In the heat of the recent events, I lost sight of one of my most important hobby-horses: music education. My main heroine, Helen Nordstrom, is a professor of music at a (fictitious) Pennsylvania college. She discovered a wonderful contralto (a mezzo-soprano, actually) on CD, and one Christmas, had been surprised to find herself on the same stage as this woman, Natalia Zemanova, a Czech settled in Paris. Helen and Natasha become firm friends. It just so happens that Natasha agrees to sing in a major musical event that Helen has mounted at her school: the Saint Matthew Passion, in which Natasha is singing contralto, and Helen is conducting (to the disappointment of Natasha, who wants Helen to give up this silly conducting, and sing.)
Anyway, during the days preceding the big performance, Natasha finds time to sit in on the classes of Helen and her friends. Here are a few paragraphs from this episode.
Helen’s class was a revelation. What Natasha had learned with diligence and hard work at the conservatory in Prague, Helen made simple for these youths. They took it for granted that the material would be easy, and occasionally complained when it wasn’t obviously so. In each instance, with infinite patience Helen questioned the student until the idea was clear. She used the piano, recordings, the chalkboard, everything at her disposal, and by the end of the hour, had convinced the class of the easiness of what she was trying to convey.
Afterwards she confessed that it had been a harder day than usual.
“You work so hard!” said Natasha sympathetically. “In my conservatory, they would discourage the less talented ones.” She smiled. “If you had to teach my classmates and me, it would have been easy for you!”
Helen laughed. “But out of these unresponsive, complaining lumps of rock will come musicians, parents of musicians, congressmen, senators, voters . . . I need every one of them! In this country, Tasha, Music can afford no enemies.”
And so it is with everything we teach. This is why some teachers seem to think that their lives depend on the work they do. The teacher is the invisible part of the larger picture, the part that everyone loves to vilify.
Kay
The Saga of Helen, and Related Issues
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Sunday, November 27, 2016
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Wrapping Up This Election
I'm sure the chapter of the election of 2016 is not closed, but I do need to bring some sort of closure to my blogging about it.
There were many dimensions to the candidacy of Donald Trump: economic issues--people, it seems, were more eager to have lower taxes than to support a liberal economy, with support for the poor, and concern for the environment; cultural and social issues--a large majority of voters, including women, were less anxious about the empowerment of women, and rights for minorities than the rest of us thought. Educational issues--it appears that Trump supporters were more angry about the leadership of the educated elite than the supporters of Hillary Clinton were anxious that the White House should get into the hands of the most ignorant among the conservatives.
As could have been expected, my friends on social media have struggled to deal with the outcome of the election, and are working out their anger in vicious posts that predict awful things in the days to come. I, for one, am done with prediction. What we haven't seen is the Elephant Bubble in the room. It isn't a bubble, really; it is an enormous sound-proof blanket, separating those who have internalized the lessons of a decade, what we think of as altruism: coming to the aid of the poor and the powerless, trying to look at the world through the eyes of those who live outside the US, and even the eyes of Nature, if that makes any sense. We thought of the Planet as a dumb being, grinding away according to the laws of physics and chemistry, but how can it be an uncaring, mechanical thing, if it is, as we suspect, the only astronomical object that is home to life? It seems to me that the Earth watches in horror, as it sees life slipping away.
On the other side of our blanket, we see ignorant businessmen, who are more focused on such immediate things as cheap energy and gasoline, rather than the long-term goods such as renewable energy, cutting back on global warming, and slowing or reversing the pollution of the water and the oceans. They probably do recognize that the environment is being destroyed, but dismiss the alarms raised by scientists as exaggeration, stemming from the greed for publicity that they have come to think of scientists as being addicted to. Since that's more convenient for them to believe, that's what they believe.
But the social, cultural divide is the most heartbreaking. For whatever reason (and probably not a calculated one) the Trump camp has settled on xenophobia and racism as their philosophical basis. That has all been a secondary issue for Republicans for many years; something quietly trotted out in private at election time, as we saw in that Romney video of 2012. But it has become a signature plank in the Trump platform, and as such, conservatives, especially the very young, dragged along with their elders, feel obliged to subscribe to that poisonous attitude. I see it even in my students; they're practicing glaring at their foreign classmates, their minority friends and former friends. Their looks seem to say: I have nothing against you personally, but it looks very much as though you had better keep a low profile in the future. The conservatives probably have no inkling that this formal racial hostility is tearing white youth apart. Or perhaps they do, and believe that it is a lesson young whites have to learn: to keep non-white, non-straight, non-American human beings at arm's length. There are many who do not buy into it, but soon their stand is going to seem heroic.
There is a small chance that Trump was only play-acting about his xenophobia, or perhaps he was so troubled by the turbulence and violence in the Levant that he snapped, and decided to become hostile to everyone who was not just as White as he was.
Across the US, institutions of higher education are announcing their manifestos, informing their students that these colleges and universities shall be safe havens for minorities of all sorts: ethnic, sexual, political, and economic. It used to be that American institutions had to spearhead sanctions against foreign nations whose policies were discriminatory against minorities and women. But now, foreign banks and organizations are pulling out support for companies that are riding rough-shod over Native Americans. Good for them.
