Thoughts more scattered than usual follow.

I have to admit that I’m a bit (okay, more than a bit) shy about this blog sequence. There were magical, beautiful moments in this class. There were also very disappointing moments, and some of them were because of my failures. I’m haunted–probably too haunted–by the gap between my conception of a learning odyssey and what I’m actually able to encourage and live up to myself. I’ll be teaching this class again this term, and I’m going to try to do better, but my best chance is always to let my fascination with the subject carry everything else along with it. When I lose myself that way, I find myself. Or perhaps when I ride the fascination I am better at getting out of the way–my own, and the students’.

There’s such an alchemy about teaching and learning that I feel a strange mixture of eagerness, awe, and trepidation every time I start again. I think back over this particular class and memories crowd to the fore: the Beatles argument, the two days I felt compelled to devote to the Beach Boys, the day we listened to James Brown’s “Night Train” together as we finished up Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitments,” the day a student identified a call-and-response moment in a Led Zeppelin song that I thought I knew inside out and suddenly opened an entirely new vista before me (it was all I could do to avoid jumping up right then and there with a Peanuts-esque “That’s IT!”), the way so many of the third presentations suddenly gelled into the kind of deep, thoughtful, rigorous, playful work I’d been hoping for–and trying to encourage–all along. The best blog posts, one of them quoting the last line of “Glimpses” in a way that made me think something had really resonated. One of those posts finding a YouTube tribute to the “female Elvis” whose obituary I had mentioned in passing that day. (By the way, YouTube was the single greatest resource for our class all semester long. I was worried about how we’d be able to share the music. I needn’t have.)

There were times I thought we wouldn’t get there. The day it became apparent I may have messed up the book order and left “High Fidelity” off the list. The day I tried to explain my follow-your-nose approach to research and left one student bewildered, apparently beyond recall. The day I asked the seminarians why they weren’t more lively in the question-and-answer period that followed their classmates’ presentations, and they replied that they didn’t want to ask questions for fear of making their peers look ignorant or stupid. I felt something rip inside when I heard their answer that day. A couple of them were passive and couldn’t be bothered to be answerable with questions, but for most of them it was the absolute truth: they didn’t look at the Q&A as a time to go deeper with what their classmates had already showed they knew, or to bring in interesting connections, or generally to take the level of engagement and enthusiasm and inspiration up a notch or ten. No, they were worried about catching their classmates out. And this in a class with no tests at all–but that’s another story.

Then there was the day when it became clear that I’d have to tell them they should blog twice a week, when I had hoped that with this small group and a topic of some urgency to all of us music lovers, I could just step back and let the blogging commence. That was certainly true for a few of the students. One in particular became a champion blogger within a week and I learned a ton from reading her blog (and told her so, too). But for most, especially at first, the overriding question was “how much do you want us to do?” I didn’t resent the question, really, but it was disappointing to realize how much their focus was task-oriented rather than inquiry-oriented (a facile dichotomy but I’ll leave it to advance the argument, for now). I know they were puzzled that we would be doing all this reading but they’d not be tested on it. I figure some found this a good reason not to read, or not to read very carefully. I used to be well-known for my regular reading quizzes, and I think those quizzes did a great deal of good as a constant indicator of the level and kinds of detail I expected them to attend to as they prepared for class. Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped giving these quizzes, probably because I grew impatient with them or tired of talking about them. I felt, and feel, that the time could be better spent. But as my wife always and rightly reminds me, much of what I need to bring concerns modeling, stepping students through certain paces. I will again attempt to find a balance between structure and emergence in this instance as well.

Then there was my own struggle to keep up with my evaluations of their oral presentations. Even with a (good) rubric sheet and recordings and copious notes, I found it hard to get the marking done. My mistake was not to evaluate the presentations right away, while I could replay the presentations in my head from memory, using my recordings and notes as supplements. Here I can find my biggest improvements next term. More structure for me.

