The Lens:
Do you like quiet? I prefer a degree of daytime quiet. However, unless I am trying to sleep, I find daytime silence unsettling. I need some kind of background noise.
Are you a background noise person? If so, what do you fill the quiet with?
I am a music person myself. A bit of loud-ish music is great to get me going if I am doing something like cleaning house. Music also tends to sooth my frazzled nerves, like keeping me calm when driving around, or unwinding after a long day.
I have a rather large library of music – music for all occasions. I have a regular daytime set, dinner set, Sunday morning set, party set, housework set, family set, etc. From Thanksgiving through Christmas (and maybe a little after), it is my holiday set all the way.
For this to work, I need more than a lot of holiday music. It has to be good music. My holiday set has been years in the making. Each year, I try to find new songs to freshen it up. This year, I found Amy Winehouse’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”
Wow, is all I can say. A couple of years ago I saw the documentary “Amy.” A story of an amazingly talented, yet troubled person. There are too many similar stories with a fabulously gifted person who is surrounded by people who see the earnings potential and forget there is a person behind the money bag.
Listening to Amy’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” is mesmerizing. I give some credit to the backup musicians on the recording for the unique arrangement. Yet, the genius belongs to Amy. What she does with the vocals and phraseology is unlike anything I have heard before.
This reminds me of another talent who took a previously recorded song to a whole other level.
How much do you know about the song “Me and Bobby McGee?” If you know it at all, you know it was a huge hit recorded by Janis Joplin. You may also know the song was written by Kris Kristofferson. If you have watched any documentaries on Kristofferson, or the Ken Burns “Country Music” documentary, you probably know a few more details.
The song had been recorded by several artists before Joplin. I had only heard Janis’ for many years before hearing others. All of the other versions more resemble how Kristofferson wrote it. One favorite of mine is Gordon Lightfoot’s rendition.
As much as I like Lightfoot’s version, Janis just blows it out of the water. In the Ken Burns documentary, Fred Foster, Kristofferson’s producer, who heard a preview of the recording before its release, says, “That’s not a record. That’s an experience.”
Kris also describes a very emotional reaction when hearing Janis’s interpretation. Both men say they were moved to tears.
I am not sure Amy’s “I Saw Mommy” goes to that level, but, for me, it was an experience. These two women took these songs and made them their own.
I don’t know if there was any outside creative input on what these two should do with these songs. Yet, even if there was, these songs were all them. No one could have told them to do what they ultimately did with these songs. These were two true music geniuses.
The Refraction:
What is genius?
Many say Kristofferson is a genius when it comes to music. His melodies are incredible and his lyrics pure poetry. So, is he a genius?
Are Amy Winehouse and Janis Joplin geniuses? I am tempted myself to say yes to all three, but with the added qualifier that they are musical geniuses. And, therein lies the catch.
I don’t know much about Amy’s and Janis’ academic background, but I do know Kris is a Rhodes Scholar. So, what is your take on his genius status now?
How would you compare these artists’ genius to, say, the genius of Albert Einstein? Now, there was a genius, right?
Or maybe not. I don’t know much about Einstein either. But, I do now he was a physicist who came up with “The Theory of Relativity.” I’m not really sure what that is all about but I know it is something extremely significant in the scientific world.
My youngest son is very bright. (So was my mom. I think the intelligence skipped a generation. But, I digress.) He was given a full academic scholarship to Santa Clara University. While I think part of it was timing – the university had just opened their Leavy School of Business and I am guessing they were recruiting students who would boost that school.
Even so, they weren’t recruiting just anyone. He had the grades and test scores to make him a compelling recruit. So, is he a genius?
Ironically, he is also quite an accomplished musician. He is a talented pianist. He took up the bass when his brother and dad needed a bass player for their band. He is quite the bassist, too. I am told he can sing, though I have never heard. He has a fabulous ear which I think lends to his musical talent. So, now where does he fall on the genius meter?
There are all sorts of books on types of intelligence. One popular idea is there are eight intelligences that range from things like music to math to space.
So, if we have all of these intelligences, why do we always seem to go back to gauging someone’s intelligence or genius on the grades they get in subjects like science and math, or their accomplishments in those fields?
