Musings on an Educational Pedagogy

Commonly, when people critique our educational systems, they like to talk about the issue of rote memorization versus critical thinking.

"We're only teaching our kids to spit facts back out, we're not teaching them to REALLY THINK," they insist, full or moral righteousness and deep, undying care for the youth of today. As you might have noticed, I have many issues with these people. But to start, I'd like to make a claim: I was, in my specific educational path, taught to think. And, not to pat my back too much, I was taught really well. I was privileged enough to be born into a middle-class, suburban family that valued education highly, to be able to attend public schools that were able to afford quality teachers followed by a fairly prestigious private high school and am now attending a prestigious private liberal arts university. This is also probably a good moment to mention that I'm white and a cisgender male, which generally makes everything easier. The point being: critical thinking is a skill I've been taught all my life, and it's one I've gotten pretty good at. And it's also a skill that's served me really well for problems that it's good at solving.

"So what's your problem, then," you ask, astute as always.

My bone to pick is this: critical thinking is pretty much all I was taught. It was all that was on the curriculum, at least. All that I, from an institutional standpoint, was told was important. The message that sent was simple: all you need in life is good critical thinking. If you master this skill, all the primary and secondary schooling I've ever received seemed to say, all of life's problems will simply melt away in front of you with nothing but the faintest mental effort.

Needless to say, this is not true.

While I would probably have told you that that wasn't true for many years before now, it's only in the last six months that I've really realized just how strongly I had considered it to be true. And even now, I still live it, if you will, despite knowing that it's not true. It's one thing to declare a proposition false, it's another thing entirely to try to throw off 12 years of institutional education enforcing that insisted that proposition was correct.

I don't care who you are (or what you study), it's not possible to make it through this life happily and successfully with nothing but intelligence. And nor should you want to. Intelligence is a remarkably limited way of interacting with and understanding the world, leaving out everything from the wonder of childlike naivete to the solid grounding of centuries-old wisdom that's only wisdom when it lives in your bones and not in your head.

And so, reader, I now come to you for help: how do you get out of your head? How do you access modes of interaction and understanding that aren't intelligence? I could use some help learning.

Parody Part 2: "And So I Watch You From Afar" to "Catch For Us the Foxes"

Hey y'all. I know it hasn't quite been a week, but I've got a pocket of time, and I figured I'd write a bit about how the music project has been going. Since last post, I've listened to 26 albums (including several that I only have one song on) and am working on my 27th right now. I'm averaging solidly under 4 hours a day, which is concerning because it means that this whole project is going to take over a month to complete. But that's fine, because I've actually been finding it a lot easier than I had expected I would. When I like the album that's on the docket, I have a lot of fun listening to it. When I don't love it, I usually am able to put it on the background enough that I can absorb it without getting too bored. Walking from my apartment to campus has been a blessing in this regard.

What it hasn't quite been, though, is as meaningful as that first bit was. I haven't had a moment quite like the moment that I had with "Ambient 1." There have been some fun moments: "Antics" by Vundabar is a really fun album that I always forget about, so it was nice to have a reminder. "I Got Mine," the only track I have off of the Black Keys' "Attack and Release" is a really quality single. "Brother, Sister" by mewithoutYou is one of my favorite albums, and coming back to it in this context made it more meaningful, somehow. But on the whole, I've spent a lot more time not quite focusing on the music than I'd like. It's somewhat of a necessary evil, as I mention above, but I do wish I had more patience.

Overall, not a hugely informative chunk of time, but I am still enjoying myself. And this is also the longest I've ever held myself to a challenge like this, so that's pretty cool.

Every album I've listened to since the last update:
"And So I Watch You From Afar" by And So I Watch You From Afar
"Antics" by Vundabar
"The Argument" by Fugazi
"Bound for the Floor" off of "As Good as Dead" by Local H
"I Got Mine" off of "Attack and Release by The Black Keys
"An Awesome Wave" by Alt-J
"Bastion Original Soundtrack" by Darren Korb
"BBNG2" by BADBADNOTGOOD
"Hedron" off of "BBNG3" by BADBADNOTGOOD
"Novocaine for the Soul" and "Not Ready Yet" off of "Beautiful Freak" by the Eels
"Bestiary" by Hail Mary Mallon
"BetterOffDEAD" by the Flatbush Zombies
"Black Sabbath" by "Black Sabbath"
"(Boyle) and Piles EP" by RED WALL
"Brother, Sister" by mewithoutYou
"Bryter Later" by Nick Drake
"The Mission (M is for M is for Milla Mix)" off of "'C' is for (Please Insert Sophomoric Genitalia Reference HERE)" by Puscifer
"Cage the Elephant" by Cage the Elephant
"Camouflage" by billy woods
"Cancer for Cure" by El-P
"Cape Verde" by Super Chron Flight Brothers
"Cardboard Castles" by Watsky
"Lazy Eye" off of "Carnavas" by Silversun Pickups
"Cast the First Stone - EP" by The Virginmarys
"Catch For Us the Foxes" by mewithoutYou

A Parody of Myself Pt. 1

If you know me well (or not that well), the conceit of the following blog will make a lot of sense.

