pigeon

Rock up, swing down

In 7th grade, my math teacher was a gym teacher, with a boulder for a head, a protruding brow ridge, and a permanent glower. My high school drama teacher was essentially an adolescent, god bless her. My economics teacher was a reanimated corpse. I don’t know what my band teacher was before he was our band teacher, but he would later get the hell out of Dodge and become a used car salesman.

He made us do a warm-up before every jazz band practice, called “rock up, swing down.” This consisted of playing a scale (was it even a blues scale or anything like that? I seem to remember it as a plain old major scale), up with a rock rhythm, and down with a swing rhythm. Get it? We were jazzy, we were versatile. The thing was, though, those of us with wind instruments (yours truly: trumpet — not piano, but that’s a different pigeon) or keyboard instruments or string instruments just played the notes of the scale the exact same way, whether up or down. It was — just a scale. The only thing that differentiated the “rock” ascent from the “swing” descent was the drummer. He did straight eighth notes on the hi hat on the way up, and that characteristic tsss, ts, ts-tsss on the ride cymbal on the way down.

Sorry, but — what was the point of this warm-up? I guess one could make a rather lukewarm argument that it helped the rest of us listen, get in the mindset, refresh our awareness of the difference between the two styles. OK, fine, but — every time? Without fail? We get it! Let’s warm up some other way! Maybe taking turns with some improvisation or something? Nah, we wouldn’t learn anything actually jazz-related like that in jazz band — except two times that I remember: one was a workshop run by some guests from the university, and the other was a mistake (different pigeons, both of those).

I don’t know what this has to do with anything except it’s an example of being a student and finding something pointless, annoying, irrelevant, or otherwise dumb about what or how you’re being taught.

As I am allegedly a teacher now myself, this perspective is one I consider every day.

In a meeting this morning, one of my colleagues gave a mini-presentation about “why kids don’t like school.” It had many of the components one might expect: factoids and links to research about how the brain works, how we regulate attention, relevance to real life, how we respond to narrative structure — moderately interesting, though not much that I hadn’t heard or read before. But I couldn’t help thinking hold on, lemme just stop you right there — the reason kids don’t like school is that it is mandatory.

Am I wrong? I’m probably dreadfully oversimplifying, at the very least. Yes, I am wrong. Right? I’ve heard kids say “I like that class” or “I liked that assignment” or what have you. I remember not minding or even enjoying being in certain classes myself, and I could probably enumerate some of their distinguishing features.

And yet. Who would show up if they didn’t have to? What otherwise energetic, motivated, curious individual, given free reign to investigate, explore, build, or change something in the real world, by any expedient process, in any physical location, in association with any collaborators of their choosing, would go to a high school and do high school assignments to be graded by a high school teacher?

It feels a bit degrading to be performing for a captive audience.

I need to keep this from turning into “Poor me, I’m superior to my job! My excuse for being a disengaged, unmotivated teacher is the inherent injustice and rigidity of the system!” So, OK, yeah, either do a good job or quit and get a different job. (Wait — make that get a different job and then quit, yeah?) At least I theoretically have that option (though it probably doesn’t help that I’m not getting any younger and our economy is being raped and murdered and chewed up and swallowed and puked up and slurped back up again as we speak). But what’s a high school student supposed to do?

Survive. Play survivor. Be indefatigable. Be indomitable. Show initiative! Stop having mental health problems. Stop being addicted to social media, sugar, fat, salt, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, sedatives, stimulants, opiods, molly, ecstasy, sex, love, approval, gang affiliation, self harm, shoplifting, and buying things! How are you going to compete for a top spot in our utterly, irretrievably addicted society if you can’t stop indulging your addictions all the time?

Get those grades, kids. Rock up, swing down.

I’m not always bitter or bad at my job. A principal at a school I got let go from many years ago once told me, “You’re good at teaching — when you do it.”

Maybe teaching — what “being a teacher” means, as a job you get paid for in this world at this time — is hard, pedagogically and socially, and I’m tired and restless and constantly distracted, and it feels almost impossible to avoid hypocrisy. Everybody’s got a sob story.

I read a post by Cory Doctorow that made reference to an article by Fobazi Ettarh about “vocational awe,” the feeling that one’s profession is or ought to be a sacred calling of some kind, which feeling can then be used as leverage for low pay and all kinds of other institutional indignities.