How reflective would academic grades have been of the talent possessed by Winehouse or Joplin? How would have Kristofferson’s academic grades predicted his musical genius? I know that for my son, his grades, while impressive, were in no way indicative of his talent as a musician.
If you look how we educate our children, we get it all wrong. We have one predominant educational model and expect that all children should succeed in this model. We throw in things like differentiated instruction so we can make children be successful in this setting.
We call this mainstreaming. The idea is that students with learning differences can be placed in a mainstream academic classroom rather than a special class specifically geared toward them. The thinking is that placing them in a traditional classroom will give them access to the same education as their non-challenged peers.
I am going to make a statement here that is completely counter to what educators today advocate for: By virtue of mainstreaming, we are setting up a deficit model of education.
We only see where students are deficient. We focus on their weaknesses and then modify the traditional classroom so they can fit in rather than looking at their strengths and creating a classroom experience tailored to taking advantage of those strengths.
Here is the thing . . . trying to take something and make it fit isn’t nearly as effective as making something that fits. Trying to make the traditional model fit all students can take a toll on children’s self-esteem.
Kids in the classroom know who the “smart” kids are and who the “dumb” ones are. At my son’s 4th grade back to school night, I was talking with the parents of one of his classmates. The parents told me their daughter had come home and said how smart my son was. She told her parents he was the only one who got 100% on a hard math test. This is 4h grade – ten-year-old kids.
I had a child in one of my classes who it was determined to be dyslexic toward end of the school year. I could see his struggles and it was more than disheartening. At the pick up area after school one day, I heard one of my other students ask this child what was 1 + 1. He answered 2. She turned to another boy in our class and said, “See, he knows what 1+1 is.” We had a little discussion right then and there, but this little first grader was already being pegged as the “dumb” one.
One last example. When I was doing my student teaching in a primary grade classroom, there was a girl who had learning differences that affected both her behavior and ability to learn. While there was some support for her, it was minimal. She spent most of her day in the classroom taking up a considerable amount of the teacher’s time.
That would not necessarily be a bad thing if there were results to show for it. There weren’t. There is only so much one teacher can do for an individual student with 20+ other children to teach.
This girl was also not well-liked by her classmates. They would make occasional comments about her classroom behavior as well as her academic ability. (Again, this is primary grades.) In the school yard, she didn’t play with any of her classmates.
I go back to the deficit model. My son was a “smart” kid. But that label is in part due to what we deem as smart. “Smart” kids (and adults) are the ones who get A’s in school. My son ‘s intelligence was only part of the reason for his grades. He was also able to absorb the material easily in the manner in which it was presented (that is, in a traditional classroom).
On the other hand, my little first grader was still struggling to read at the end of first grade. So, he was considered by his classmates to be dumb. That was far from the truth. It wasn’t that he wasn’t getting good grades because he wasn’t smart. Rather, he couldn’t absorb the material being taught in the manner it was being presented to him.
Nowhere in the equation of my son was an assessment of his other gifts or intelligences. There were no grades to reflect my son’s incredible ear or his talent as a musician.
Likewise, there was no grade to reflect my little first graders ability to get along with everybody. To me, that is intelligence.
I am not advocating to going back to separate classes for children with learning difference. This just perpetuates the deficit model. We would still be labeling our children, and, in this case, giving them what is often viewed as a negative label (i.e., these children can’t be smart because they need special help and special instruction).
I also don’t advocate for classes for “gifted” students. Again, we are labeling our children. And, though, this may seem like a positive label, we are giving this label to students who are suited for the model of education they receive. It also perpetuates the idea that good grades is the one true measure of intelligence, when it is only one measure of of a person’s abilities.
What I am advocating for is a complete re-envisioning our educational system. We already have some alternatives to the traditional model: Montessori, Waldorf, Project Based Learning, Cristo Rey Network, to name a few. So, why is it so difficult to re-imagine education?
Because, we see only one type of intelligence (what is reported on a report card) as valuable. Any meaningful change to our model of education has to involve a change to what we consider and value as intelligence. And, there is the problem. It is far easier to change systems than to change mindsets.
Just consider, 260 years after the slaves were freed, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, and we still have pervasive racial injustice. Our laws have changed, but our mindsets have not. Still, I am the optimist. All it takes is for change to happen is for people to act. All anything takes is for people to act. So, what is it that you want changed? All it takes if for you to act.