I've decided to listen to every single album I have on my iPod in alphabetical order. From "All Hail Bright Futures" to "You're Dead." That's 178 albums containing 1,853 songs by 121 artists. The total runtime is 5.3 days, or approximately 127 hours. At about 4 hours a day, that's almost 32 days of listening.

Never let it be said that I'm not ambitious.

The start of this project was very much as a challenge for me and a challenge to me. It is going to be a challenge to not deviate from alphabetical order, to not fall back into something I'm more comfortable with, to not skip something I don't love. But it's also a challenge to me. Why do I have so much music that I have made immediately available to me? Why don't I listen to all that much of it? I generally cycle between 5-10 albums regularly, with another 30 or so thrown in occasionally. There's music on my phone I've listened to once, and probably more that I've never listened to. And yet, when I try to clear out how much music I have, I always end up keeping the vast majority of it. Why can't I let go of music I don't listen to? And, on top of the challenge, it was also borne out of an urge to explore. I like music a lot. I want to find new music that I like a lot. I want to rediscover music that I've let go of. I want to expand what my ear can handle.

Any while all of those things are definitely still true, of course the journey has already taught me more than finishing probably ever will.

So far, I've gotten through 3 albums: "All Hail Bright Futures" by And So I Watch You From Afar, "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" by Califone, and "Allelujah! Don't Bend!Ascend!" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I'm currently working my way through Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno. "All Hail Bright Futures" was a great one to start out on because it's an album I really enjoy, but don't listen to too much. So it sounded fresh and set me off on the right track.

"All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" is an album I've listened all the way through perhaps once, although there's one track on there ("Funeral Singers") that I love and have listened to many times. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed listening to it. I didn't feel any of the sense of impatience that I usually associate with trying to force myself to listen to certain music. And while I highly doubt the album will be cracking my Last.fm top weekly listens for a while, it's certainly one I want to return to.

"Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!" is also an album that I haven't listened to entirely that much, although again I have one track ("Mladic") on it that I particularly love. It's a relatively short album for the band, clocking in at only 55 minutes (as opposed to "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antenna To Heaven's" 87 minutes), but it's still an incredibly experience. Godspeed truly are the masters of long-form post-rock, and this listen was as magical as I expected it to be.

Where things started to get kind of interesting was when I started listening to "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" by Brian Eno. I've listened to it several times, although none recently, so I'm not super familiar with it. I listened to the majority of it while walking around campus, which caught my attention because it's not the type of music I'd normally listen to while walking. It's, as the name notes, very ambient, very relaxed, and not super driven. My most recent walking go-to, for contrast, has been "The Argument" by Fugazi, a rocking post-hardcore album. And yet, I found the experience of walking while listening to "Ambient 1" truly beautiful. I wouldn't say it was life-changing, but it was the sort of bubble of presentness and peace that I strive for everyday. I walked along totally absorbed in what was right in front of me, acutely aware of the buildings in a way I'm not normally, feeling the cold on my face with an appreciation I had been lacking. It was a wonderful walk across campus and back home, and it all seemed to be driven by the music, which shook me out of my normal routine and into something just a bit more magical.

And so, I again learn the importance of presentness, and hope to incorporate that into this challenge. If I can experience that sort of awareness through every 4th album, then this month will be an incredible one.

I will (hopefully) update again in about a week!

Ideas

I'm hoping this will be the first in a series of regular blog posts, outside of (what I hope will become) my normal output.

See, one thing I've never really struggled with in my incredibly short time as an artist is having ideas. They seem to come to me out of nowhere, and I've recently been really good at creating a smooth pipeline from an impulse to a more fully-formed idea. And that's where the issue starts. I often sit on half-formed ideas for a long time, unable or unwilling to develop them further. So, in an effort to jostle some of those ideas loose, I'm putting them here. I'm hoping that the act of publishing these ideas will push me towards taking them more seriously, and I'm also hoping that any comments on these ideas will help me to develop them further/find collaborators who are interested in pushing the idea towards reality. I am going to do my best to post ideas here bi-weekly, but bear with me if I'm not totally punctual.