This examination of the entanglement between the sacred and the pecuniary got me thinking again about an anecdote I heard from an anthropology professor. I forget which culture we were discussing in class, but he told us about these people who had maintained a traditional craft across the generations. The items they made — I want to say it was some kind of ceremonial staff or something like that — had a specific, sacred, magical function. But the people lived in a place where cruise ships had begun regularly stopping, and as a way of negotiating with changing economic circumstances, the people began selling the staves to tourists, who gobbled up the opportunity to get their mitts on these exotic and worldly souvenirs. The secret was, so this professor told us, they started making two different types of staves. The ones they were going to keep for themselves, they continued crafting by the age old traditional methods. The ones for sale to the tourists looked exactly the same, were made of the same wood and everything, but they didn’t put the magic in them. It wouldn’t have been right; the magic wasn’t for sale. Sell ’em the empty ones — no worries, no stress.

The self-satisfied cruise passengers were none the wiser. As far as they were concerned, their money and privilege were bagging them a rare enchanted prize they could wave around back home and say, “Look how well traveled I am!” In reality, it was as if they were perceiving the notes of the scale going up and down, but they had no ears to hear the differences between the rhythms played by the drummer in the background.

In compulsory education, we’re all tourists, selling contentless artifacts to each other, bound by implicit and explicit rules not to talk too earnestly about what the alternatives might be. The difference is, I think we all know about the magic. We know it exists — somewhere.

I just got an email from a student, consisting of these words: “Hey, I was wondering if what I’ve handed in so far would be good enough to pass your class.” (That’s actually fairly garrulous compared to most similar emails this time of year.) Emails like this are basically saying, hey, the ship’s about to pull out of the harbor — how much for the magic staff?

Instead of a tropical travel trophy, we’re haggling over the price of commodified credentials. Why does this bother me? Is vocational awe inhibiting my ability to sell them the empty ones and call it a day? Or do we not even have that distinction here; are magic and money (or grades; same difference) synonymous by the standards of our society?

I sometimes find it difficult to differentiate between the cognitive dissonance of working for a fundamentally flawed institution, and being exhausted, bored, or inhibited for other reasons.

Ironically, for me, I think making the staves without the magic in them is harder work than making the ones with it. Or maybe I’m getting grandiose and idealizing my malaise as a way to assuage my guilt and anxiety over feeling like I’m not really teaching anyone much of anything, most days.

I should be able to look around at the overabundance of need around me, see the deficiencies in the system and bring my individuality, my compassion, my personality to bear on shoring them up, just as a student, when asked to perform some meaningless sequence of tasks, should be able to conjure up gumption and pluck, and invent some precociously entrepreneurial demonstration of superiority over the established baseline of conscientious conformity we’re constantly telling them is a prerequisite for having a good life.

Or, I should be able to get off my high horse, quit overthinking it and make the job appear done to the satisfaction of all materially interested parties, even as a student should be able to appear to have done what they need to do to get the grade without undue groveling or scheming.

Neither option is working too smoothly for me at the moment. I think I got my staves mixed up. I’m not sure which kind I have in hand right now, the magic or the mundane. Can’t tell if I’m rockin’ up or swingin’ down.

I don’t think I’d make a very good used car salesman, though, so I’m gonna have to come up with a better backup plan than following in my band teacher’s angry little footsteps....

OK. Deep breath.

I am very fortunate. Let’s be real. I have a house for god’s sake. I went to a nice grocery store the other day and waved my phone at a thing, and walked away with blueberries and not the cheapest tea and like 7 pounds of angus chuck roast. (I made that one Mississippi recipe, with the pepperoncinis and all that.) There’s so many ways I could be so much worse off. I know myself — I need to make sure all this rumination leads to motivation, not some rube-goldberg self-torture device or elaborate mental jungle gym of justifications for giving up and playing the victim.

I’ve been scared of a lot of things for a long while, for various reasons. Some of the things and some of the reasons would scare some other people too, and some of the things would make some people wonder what my freaking problem is. Gill said part of getting sober is realizing you want more from your life, and that’s where standards come in. I guess one big question then is, whose standards? There’s these, and there’s probably some merit to be found in them, but I’m also leery of the religiosity around them, their openness to interpretation for convenience, their non-measurability, and their susceptibility to Goodhart’s law.

So that means I need to figure out what my standards are. Sounds like a good project to work on right now, tonight.