So, dear readers, if you can bear to do it, I suppose this is the time for us to show how much decency and goodness we have in us, if we have any left! The young people around us must see that all goodness is not gone forever. In Alexandra, I portrayed an invasion of a country by a neighbor. The invasion runs into trouble, and the enemy military leadership changes hands many times as they encounter obstacles, until finally an ambitious young woman accepts the reins of power (of the invading nation). She takes into her service a woman who she discovers is a spy. Out of fear, but still reluctant to give up the beautiful servant, she cripples her, and continues to use her sexually. But the time comes when the general confesses to her crippled lover that she must give up the war, before all beauty is gone from her land forever. Any fool can fight for wealth, for natural resources, for access to seaports, trade routes, the sorts of things that invasions sought to obtain for the invaders in centuries gone by. But to fight for the health of the planet, for a good life for all people, for beauty: these are things that are new. But they are good things. And it is a different kind of fighting.
Kay
There were many dimensions to the candidacy of Donald Trump: economic issues--people, it seems, were more eager to have lower taxes than to support a liberal economy, with support for the poor, and concern for the environment; cultural and social issues--a large majority of voters, including women, were less anxious about the empowerment of women, and rights for minorities than the rest of us thought. Educational issues--it appears that Trump supporters were more angry about the leadership of the educated elite than the supporters of Hillary Clinton were anxious that the White House should get into the hands of the most ignorant among the conservatives.
As could have been expected, my friends on social media have struggled to deal with the outcome of the election, and are working out their anger in vicious posts that predict awful things in the days to come. I, for one, am done with prediction. What we haven't seen is the Elephant Bubble in the room. It isn't a bubble, really; it is an enormous sound-proof blanket, separating those who have internalized the lessons of a decade, what we think of as altruism: coming to the aid of the poor and the powerless, trying to look at the world through the eyes of those who live outside the US, and even the eyes of Nature, if that makes any sense. We thought of the Planet as a dumb being, grinding away according to the laws of physics and chemistry, but how can it be an uncaring, mechanical thing, if it is, as we suspect, the only astronomical object that is home to life? It seems to me that the Earth watches in horror, as it sees life slipping away.
On the other side of our blanket, we see ignorant businessmen, who are more focused on such immediate things as cheap energy and gasoline, rather than the long-term goods such as renewable energy, cutting back on global warming, and slowing or reversing the pollution of the water and the oceans. They probably do recognize that the environment is being destroyed, but dismiss the alarms raised by scientists as exaggeration, stemming from the greed for publicity that they have come to think of scientists as being addicted to. Since that's more convenient for them to believe, that's what they believe.
But the social, cultural divide is the most heartbreaking. For whatever reason (and probably not a calculated one) the Trump camp has settled on xenophobia and racism as their philosophical basis. That has all been a secondary issue for Republicans for many years; something quietly trotted out in private at election time, as we saw in that Romney video of 2012. But it has become a signature plank in the Trump platform, and as such, conservatives, especially the very young, dragged along with their elders, feel obliged to subscribe to that poisonous attitude. I see it even in my students; they're practicing glaring at their foreign classmates, their minority friends and former friends. Their looks seem to say: I have nothing against you personally, but it looks very much as though you had better keep a low profile in the future. The conservatives probably have no inkling that this formal racial hostility is tearing white youth apart. Or perhaps they do, and believe that it is a lesson young whites have to learn: to keep non-white, non-straight, non-American human beings at arm's length. There are many who do not buy into it, but soon their stand is going to seem heroic.
There is a small chance that Trump was only play-acting about his xenophobia, or perhaps he was so troubled by the turbulence and violence in the Levant that he snapped, and decided to become hostile to everyone who was not just as White as he was.
Across the US, institutions of higher education are announcing their manifestos, informing their students that these colleges and universities shall be safe havens for minorities of all sorts: ethnic, sexual, political, and economic. It used to be that American institutions had to spearhead sanctions against foreign nations whose policies were discriminatory against minorities and women. But now, foreign banks and organizations are pulling out support for companies that are riding rough-shod over Native Americans. Good for them.
So, dear readers, if you can bear to do it, I suppose this is the time for us to show how much decency and goodness we have in us, if we have any left! The young people around us must see that all goodness is not gone forever. In Alexandra, I portrayed an invasion of a country by a neighbor. The invasion runs into trouble, and the enemy military leadership changes hands many times as they encounter obstacles, until finally an ambitious young woman accepts the reins of power (of the invading nation). She takes into her service a woman who she discovers is a spy. Out of fear, but still reluctant to give up the beautiful servant, she cripples her, and continues to use her sexually. But the time comes when the general confesses to her crippled lover that she must give up the war, before all beauty is gone from her land forever. Any fool can fight for wealth, for natural resources, for access to seaports, trade routes, the sorts of things that invasions sought to obtain for the invaders in centuries gone by. But to fight for the health of the planet, for a good life for all people, for beauty: these are things that are new. But they are good things. And it is a different kind of fighting.
Kay
Saturday, November 5, 2016
The Lost Years
As you might remember, I have an embarrassing habit of reading and re-reading the stuff I have written--the stories, I mean--and I just started reading Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years. For anyone not familiar with this: some episodes of the Helen story got mislaid in various computers, and I reconstructed them from memory; hence the "Lost Years" description. Lalitha is an Indian girl who was a freshman at Helen's college in Helen's senior year.
I'm going to edit and correct this episode, so if any of you own it, you can download the the edited version for free once I'm done with the cleaning up. I would like to mention that there is a significant chunk of the story set in rural India, for those of you who're interested in travel abroad! And the story describes how Helen came to adopt Gena and Alison.
I'm going to edit and correct this episode, so if any of you own it, you can download the the edited version for free once I'm done with the cleaning up. I would like to mention that there is a significant chunk of the story set in rural India, for those of you who're interested in travel abroad! And the story describes how Helen came to adopt Gena and Alison.