Why Do You Always Take Pictures?

At an event this afternoon, I saw something that caught my eye, so I snapped a few pictures. Business as usual in my vida diaria.

However, the person sitting next to me turned & asked: ‘Why do you take pictures of everything?’

My initial response (which I elected to keep to myself): “Why DON’T you take pictures of everything?’ …ZING! [...sometimes the 'answering a question w a question' method just works oh so well...] (;

ANYWAY, this question really did get me thinking…hmmm…I know why I take pictures + document everything …but how do I explain this succinctly to others??

…and then all of a sudden the rain stopped, the clouds parted and *dun dun dun dun* – I came across some Keri Smith greatness while searching Amazon…nothing short of a Christmas miracle!

Love me some Keri Smith (super smart, creative, brainiac-y woman) so because of this & because what she said basically summarizes my thoughts…there’s no need to write it twice. Here you go:

Process, Learning, Music + Me Playing!

When I first started taking private violin lessons way back when, my teacher, Mr. Nelson, had me read a book before I began: The Inner Game of Tennis.

“WTF? I am here for violin lessons, not tennis tips” I thought to myself.

However, I read the book and honestly, the ideas in the book have really changed my way of thinking. My brief summary will do no justice to this book; however, to give you a brief background, the book is basically about this:

In every human endeavor there are two arenas of engagement: the outer and the inner. The outer game is played on an external arena to overcome external obstacles to reach an external goal. The inner game takes place within the mind of the player and is played against such obstacles as fear, self-doubt, lapses in focus, and limiting concepts or assumptions. The inner game is played to overcome the self-imposed obstacles that prevent an individual or team from accessing their full potential.

So basically, it’s about the psychology of learning. And how we all have a ‘self 1′ and a ‘self 2′. Self 1 is the name that is given to the conscious ego-mind which likes the tell Self 2, you and your potential, how to hit the ball and play the game. (or how to play the music in my case…). According to the Inner Game theory, to achieve peak performance, the key is to resolve any lack of harmony between the two selves, as it is the contrary thinking of Self 1 which causes interference with the natural abilities of Self 2. This requires the learning of several inner skills, such as the art of letting go of self-judgements, letting Self 2 do the hitting, recognizing and trusting the natural learning process.

Pretty wild, right? For me this was a huge learning lesson because I realized how much my “self 1″ was affecting my playing. I always caught myself thinking, ‘oh shoot, you are going to be flat on this note’ or, ‘wow, your intonation and pitch is really off today’. When the reality of playing an instrument is this: it’s all about muscle memory and hearing the sound you want to hear before playing it.

I remember in orchestra, we’d always do these exercises where we’d put down our instruments and Mr. Nelson would take out a ball and throw it to us and we’d have to catch without looking. He said: you should never miss the ball because you know how to catch a ball. You know how to anticipate where it is going to land based on the speed and distance for which it was thrown. It’s all very systematic actually. There’s no excuse for missing catching the ball because nothing changes the process. The only thing that changes is ‘self 1′ telling ‘self 2′ that you are going to miss the ball.

Pretty crazy how psychological success can be sometimes, right?

So that indirectly segues into the following videos. There are a few different ways to learn music. One is by ear – many young children use a method called the Suzuki method to learn an instrument, which is basically learning by playing by ear rather than reading music. My opinion is that this is used on many of the children who are started on instruments at a very young age, where their small motor / reading skills aren’t developed enough to read music. The other way to music is by reading the map, i.e. the music.  I personally don’t think one method is better than the other and personally think a balance between the two is ideal.

Now here’s the problem with learning w the first method: these musicians can’t read music. However, because they aren’t buried in the music and aren’t READING notes, they are rather HEARING the notes, which in my opinion is far more organic sounding. It’s like the different between learning Spanish from a book, rather than from a native speaker. The end result is that the spoke Spanish sounds WAY different. Well, it’s the same for musicians.

Here’s the problem w learning from the 2nd method: musicians are great at reading music, but tend to lack a musicality within their playing as their sound is very mechanical.

So this leads me to me. (= I would say I mainly learned to play (violin) with the second method. I did a bit of Suzuki; however, I mainly learned music from reading rather than hearing the music. So at this point in my life, I have a few goals in music. For violin, I am trying to put the music aside and learn more by ear, as I can read music well, but have found myself forgetting to learn by listening, which affects the end result. On piano…I’m doing the opposite. I can mess around on the piano without music; however, I really could use some practice with following the map and learning to just pick up any piece of piano music and going to town. (= I need to learn improv. too, but that’ll come in time.

So…it almost pains me to post the following videos because I am a perfectionist and clearly the songs I’m playing are nowhere near perfection. However, for me, I am all about process (moreso than end result)…I am a planner / strategist after all, so the creative process for me is more interesting than the final product. (=

Last year in Deb’s class, she assigned us to create something (ANYTHING – digital, movie, book, song, interpretive dance, puzzle, WHATEVER, didn’t matter!) that defined us. After much contemplation, I decided to make a book about how I learned process + strategy from music. I can honestly say that 95% of everything I’ve learned in life, it’s come from music…that’s pretty huge, so being able to explain that really helps me to explain my thought process.

