the anti-school school

I'm going to try this blog everyday thing for the month of November. It sounds like a fun challenge. This is also the home stretch to the end of the quarter so we'll see how well I hold out. I'm pretty excited because the last day of graduate school classes ever (ever! well, at least here) coincide with my 30th b-day on Dec. 1. You can all bet I'll be drinking heavily that night to celebrate.

Today started out pretty well. I woke up half an hour before my alarm, which gave me time to finish an assignment I had procrastinated on all week. On the bus I read an article about the musical brain (for my piano pedagogy class) that said everyone is born with some capacity for music and music-making, and it also said that people are subconsciously drawn to music that mimics proportions in nature. This nature idea was later brought up in class, but in a more round-about way. We were discussing how it is better, in performance to have correct rhythm than correct pitches, because uneven and unsure rhythm makes us feel nervous. This led to speculations about the rhythms of nature, i.e. the regularity of our own heartbeats and a predilection for even, steady rhythms. Then a classmate interjected by saying that she has an uneven heartbeat, and does this tie in with her inablity to keep a steady pulse while playing piano? Someone else mentioned that if you put two old-fashioned metronomes together, on the same speed but start them at different times, that their beats will eventually synchronize. Very deep thoughts for a wednesday afternoon, but it's all pretty fascinating if you think about it. I'll have to try the metronome experiment sometime and get back to you.

More drama in the classroom. I posted, on my class website, that I was concerned with their grammar skills and tendency towards plagiarism. I got an annonymous comment from a student who was appalled that I didn't state this policy in my syllabus and how could I possibly grade down for that? So I wrote back that it goes without saying that whatever written work you turn in for school needs to be at least somewhat grammatically polished and not copied from another author. I haven't heard back yet, but hopefully they get it now. It's so frustrating. I see why they're frustrated. High school did not prepare them to be good writers and thinkers, but plagiarism? My god, K was just telling me that in 3rd grade he learned what plagiarism was because he had copied an oral report out of an encyclopedia. Am I being too mean to these students? Am I asking too much?

Along these lines I'm currently reading a book called, "What's College For?" and in it the author mentions that today's college students feel entitled to receive A's and pass classes just because they pay tuition. It's a business venture--I pay you, you give me a degree. This may be one of the reasons college today is dumbed down--deans feel pressured by parents and students to ease the load so the college can continue to operate and keep their enrollment high. This is probably a gross oversimplification, and there are definitely other factors involved, but this book is really fascinating and makes me see higher education in a whole new light. It is really a business--it has nothing to do with learning or education at all. On the other side of this all, I've been enjoying teaching because it makes me mad and makes me want to do something about it, but can I really go through the bullshit of another graduate degree just to teach a subject to students that feel a sense of entitlement, who don't care about the subject, who work full-time jobs (because they can't afford to go to school AND feed their families or pay rent), who are visual learners instead of aural learners--who would rather sleep or chit-chat in class or watch a video or play solitaire on their laptops or listen to their iPods with one ear-bud in their left ear (all happened)---and the worst part of it all is that I understand because I am a student and I've been in painfully awful classes and seen ineffective teaching. Well, I hope I'm not too terrible of a teacher, but I can't be worse than some profs. But how do you teach a large lecture class that meets everyday a subject like music history where the only option is to give boring lectures everyday because no one reads the textbook (which I didn't pick out by the way--it's embarrassingly dumbed down--large pictures, containing over-simplified and sometimes incorrect music-historical information). There is no opportunity for active learning, deep listening, or intense engagement when people are worried about their next paycheck, or they're sleeping because how does Renaissance polyphony relate to Alicia Keys and Tupac? You can't teach someone who doesn't want to learn, and feels entitled to receive an A just because they paid tuition. Out of a 50-something class, only 20 have been showing up. How can I not care about that? How can I keep going when I know they don't care no matter how hard I try?

I want to work in the field of education, but it's all so messed up. I think I'm going to start my own school: the anti-school school where you pick out a few subjects you want to study, and you read about them on your own, and you make robots and puppets and go on field trips to learn about dairy farms and talk about current events and put on skits. This is actually what it was like in "gifted" class in 5th grade (I hate that word because everyone is "gifted" in some way). Why can't school be like that?