I did not revise the syllabus with the students, exactly, though I’ve been powerfully influenced by the idea ever since I heard Barbara Ganley speak about it at Faculty Academy last spring. My version was to make it clear to the class that my revisions responded to my sense of the way the class work was emerging. I wanted them to understand that I did not view the syllabus as a “contract.” I tried not to abuse my privilege in this respect, and I tried to earn their trust so that any changes I made would  be seen not as “gotchas,” but as support for our work. I also put the syllabus on a wiki and asked students put their own contributions, notes, presentation materials, and so forth on the wiki. In that sense, their work enlarged and augmented (and completed, really) the outline my initial syllabus represented. I’m going to try to ramp up all these aspects next term. I’m also going to try to weave in more powerful, frequent knowledge-networking, specifically work with del.icio.us and online music resources. But I’m wary of piling too much on, as there were moments of what-do-we-do-now silence out of which some powerful ideas emerged, particularly the final project. (I’ll need to blog about this final project separately.)

I marked their oral presentations. I also evaluated their blog participation, their class meeting participation, and their class commitment generally. That evaluation was influenced by the self-evaluations I asked them to write at the end of term. I asked them to evaluate their own work on the final project, as well as their group members’ work (they had organized themselves, at my suggestion, into various task forces to construct the website). These self-evaluations also influenced my marks for their final projects. I explained to them that this was a chance for them to impress me not only with the quality of their argument but also, and primarily, with the quality of their reflection: its candor, expressiveness, and depth.

Most of all, though, I wanted for us all to listen with better ears. My strategy each day was to get us gripped, either by something I brought to the table or by a sudden insight or even a chance remark from one of the students, either in the class or in a blog post. And “gripped” here means not just fascination in the moment, though it certainly means that, too. In its larger sense, “gripped” means unable to let ideas alone, unable to keep from trying out an insight. If they could see that popular music could reward such scrutiny, they might be able to transfer that sense to other areas of their education, their lives. I can sum up my deepest joys in two ways: when students would point out a connection or a resonance I hadn’t expected or understood, and when students would say they found themselves listening to their songs more carefully and with greater interest than they had before, as they considered whether each song was rock, soul, or progressive. Sonic Youth, Backstreet Boys, Janis Joplin, the Kinks. Whatever. The students who gave the most to the class showed me, by the end, that they could stretch from Peter Guralnick’s patient, thorough, deeply committed Sweet Soul Music to the sparkling insights and arid bitterness of James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin to the rush and verve and swing and kerrang of Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop. They could see, or begin to see, how these writers, and these musicians, were themselves gripped.

I feel pained by the disappointments, especially the ones I contributed to, but as I think about the best of what the class produced, I start to feel elated, too, by where we found ourselves going. I aimed to bring the class powerful readings, a sense of history (and historical disputes), and a varied palette of songs from the 1950’s to the present. I wanted them to understand that sophistication can increase commitment and joy, as well as a healthy (and sometimes corrosive) skepticism. We played records for each other, and thought about everything from the technological pseudo-folk-song of Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” (Miller’s analysis here is brilliant) to boy bands, Britpop, and John Cage. We could take the measure of a season of astonishing cultural fermentation–and enjoy the blushful Hippocrene as well.

Perhaps the most startling moment of all came after the class was over, when a student in my freshman seminar commented on my Theme Parks and Sandboxes blog post. It was as if something I had been saying over and over, all semester long, had suddenly connected. Both he and I wish it had connected earlier. Yet I suspect that for this class, as for many, the deepest connections will occur in its wake, and that even if I had asked them to read my blog all semester long (that’s always seemed a little presumptuous to me, but maybe it shouldn’t) and had written that particular post at midterm, the ripeness that is all would not yet have come–to them or to me.

What’s lovely about blogging, of course, is that the connections endure, and the ripeness may always yet come.