Anyway, so like I said before, the following is no where near preformance / presentation levels. I am in the process of learning these songs and have much to fix with pitch, tone, intonation, musicality, bowings, style, telling a story with the song…the list goes on…however, in the spirit of the process + learning methods topic, I figure these videos are actually quite appropriate:

education, music + process

1 1/2 years ago in Dave’s curiosity class, my term curiosity project was to learn all that I could about education systems over the course of ten weeks. Since then, and especially now that I have joined the education field, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about education models.

I won’t go into detail now (or else this will turn into a novel), but in my brainstorming (and by drinking the Ken Robinson kool aid), I realized that my orchestra + choir classes were the what taught me the most relevant and long-term content.

In Deb’s class, I made a book explaining how music has guided my education, using a piece by Tchaik. that my orchestra played back in 2005 – I don’t think I’ve ever played my orchestra music for anyone, but alas, the time has come (=

At first I was hoping to get a video up here, as I know we are a hugely visual culture and perhaps more of you would be apt to watch the song in its entirely if there was some sort of visual (= However, I was reminded of Mr. Nelson always telling us to “keep our eyes above the stand” AKA, stop trying to listen to the music with our eyes.

So…now it is that time for me to pass along this knowledge and encourage the same. Some of the best performances we had were when we turned the lights off and had to rely on just two senses to create music: touch and hearing.

Our generation is over stimulated – it’s so easy to multi-task and do 15 million things at once, but with this opportunity also comes the consequence of losing sight of the details that perhaps seem minute, but in all actuality are major components of the whole.

With that said…I encourage you to put everything else aside for 9 minutes and 31 seconds and enjoy some Tchaikovsky.

Here’s the recording of my orchestra at the 2005 Vienna International Youth + Musical Festival playing the 4th movement of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C:

Waiting For Deb Idea Book

Part A: At the beginning of winter term this past year, Max and I really bonded over sitting outside Deb‘s office, waiting for a few minutes to chat…along with every other J. school Ad. kid in Allen.

Part B: We discovered we both always brought our idea books to pass time during the wait.

AHA moment!: We decided to make a project out of it – insert the Waiting for Deb Idea Book!  We decided to Velcro a small blank notebook under the chair outside of Deb’s office.

Over the course of the next 2 terms, any student waiting for Deb could contribute to our collaborative book.  The kicker – Deb had no idea this was in the works (=  A week or so before school concluded, we presented Deb with the book during Ad. Night:

- I’m pretty sure it was a hit (= Between us all, the pages were almost all filled and…you can check it out for yourself, but I think there are some pretty sweet insights within: (=

why grad. school isn’t in my future

I really began thinking/learning about our education system about a year in a half ago in my curiosity for strategists class.  We were instructed to pick anything…a person, religion, idea, sports team, occupation, etc., learn about it for a term, and present our findings.  I chose to investigate education systems + mainly focused on the various types of school curricula structure and methods: traditional, home schooling, Montessori, unschooling, etc.

This year, I continued my education study through the cultural anthropology investigation I conducted.  Rather than structure + methods, I chose to focus my attention on curricula content and spent quite some time thinking about the validity and practical use of what we “learn” in school.

Last week, I watched a TED talk given by Liz Coleman. The main takeaway: there are repercussions of current over-simplified education curricula – rather than narrow areas of study, perhaps the best education includes cross-disciplinary + hands-on methods. hmm. interesting idea…

So, last night I found myself at probably the most stereo-typical Eugene college party I’ve ever been to in my life. Last weekend in Eugene…better late than never, right?  Anyway, the way I see it, there are three main types of Eugene house parties: the sorority/fraternity Greek themed / keg race parties, regular house parties, or SoCal/hippie/’dude’/vinal records/chill hang-out parties. I was at the 3rd type last night. …but I digress.

Anyway, the point is, I ended up talking to this kid traveling to Ecuador next term to do volunteer work.  He told me the reason he’s going is because he wants to be able to finally apply his knowledge to an actual … THING.  (this is where the lightbulb turned on in my head!)  We then spent quite some time discussing what we saw as the biggest disconnect in public school education – we learn about alot…but that’s where it ends. And that’s an incomplete education in my opinion. We need to be taught…and need to be practicing a practical…and actual application to what we are learning in school.  This system we’re using now basically is basically saying…teach the kids everything they need to know for 16+ years…but in this curriculum, do not include opportunities that actually allows students to apply their new found knowledge! Eurkea!  (except NOT!)  Doesn’t sound like a very smart idea to me (=

So this morning I read this article from Good (titled: the grad school brain dead)- my main takeaway: I now understand why grad. school is not in my immediate future.  Pigeonholing all grad. school programs into broad categorization aside, check out the follow snippets from the article:

A larger percentage of young, inventive, creative folk will enter an almost-bankrupt (to follow Taylor’s Detroit metaphor) graduate system. Most will not get teaching jobs. Many will never finish their dissertations. They will go into debt. And they will be trained to think deeply about an increasingly narrow range of ideas intelligible to only a few others. They will become increasingly unable to enter into conversations with colleagues, not to mention those outside the academy.

Academia over-specialized. The faculty lounge is silent, or is repurposed into a computer lab set up with 18 separate work stations. Non-academics deem the goings-on inside the gates uninteresting to those outside it (who wants a radio show on universities? Yawn). The result? No one, inside, outside, or over the ever thickening firewall between the two, is talking to anybody.

…so…what do you guys think? Is this really an issue with our public education, or just a handful of people with some crazy/extreme ideas?