Catching Points

Yesterday they were great, and today, chaotic.  I think my scholars are as pecuniary and fearful as the rest of the adult population and my job is to award points and corrections and stick to it.  I'm disappointed in my ability to do this consistently.  So I'll keep asking myself if I can do a better job.  Can I put more of my focus on the points and corrections distribution?  100% of the students 100% of the time.  This is what the art teacher advised me today.  Everyone is so supportive.  They know it takes time, that it's difficult.  But that doesn't mean I don't want to have it solved now.  It's a quick fix once I get myself on board.  And yesterday was great.  They were expecting their punishments and I didn't dole them out because they didn't need them.  It was a mistake.  So many thoughts about what I'm going to do with the content of the class and really I think it is far more simple, just lay down the law.  But it is so hard to do that.  To really be fair, to ignore someone if they are talking out of turn, to call them on it, and punish them.  I have to trust that they can be trained.  That's the goal for Thursday.  And better bow holds and the left hand on the cello and better rhythm reading.....

I joined the Riverside Choral Society because I had missed singing for the past ten years.  And it is wonderful to be singing again and it is wonderful to be in this group of people that are very nice and talented amateur musicians.  But we do have to go over things a lot and I miss the rigor of orchestra.  I miss the engagement of sitting next to a really great stand partner.  I miss the trombones.  Yes, that's right.  There are so many colors, so many nuances and capabilities.  I'm surprised how much I miss it and I can feel the atrophy of it every time I'm singing in this group.  For some reason it invokes the desire for more.  And maybe for that reason it is something I need to be doing, to at least be reminded of the importance of making music with others, that it not silently crawl out of existence.

But there is a frustration here.  I wonder if longing is actually connected with lacking or missing.  I remember longing so much in high school.  For what?  Or maybe it was for all the things that have come into me.  I long much less now and somehow feel less sincere.

I had a moment today where I wished to be blind.  It was a feeling, a desire to lose my eyes and ability to see.  Hard to know what to make of it.  Maybe I wish to see the beauty of the front hallway of our apartment again, the way the elevator door closes.  It can be hard to note all the beautiful things once experiences.  How to keep seeing.  

Rainy Mornings, Diner Booths

A chilly, wet, autumn morning through the streets of New York.  Coming out of the subway and feeling the wind whip the mist along the pavement, up the buildings, a warm smell of something, from a bakery, a food cart.  On a street somewhere some one is walking.   Maybe it is someone I know, someone I've loved, or will love one day.  I'm looking at all the faces and searching, and not looking at any of the faces and feeling.  This time of year is a departure.  The sun is leaving us, the warmth is leaving us.  We never think of the arrival of the dark, the arrival of the cold.  

So many departures come to mind on a morning like this.  How many departures does one have in life?  

I've been reading Nurtured by Love the classic Suzuki text I've read at least twice before.  But this is the first time I've read it since having been in Japan.  It takes me back a little.  I understand Suzuki, his way of life and way seeing the world in differently than I did before.  To Westerners, he is a magical person.  He is indeed, but his thoughts about pedagogy are certainly the product of the classic approach to Japanese education and culture.  It takes me back.  I read a few lines of Japanese this morning for the first time in months.  There is an irreplaceable feeling there.  It's a hidden alcove inside of me that can never be closed, even if it gets shriveled and shoved under all the pertinent parts of living now and living to come.  I've been opened in yet another way.  How many ways can one be opened?  How many times can one love?

With the cold, we've started a diner search.  An hour spent in a booth, across from a solitary woman reading a book, a well-lipsticked and laid back waitress with a light evening, a decent cup of hot chocolate, and some horrendous cherry pie.  One diner down, and so many more to discover in the upcoming cold that approaches this city.  

New Yorkers

As I left the school today, wondering if I'd gotten any closer to figuring out the classroom management needed for these students, it started to rain.  And then next to me came the voice, "Ah another fellow musician."  A woman dressed in black, carrying a bassoon on her back.  "It rains on us all," I said.  And here was an immediate friend, originally from Israel, speaking in a candid, comfortable and straightforward manner.  She could not have been more New York.  We chatted during our train ride to the same stop and she got my email address.