Much left I would like to write about. I’d like to say more about each of the students. I made a study of them during the course, and thought hard about how to reach each of them, and how ready they were to be reached. I’d like to write about the first incarnation of this course, when I taught it in the summer of 2003 as part of the Advanced Studies in England summer program. I’d like to think through the freshman Writing Workshop I taught for many years in the late 90’s and early 00’s, often with my colleague  and partner-in-crime Bill Kemp, that we called “Stranded.” Since everything I did in Rock/Soul/Progressive last fall was in some ways influenced or inflected by everyone I was talking to, everything I was reading, and everything I was watching or listening to, I really should have a contributors acknowledgement page with a hundred or more names on it. I can’t end, however, without citing an essay that has long haunted me with its vision of an authentic self meeting the authentic otherness of the world, including all those other selves: Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature.”

I think that some part of me believes that careful attention to popular music can open more doors of perception than one usually finds in a course of study, but that may be largely the product of my own passion for rock-and-roll.

I see the students’ faces now, sitting around that table in Combs 348. I hear their voices, think about the apparent silences that their subsequent blog posts proved were not at all quiet, mull over the detachment they slowly overcame by the end of the semester. I think about the student who clarified a Blur song for me. The student who seemed so resistant yet wrote some of the most candid blogs. The student who shared with us how it felt to go home for the Thanksgiving holiday, and who thereby demonstrated the community we had begun to experience together.

I wish them well. I am grateful to them and hope that what I have learned will do justice to the work we did.

FSEM 100Y, Fall 2007. The University of Mary Washington had begun a program of freshman seminars the semester I left for the University of Richmond in summer of 2006. As I prepared to return to UMW for the Spring, 2007 semester, one of my first deadlines was for proposing a freshman seminar for Fall, 2007. Faculty were encouraged but not required to apply. I wanted to put that oar in the water, however. Many schools across the country were focusing on the “first year experience,” stressing its importance for bringing students into an intense community of learning that would strengthen and inspire them for the work they would take up during their college careers. I wanted to be part of that effort at UMW.

So I decided to propose a course built primarily out of heuristics and passion–though I didn’t put it exactly that way in the application. The heuristics were in the course title: rock for music derived from blues, country, or a mixture of the two; soul for music derived primarily from the gospel tradition; and progressive for music whose roots were in the various classical music traditions of Europe and, to a certain extent, of other cultures as well. These heuristics would allow us to ask questions about musical form, about performance practices, about musical history, and about cultural contexts. The overlaps and uncertain taxonomies were obvious from the start, but the categories were nevertheless useful as a way of focusing our analytical work and keeping us aware that the musicians we studied always located themselves within a tradition and within various communities of practice. A couple of times I brought up the connection between traditions and communities of practice within popular music and traditions and communities of practice within school. Once it came up in a particularly intense way at the end of a class session, and seemed to resonate within several students for some time afterward.

The passion was essentially a love for popular music, music that inspired social exchanges but also individual dreams, deep emotional bonds but also solitary, introspective pleasures.

I wanted to try to shape a course of study in which stronger and more precise analytical practices would emerge from an immersion in idiosyncratic but compelling musical histories, from oral presentations that would take the form of debates over whether a given song was rock, soul, or progressive, from novels deeply concerned with popular music, and from a final class project that would demonstrate what the students had learned in a way that would a) offer outsiders a powerful, entertaining, creative, and thoughtful experience of our work together and b) reflect as comprehensively as possible each part of the course of study, not just what was easiest or most obvious to include. Threading its way throughout the course was a dialetic between the US and the UK / Ireland. We read three music histories, two by US writers and one by a UK writer. We read three novels, one by an Irishman, one by a Brit, and one by an American. I assigned songs for the first two oral presentations, and I kept the dialectic going in those assignments. The students themselves chose the music for their final oral presentations.

