also necessary to display it prominently.  I was not without friends, in elementary school, certainly far from it, but I remember struggling to keep at least one friend in competition with another boy who always seemed to have something interesting to bring to recess.

And this, I suppose, is “cool” at its most insidious–that it drives nine-year-olds to obsess over colored pieces of plastic and metal.

Middle school was extremely status-driven and hierarchic, with clothes finally displacing toys, I suppose, along with the divide between students who were adept at sailing the seas of hormones (Charlie Reed) and those who were (ahem) not.  I remember thinking for a long time that it seemed like some cruel game that someone had set up, with rules that were rigidly, firmly in place, until they were changed, but no rule book in sight, along with few referees (or at least not enough to prevent a fair amount of misery).

Years later, as a teacher, I would become familiar with the fact that school cohorts seem to alternate in terms of behavior, with one class being “fun” and the one following it being more “difficult.”  My personal theory is that once a class develops a personality, teachers react.  A good class has relaxed, looser discipline by the end of the year because they are less challenging to their teachers.  The next class comes in, and teachers begin with the looser discipline from the beginning of the year, but because they haven’t laid the groundwork of behavioral expectations, the new class takes advantage.  They become unruly, and the teacher tightens up by the end of the year, and then begins the next year in the “tight” disciplinary mode, and the two-year cycle begins again.  The effects of this are amplified as, year after year, the students move on to new teachers who have always taught the class preceding them.

I was the student who kept my nose to the grindstone and did my work.  I had friends, again, and a run-in or two with bullies, but that was always more verbal than anything else, because I was on the tall side of average.  Any bullies I encountered soon got bored with me, because I stayed calm and didn’t let them under my skin, although one guy made a good portion of my sixth-grade year miserable just by his relentless presence.  I realize now that he probably had very little waiting for him at home and really just needed friends much more than I did.  I was certainly not “cool,” and for most of middle school, I could have told you who the “cool” kids were.  On our class trip to Washington, DC in eighth-grade, we were placed into small groups for reflection and writing, and somehow my room of four “not-cool” guys was grouped with a room of four “cool” girls.  I still wonder if it was some kind of social experiment our teachers were having.  (For the record, I may not have been “cool,” but that was a great trip).

My high school, in the early 90s, seems to have been entering the “pluralistic” phase Quartz and Asp describe, at least from my perspective.  Perhaps it was simply big enough that status and hierarchy didn’t matter, although the point of outward status symbols is that they allow individuals to determine at a glance the relative status of a stranger, so if there were a status hierarchy in place, I should have felt it more.  There were times that I felt very “in” and others that I felt “out,” in those four years.  I worried tremendously about girls and I did my schoolwork, and yes, there were girls who I felt were “out of my league,” including one who agreed to a date and then blew me off.  There was some status sorting happening, but not as rigidly or as intensely as my wife describes in here high school experience around the same time.  Perhaps she simply worried about it more, having to move to a new school about halfway through high school and having attended many different schools growing up, where I made it through late-elementary, middle and high school with the same students, augmented by new groups every time we moved to a higher school.  Today, I am linked to many of my high school classmates through social media, and they are a fair variety–from our class officers, to the people I was in band with, to people I never really talked to in high school.  On the other hand, I haven’t kept in close touch with anyone, and the best I can hope for is that many of my classmates remember me as the guy who ran for class president twice and lost, but was overall a good guy.

Did I witness this shift from “rebel cool” to “DotCool?”  It seems to ring true.  It would have happened during my high school and college years, and even though I was fourteen in 1990 and twenty-four in 2000, it seemed like I wasn’t the only one changing.  1995 was an epic year–Campbell is right, and I’ve been teaching it that way to my students.  I also teach them that grunge was in many ways the last original form of rock and that everything since has been repetition, which has always seemed to place my own experience too close to the center of things, so it’s nice to receive some support for that view from Quartz and Asp.  My college experience (admittedly as a music major) had relatively little to do with any kind of opposition to conformity, and I watched the shift to pluralism in both my ideals and the larger society.  That isn’t to say it wasn’t without status, but this was somewhat dampened in the world of the music conservatory by the presence of so many people who were focused on the work at hand.  Perhaps in the larger University of Cincinnati, frat boys and sorority girls were much important, but though I saw their sweatshirts (status symbols again), I didn’t give it much thought (but even though I didn’t know one house from another, I’m sure it made a difference to those wrapped up in Greek life).