And on the way back home a stranger paid for my train ticket when my card didn't read and I got stuck in the turn style with my cello.  I could have backed up, but he was too fast.

People are so open and closed with the strangers around them.  They ignore them or interact with them, but not much in between.  It is so liberating to be in this city after Japan, where emotions were so covered, but still understood.  There need be little deciphering here.  The pace is fast enough that there isn't really time for it.  Any offense gets off a few stops later, walks on.  People are too involved in their own lives to be concerned for others.  And so kindness actually feels more sincere, more open.  Like the woman who spontaneously opened up to me, or the guy who paid for my fair.  They have nothing to expect in exchange.  Just people being nice and open.  No strings attached.  Another side of human nature.

Listening and Cultivating

Watching a Suzuki master teacher give a lesson to a 5-year-old Book 1 student this afternoon, I have the feeling that experience entitles one to being less hurried, to having greater ease.  She knows that she can get a student there.  She's done it probably hundreds of times and even though each one is different, she can look at this little person, with imperfect little things and still see a path to the future when he is more than what he is.  She is that path and that connection.  She has faith in something that others can't see.

It seems to be the same with masters of any number of things.  There is a confidence, a calmness, even if the task requires great speed and focus.  I can understand this as a cellist and I wonder if I can help myself along by finding it in my teaching.  I do believe in myself, but I have never gotten a mixed group of cellists to the next level, including four beginners.  Can I do that?

The answer is yes.  Perhaps not as well I will be able to do it in the future, but it will happen.  Already they know how to open their cello cases and get out their bows and cellos safely.  They know how to do pizzicato and the names of the strings and at least in theory, what it means to have good cello posture.  When I think of just a little more than one week ago, this is huge.  They are already on the path to becoming cellists.

But I think as I do this more often, I will know and trust the path in me more and more.  But in the meantime, I admire the voice that I hear in these Suzuki teachers.  If I'm incomplete in some of my early lessons on set-up, if I'm distracted by the classroom management gymnastics that I feel I have to be doing, I can at least remember to give them some of this voice.  It is so much closer to my own than the one I've been trying to adopt.  And I think I will just have to go with it, not really knowing a more authentic way.

Points

I miss playing in an orchestra.  I'm surprised to have this feeling and in a quandary over what to do about it.  I believe in the work and the struggle of teaching my students, even after a day like today which is more challenging than I would have hoped.  (Was it the messy start due to the previous class running over?  Or was it my desire to be more hard lined than is natural for me?  I'm still trying to calibrate this whole thing.  My parents disciplined me by asking how I wanted to be disciplined.  Can I do that here?)  But despite the challenges, they seem like worthy ones to meet.  I believe in them in a way that is quite different from orchestral playing, even from chamber music playing.  It seems larger, more creative, more intertwined in the lives of others, which I enjoy.

I did not enjoy today, though.  And practice seems without purpose.  I think it is an inevitable part of transitions, the weeding of the old self and the building of the new.  And the old self dies hard.  I have no reason to turn away from this afternoon of challenging students, of poor classroom regulation on my part.  Points were flying everywhere, good, bad, inconclusive, and I felt like people were being more hurt than helped by them.  But that is not the issue.  The issue is what I'm trying to build behind them and how I'm going to do it in this school, with all the various things that need attention.  There is something that feels very important to me behind it and I have to listen to that.  But I must also listen to the muscian that is leading the meaning of its importance, to see if the two can learn from one another.  

Learning in New York

I have a new Consequence Hierarchy and a new Behavior Tracker, both used universally by the teachers at the school.  What if adults were monitored this way?  I suppose we have jail and fines, but how often does it really come to that.  Every time I jaywalk I feel like I should be losing points, except that it's New York.

And these are good students.  I want so much for them.  A lesson plan soars and it's execution is bogged down in time and reality.  Why does it take so much longer to get through things than I had thought it would?  Perhaps this is experience.  I can imagine myself playing the cello, but I have yet to unite the vision of my classroom with its reality.  One day I hope to be able to bring my mind up to speed with what can really be done, to gain that traction, the ability of mental practice and planning.  I notice more and more about my students, more and more about my classroom.  And there is still more to notice.