So, without further ado, here's this week's batch of ideas:

The first idea is (probably) for a play (or maybe a screenplay?) inspired by a lot of the protests and counter-protests happening around police brutality and racism sparked by the death of Michael Brown in August. Something that specifically compels me about these events is the constant presence of counter-protesters, people who take to the streets in support of Darren Wilson or police in general. It confuses me that there are people who could look at the way this country, and especially our police departments, are structured and NOT see the incredibly injustices happening. I find it really hard to see the humanity in those types of people. And, of course, as soon as I see something hard to do, I want to do it. The central character of this narrative would be one of those protesters. But instead of focusing only on this person as a political entity, it would show this character as a regular person. A person who is a husband, a father, a friend, and not necessarily a bad one of any of those things. I have some ideas for confrontations with a child and a coworker, but those are still getting fleshed out. What I do know is that the goal for this project would be to go beyond just exposing the hypocrisy that I believe is present in someone who is a loving father/husband/friend but then actively supports and peddles in hate towards other people, but to explore how this hypocrisy is maintainable. How does this person ignore cognitive dissonance?

The second idea is a performance art piece. The impulse here is the idea of self-righteousness. I'm someone who believes very strongly in what I believe in, and will generally speak up for those beliefs. But I also do believe that how you stand up for what you believe matters a lot, and I do believe that self-righteousness is not just distasteful, but also harmful, or at least indicative of a harmful attitude. Self-righteousness to me indicates that the person talking is more interested in being morally superior than making a difference. And the sort of messed up thing is that you can self-righteous about anything. So, the idea here is to create probably 4-5 different monologues that are supposed to sound self-righteous. They would each be structurally identical and (hopefully) come across the same emotionally, but would each be about a different topic. These monologues would then be performed. I'm currently trying to decide how I want them to be performed. I think the idea of them being interwoven into each other by one performer is really cool, but I worry that it could be really hard to follow. Having them performed all at once, on top of each other, would be incredibly visceral, but would lack some of the more intellectual engagement that I want to happen. Having them performed one-by-one would allow for that intellectual engagement, but feels very un-engaging. As of right now, I'm feeling a mix of those three, but I'm not really sure how.

The final idea doesn't fit quite as easily into a single medium. It's inspired by the way music makes me feel, and especially by the way that a great album makes me feel. I'm really inspired by the way that each track on a great album feeds the whole and adds to the emotional resonance of the tracks around it. So, the idea I had was to take a really good concept album (I'm currently thinking The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, but I am very open to other ideas), get as many writers as there are tracks on the album, and have each writer write a scene for a single track. Each scene would be (about) as long as the track, and would (ideally) be heavily inspired not just by the emotional content of the track, but by the lyrical content, the feel of the whole album, and the place that track has in the narrative of the album. These pieces would then be workshopped together to help them fit together like the album does, and then performed, possibly with the album playing underneath. This idea seems like the most likely to become a reality within the relatively near future, but who knows.

So. Those are them. If you have any comments, ideas, thoughts, concerns, questions, etc. please comment/email me/tweet at me/tag me in an Instagram post, do whatever feels most comfortable to you. If you want to email me but don't have my email, I can give it to you through some private means of communication.

Thanks!

Why I'm Annoyed by Epistemology

One of my classes this quarter is called "Theory of Knowledge", an area of philosophy more formally referred to as Epistemology. I've found the class to be a pretty frustrating experience. Some of my frustration has to do with just generally being frustrated at classes in general recently (they're getting in the way of my education), but I do have some specific complaints about this class in particular.

My first complaint is that I simply find the class almost completely useless to me. The types of knowledge that we most commonly deal with and the examples we're using simply don't affect my day to day life in any meaningful or profound way. One idea that we've tossed around is that we can't really know anything, an example being that if our entire life is simply an illusion, we would have no way to tell. This question is irrelevant to me. If we were living in an illusion, my view on life and my day to day behavior would probably vary very little. I'm a firm believer in the idea that this life is all we have and therefore we should make the most of it, and this life being an illusion does not affect that philosophy at all. The examples that bother me come when we introduce an epistemological theory and then, after discussing it briefly, talk about counterexamples that might prove that this theory isn't correct. The issue I have is that often these counterexamples are excruciatingly specific. There was one example to counter reliablism that goes like this: "Brian is a normal peron with accurate and well-justified beliefs about the world around him. Brain is Brian's mental duplicate. Brain has experiences just like Brian's. And Brain's beliefs are analogues of Brian's. When Brian believes that he, Brian, is eating a hot fudge sundae, Brain believes that he, Brain is eating a hot fudge sundae. When Brian believes that he, Brian, is taking a stroll in the park, Brain believes that he, Brain, is taking a stroll in the park... Brian is right about each of these things, as he usually is. Poor Brain is wrong every time" (Feldman 94). I have two issues with this example. For one, it's just bizarrely specific and petty. It's based in no such reality that I'm concerned with, and seems to have constructed an absurd situation for the specific purpose of beating the rule. The second is that, instead of spending more time discussing the theory and how we might actually apply it, we spend the majority of the time that we're talking about the theory talking about this and other counterexamples. To me, that is not a useful way to spend our time, especially if the ultimate goal of a field like epistemology is to help us to understand how we understand the world around us. 