In graduate school, I felt “cool.”  I taught admiring undergraduates as a teaching assistant, with one class in particular enthralled by my real world experience as a music teacher and even a small clutch of “disciples.”  Not to mention a couple of friendships that have turned out to endure, and several artistic collaborations.  I felt much the same way in Oklahoma at my first teaching job–for a red state, the culture felt very communal, with a large measure of equality between students and professors.  Lakeland is different, but I’m teaching a different kind of student, since my classes are intended for non-majors.  On the whole, I’m not sure my current students feel that I’m “cool,” except in the “DotCool” sense where someone who does interesting and creative work is “cool.”

Some thoughts, anyway.

 

Kevin Wale’s Senior Guitar Recital

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

I wish that every music student I have ever had could have been in the audience at Centennial Theatre at OPSU tonight. Kevin Wale, a senior music major in guitar performance, gave a recital that, at least for our school, raises the bar.

My college girlfriend and I gave our senior recitals about a week apart in 1998, and my parents made it down for both. My mother, who has no formal musical training, hit the nail on the head when she said, “M. had to do a recital, but you got to do a recital.” She was right–I enjoyed every minute of it (although I’m not sure that my audience can say the same thing).

Tonight’s performance, though, is a model that all musicians can aspire to in one way or another. Kevin “got to” give a recital, and from start to finish, it was amazing.

To my current students: this is what happens when you work as hard as you should be working. I’m talking about the technique, the confidence, the joy and passion with which Kevin played, the variety of styles he tackled and the facility of execution. Kevin told me later he was nervous, but it didn’t come off that way, and I wouldn’t have expected it to. As my colleague Matt Howell was fond of saying, “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” The battle is not to the swift or to the strong, but to the well-prepared and the well-trained.

Again, to my students–you can do this. It won’t be easy, and it won’t always be fun. In fact, it mostly will not be fun. But like any discipline, practice becomes a habit, and soon you feel uncomfortable without it. You need to make practice familiar, until your instrument becomes as much under your control as a part of your body (or singers, bring your body so fully under your control that you no longer have to consciously control it).

Tonight, I saw a rock guitarist play twenty minutes of classical guitar. It wasn’t Segovia–only Segovia was Segovia–but it was well-practiced, conscientiously prepared, and played in a stylistically aware fashion. To my students–some music will take you out of your comfort zone. Indeed, you may never be comfortable with some music. A rock guitarist playing classical is like a sex change! But Kevin pulled it off, again, with confidence and aplomb, and he is now a better, more complete musician for it. College is about pushing boundaries and expanding ourselves to new and different areas of endeavor. Whether it is within music or not, you need to try things you might not otherwise try, meet people you might not otherwise meet and dare to see what’s out there. You will either reaffirm your understanding of the world or be forced to revise it, and either way, you will be a better, fuller human being for it.

Kevin could not have done tonight’s recital alone. He had a slate of collaborators of all types, but what they had in common was that they could support his work with their own. To my students–choose your coworkers wisely, and treat them with respect. You may think you are more talented than they are, or think you are giving them more than they are giving you, but in the end, we are not in this alone. “No man is an island,” in any sense of the word. But, too, don’t tolerate collaborators who are unreliable or uncommitted any more than absolutely necessary. You can’t build whatever it is you are trying to build when the people you work with are holding you down.

Something that has always impressed me about Kevin, and which was in evidence tonight, is his ability to step back and think about things in context and ponder deeply. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and the same is true about music. Not a single piece of music was out of place, and each piece fit into a 90-minute tour of the guitar with Kevin Wale as tour guide. I instruct recitalists in our department to choose music of merit, whether it be for its significance in the repertoire of the instrument, or its degree of difficulty or its ability to showcase the performer’s talent. Kevin very much took this to heart for this recital, and added on top a layer of thoughtfulness in programming that made the audience a part of the recital as well.

So, to address my students one more time–don’t just practice to learn music, but to dig deeply enough into the music to learn how to live. These are the real virtues of an education, whether musical or otherwise, and be grateful that you have been granted the time and the opporunity to pursue them. Congratulations again, Kevin.