And tonight I began training with a fellow Tae Kwon Do member who has been training alone.  It's so wonderful to be working out with someone again, to have his guidance, and to have another example of teaching in a teaching tradition that is very, very strong.

I think I want to be a master teacher.  To feel as though I have mastered teaching, even though, from my experience with cello, I know that it doesn't mean that one has finished learning when one is a master.  But I feel very young, or at least I am surrounded by many inspiring possibilities.  Something new to learn in New York.

Catch

We just came inside from catching a lunar eclipse.  We watched the moon fading behind the earth fading behind the thick clouds, with a crowd of other people watching at one of the entrances of Riverside Park.  There are always other people, always other people.

I think in my life in Japan I became accustomed to being alone.  Being in Japan was a practice in loneliness.  I was far away from family and friends, far away from familiarity, and even in the cluster of people in which I moved, there was a loneliness.  The courtesy of the Japanese culture, the way that they express fear and love, to my eyes and ears and all that comes in between from their searching, was so quiet, so polite, or judging, or fill-in-the blank.  It was lonely.

There were many people in Japan, but there are so many people in New York.  And it is much harder to feel lonely.  I say this with winter ahead of me, but never in Japan would a woman have gotten on a bus and berated the bus driver for leaving the stop too early, continued to argue with him, and quickened to an apology to get him back on and driving again.  People throw themselves at one another in New York and are just as quick to ignore one another.  People say hello, or bury themselves in their work, but the strings of longing and loneliness seem shorter or non-existent.  There is so much here.  There are so many different people doing different things and the ragged edges of possibilities are as inviting as velcro.  It's hard not to become attached, to get caught up in the importance of walking from the subway stop.

It's been a week of many new things.  And new things require a lot of attention.  I began teaching at the Harlem Success Academy and find myself just as caught between worlds of education philosophy as I was a week ago.  I already have a growing affection for my students, something that I believe was seeded in the moments between discipline when I saw their deviations from the norm, their individual humanity that disrupted my classroom.  And somehow this is what has made me more committed to them, to finding a way to keep our order as tight as I know they are capable of doing.  A great deal can be done in this teaching style.  But I would like to include the words "Please" and "Thank you."  I would like to quell the discipline arms race that stands in the hallways in stern tones of reckoning.  What happens when these students grow up and people don't speak to them in such a tone?  Will they still know how to show respect?  I see what focus these students can achieve and I admire what learning can be done in its wake.  I find myself still at odds, not entirely committed to this tone because it is not mine, but I'm open to hearing what it can offer in the void of having my own.

And to balance this is the Suzuki training that I'm doing which is a guiding force in the expectations to which I wish to hold my group of students, though we have far fewer of the benefits of classic Suzuki teaching:  the involvement of the parent, the control of the teaching space, the expectation of daily guided practice, proper chairs and equipment.   But the tone is one of warm love.  It is still full of expectation, but it is also full of time.  There is time because there is support from all around, because there is trust that success will happen.  Time is timed my Harlem school.  There is no time for time.  But maybe that is the way it needs to be.  And it certainly it is efficient and a great way to motivate.  I suppose even Suzuki lessons use the motivation of the timer occasionally.

It's a wonderful opportunity to be merging and playing with these ideas in teaching.  And to add to this is Dalcroze which is a movement based method of music education in which I'm taking classes once a week.  There will be even more resources for thinking about how to embrace students, how to help them grow, how to reflect on what it is that needs to be shared and how to most effectively share it.

It is quite stimulating to be here.  And maybe this is the antidote to loneliness.  Or at least it is mine.   I'm finding myself more and more wrapped in this city, coming to love all the different people, all the different possibilities and feeling free to interject my own existence into it.  There are many things in New York, but I find loneliness to be a difficult one to feel at this point.  Of course I know that winter is ahead.  And I know that people rarely follow up on the get-togethers they say they will have.  One day I will feel lonely again, and wonder how to shake it, and wonder how to make the world seem so new as it does now.  And hopefully then, there will be the twins dressed in black that I saw on the train the other day, or the crowd speaking loudly in Spanish, or the shoe sellers yelling in Arabic on the street, or the vendor yelling "good morning" with his stern but kind eyes.  Hopefully there will be some New Yorker throwing themselves my way, allowing me to catch them.