As I look back on the course, I can see how every bit of the structure I built into the experience was there to support emergence. All the theme parks were inside a sandbox. It was a very risky instructional design, especially for the first time out. Yet I felt compelled to do it that way, for several reasons. One was that I wanted my freshmen to experience a fairly radical version of the freedom college grants the learner. I wanted them to see as vividly as possible that they would get out of it only what they put into it. Another is that the academic study of popular culture can quickly become highly inauthentic. “We murder to dissect,” and I think that’s particularly true of vernacular art–not because the art is not sophisticated, for it certainly can be and often is, but because it is so close to the essence of human yearning, joy, and anguish. There is a sense of immediacy, of voices emerging from direct and intense lived experience, that I feel must be respected. Not only respected, either: participated in. When Milton writes, “Come, knit hands, and beat the ground / In a light fantastic round,” the thought is not only a thought, but an invitation to keep time.

I’ll tell more of the story of this course tomorrow. For now, here’s a link to the syllabus (itself the product of some rather intense emergence at time–I was always scrambling to keep the revisions coming and keep them current), and here’s a link to the final project website, which I will eventually move to a more permanent location. I’ll have more to say about both of these tomorrow as well.

I’ve been re-reading this small and plangent volume. Claudia Emerson gave it to me eight years ago. It resonated very deeply with me then, and does so still. Though the lessons I need have changed over those intervening years, this inexhaustible book continues to anticipate and meet those needs. I think I will not ever stop learning from it.

A short quotation tonight:

“But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”

Tomorrow I hope to start writing about my freshman seminar last fall.

As a postscript to “Structures and Emergence,” I offer a recent story in the New Yorker about intensive care, checklists, executives and practitioners, and a stubborn practical expert visionary. (The story is also about nearly intractable institutional and professional dysfunction, but neither of those qualifies as news or deserves more than a sad acknowledgement followed by the next several steps in the long trek onward and upward.) It’s not the first time I’ve been inspired by Atul Gawande, the article’s author. Gawande gave me the idea for an APGAR for class meetings, and I see from a random spam trackback (a kind of shuffle-playback for the blog?) that my first Gawande reference came way back in December, 2004, when he wrote about the “focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness” that characterize the pursuit and achievement of excellence, even more than skill or knowledge.

Once again Gawande’s exploring the idea of excellence, and again the exploration is by way of a story about a perceptive, inventive, doggedly committed professional who’s able to realize a vision, glimpse by glimpse. To use current jargon, the “outcomes” seem easily described: more patients live and leave the ICU. The real lessons are deeper, however. They concern the space between innovation and standards, between experimentation and automaticity, and how expertise, or more particularly a culture of expertise, can lead to a sometimes fatal detachment from the necessary routines of effective practice.

A physician named Peter Pronovost (not unlike Virginia Apgar) has established a basic checklist of ICU procedures designed to minimize infection, to manage pain effectively, to limit complications linked to mechanical ventilation, and in general to remind nurses and doctors of what should happen routinely to give patients the best chance of surviving whatever disease or trauma had brought them to the ICU in the first place. His physician colleagues resisted the checklists at first. Some of the arguments bordered on the absurd: “spend time with patients, not on paperwork,” though the paperwork was short, focused, and designed to keep patients healthy, not satisfy bureaucracy. However, by concentrating on a single metric, infection rates, Pronovost was able to sell the idea. (I am reminded that a tactical gain can be the legs that push a strategic imperative over the goal line.) The results were interesting:

The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

Thus checklists need not be a reductive substitute for complexity, but can instead serve as vital first step in complexity management that actually frees up time and attention for the more idiosyncratic or urgent needs. In their explicit articulation of “minimum, expected steps in complex processes,” checklists also turn information into knowledge by expecting (even compelling) a certain kind of attention. A checklist is not just a list, after all. It’s a script; it anticipates a performance.

It seems to me that our students often deal with complexity by reducing it rather than managing it. Who can blame them when much of the schooling they experience obviously and maddeningly does exactly the same thing? It also seems to me that all of us in school tend to confuse lists with checklists. This is a subtler distinction, and I may not be making it well, but to keep the implicit stage analogy going, it has something to do with the difference between repeating lines and acting them out.