The second issue I have is a metaepistomological complaint related to the different theories that have been floated. The way we've been talking about these theories has been in a very cleanly scientific way that I find offputting. The book and the class are both very entrenched in the idea that there is a "correct" theory that will cover all cases of knowledge perfectly. I very strongly disagree with this idea. Epistomology, other areas of philosophy, and the social sciences are not Newtonian physics and they should stop trying to be. It really bothers me that we're treating the human mind and how it understands the world like a pure scientific experiment where if an idea doesn't totally fit the world, then it's entirely wrong. Many areas of knowledge are not going to collapse neatly into a simple little formula that we can use every time to describe what's around us. The social and philosophical world are inherently messy and any theory that attempts to explain the world without acknowledging that are going to fail. Something that would be interesting to me is the idea of combining these different theories so that the theory can match the type of knowledge that it produces. We've acknowledged the idea of different types of knowledge in class, so I don't think that would be a huge jump.

Works Cited:
Feldman, Richard. Epistemology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Print.

I'm Back (With Some Oppression Politics)!!

It's been a LONG while, but I'm feeling the urge to write again, so here I am.

The issue I want to address here is a bit different from the usual topics of this blog. Previously, I had focused a lot on my own artistic sensibilities, creations, and reactions. This blog post is much more political, specifically politics of the oppression type.

Oppression politics is an area that I've had increasing interest in over the last year and a half or so. My interest has especially increased since arriving at college, an experience I'm sure many people can relate to. I find a lot of meaning and purpose in learning about the issues that fall underneath the umbrella of oppression politics (sexism, racism, LGBTQ issues, just to name a few).

In this article, I want to talk about a Buzzfeed quiz that's been making its way around recently, entitled "Are You A Feminist?" I find this quiz to be a little bit problematic in ways that take away a lot of the power that other people are finding in it away from me.

To pause here for a second, I just want to insert that I do consider myself a feminist, and a fairly radical one at that. I'm currently working my way through "Feminism is For Everybody" by bell hooks and it's INCREDIBLE. And, at the end of the day, I do think that this Buzzfeed article is a positive happening. Like all Buzzfeed things, it's a bit manipulative (that title is such click-bait it's ridiculous), but I'm all about the egalitarianism of anti-oppression movements.

My issues with it come in two threads. The first is sort of semantic, relating to the way the single question of the quiz is framed. To me, far too often the idea that equality means treating men and women the same too often gets translated into treating women like men, which is not the point of feminism. It also very explicitly uses the gender binary, which is always problematic. This ties into the second issue that I have with the quiz which is that it ignores the intersectionality that HAS to go along with feminism in order for feminism to truly accomplish the goals it wants to. Sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and all other types of oppression are inherently tied together and ignoring those ties leads to an incomplete solution to the problem of oppression.

The way I understand feminism, I think the question that should have been used in this quiz is "Do you believe that each individual human has the right to be treated with dignity and respect and have their full humanity recognized?" To me, this question encapsulates all oppression politics and holds a higher standard for people to reach, a standard that allows EVERYONE to retain their dignity.

The Art of Creation

I'm not going to be melodramatic: I have not always felt a desire to make music. I enjoyed playing Alto Saxophone in grade school and middle school, but it was always a side hobby, not something I was seriously interested in. In the early years of high school, I thought I was really interested in it, and signed up for a music theory class. The class didn't run, and I ended up not pursuing it any further.

Recently though, I've found the time and the creative energy to make music, and it has been an incredibly gratifying experience. The key to this has been my computer. Using music production software has freed me from my somewhat-lacking technical skill with the guitar and has allowed me to translate the music straight from my head. I've been using it for about a month now, and although I have only finished two songs since then, that has more to do with my own sort-of-perfectionist nature than a lack of creation. I have plenty more on the way, but if you'd like to hear what I have so far, check out my Soundcloud.