For me, the most provocative bits of Gawande’s essay come at the end in a restatement of his mighty theme:

We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people.

It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.

There they are, beautifully pulling against a tensile center: expert audacity and the virtues of regimentation. The tension is beautifully recursive, for to manage this tension expertly, one must establish and manage–perform?–another instance of it. Like a rosined bow pulling across a violin string.

The essay’s subtitle, presumably invented by an editor, asks a haunting question that effectively concludes the piece: “If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”

The new term begins in ten days, and I’m thinking about how to prep the sandbox for the fifteen weeks that follow. Truthfully, “thinking” is too mild a word. “Yearning” is more like it: yearning for the inspiration and insight into form, tempo, and activities that will give my students their best chance at surprising themselves and me with the depth and quality of their work.

For this post, rather than try to work out that yearning in my own prose, I want to experiment with some quotations, both audio and text. The two audio quotations come from KCRW’s “The Treatment,” in which host Elvis Mitchell does weekly interviews with actors, directors, writers, and other creative personnel from film, music, television, and other media. The two text quotations come from two Jerome Bruner books I’ve just started. Together, these four quotations fuel my yearning. I see the character of what I aspire to. That’s a good thing, though it certainly sharpens the yearning.

I hope you find them provocative too.

1. Director Paul Greengrass, from KCRW’s “The Treatment.”

2. Jerome Bruner, from the Preface to the 1977 revised edition of The Process of Education:

Let me turn finally to the last of the things that have kept me brooding about this book–the production of a curriculum. Whoever has undertaken such an enterprise will probably have learned many things. But with luck, he will also have learned one big thing. A curriculum is more for teachers than it is for pupils. If it cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it will have no effect on those whom they teach. It must be first and foremost a curriculum for teachers. If it has any effect on pupils, it will have it by virtue of having had an effect on teachers. The doctrine that a well-wrought curriculum is a way of “teacher-proofing” a body of knowledge in order to get it to the student uncontaminated is nonsense.

[An aside: Bruner’s assertion, which I agree with, runs counter to much of what I heard at the humanities session of the NCAT “Learning By Design” day last November in Richmond.]

3. Director Sarah Polley, from KCRW’s “The Treatment.”

4. Jerome Bruner, from “The Shape of Experience,” in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand:

What is characteristic of the great work of art is that its metaphoric artifice, its juxtapositions have not only surprise value but also illuminating honesty. The two combine to create what we shall later refer to as “effective surprise.” The work of art also has a cognitive economy in its metaphoric transformations, which make it possible for a seemingly limited symbol to spread its power over a range of experience.

I yearn for that effective surprise and for the cognitive economy of powerful symbols, for the structures and the illuminating honesty, the theme parks and the sandboxes, to make of courses of study episodes of buildable wonder. In posts to follow, I’ll try to articulate some of my efforts to do so last term, and to be as candid as I can about what worked and what didn’t, and insofar as I can tell, why.

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I resolve to blog at least once a day. Short or long, ill- or well-considered, focused or rambling, a post is better than silence, and I have learned to my cost how difficult it is to sustain momentum when I skip a day, or two, or ten. This blog has been a crucial part of my own teaching and learning for over three years now. It deserves more care and feeding than I’ve been giving it. Nothing against slow-blogging and its magnificent practitioners–but I feel I need the daily discipline.

I resolve to comment on at least one blog each day. Comments that grow into blog posts of their own don’t count. 🙂

I resolve to prune my Bloglines list and keep current with my personal suite of trusted and inspiring experts.

My thanks to my readers, and to those whose blogs have played, and continue to play, a crucial role in my work. Now more than ever, blogging matters, and I claim the humble, silly-sounding word “blogger” as a badge of honor.

Happy New Year.