I was reminded this week that the great Cliff Orwin once ran a seminar comparing Jewish and non-Jewish political thought – Herodotus and the Book of Esther – which included in the rubric: ‘The class motto is that of the Oregon Trail: the cowards never started, the weak perished along the way’. (I actually recalled this as ‘fall behind and get eaten by wolves’; similar sentiment…). I cannot help but admire this, while at the same time my own teaching philosophy is that offered by an French Alpine guide, an old friend of my parents: ‘You go at the pace of the slowest member of the party’.* Make sure people don’t get abandoned to the academic equivalent of hyperthermia, modify your goals if necessary, always have escape routes and alternative plans in mind, and always be prepared to change speed.
Of course, it’s important to remember that, with the Oregon Trail approach, charging off ahead on your own can be equally fatal. Yes, if it’s the teacher who has left everyone else behind, it’s reasonsble to assume that someone like Prof Orwin is an intellectual Natty Bumpo, entirely capable of surviving alone in the wilderness and finding their way back when it suits them – but if the rest of the party has got completely lost and all died of starvation or frostbite in the meantime, that’s a bit of a failure in terms of the duties of a guide. And if the person forging ahead is a student who isn’t actually equipped for it, the imperative is surely to drag them back and keep the whole group together as much as possible, for their own sake and for to give the collective the best chance of success.
I’m thinking about this at the moment because my jazz composition class – trying to draw lessons from my own classes is moderately pointless because despite all my best efforts half the students seem to have fallen victim to grizzly bears and fever regardless, to judge from current attendance… Because my jazz composition class seems to be trying to illustrate the problems with both approaches at once, much as my compositions are apparently managing to be simultaneously too dissonant and not dissonant enough. On the one hand, entirely understandably, the organisers have decided to deal with the problem of certain students being a bit more advanced and/or self-confident by setting up two groups, with the idea that each can then move at a natural pace. On the other hand, for whatever reason, it seems to be assumed that the more advanced group is perceived as much more able and knowledgeable than it actually is (or at least than this member of it is), so we’re being left to a significant degree to our own devices, and given relatively little guidance or structure. And to be honest, given how much I’ve discovered I like being set regular homework tasks, I feel I would rather be plodding along in the slower group where at least I’d know what’s going on.
I do feel really bad about feeling this. I know how much it would upset me if I got a message from a student saying something to the effect of ‘from the perspective of my considerable teaching experience you’re doing this all wrong’. But it would also upset me at least as much if I knew, or suspected, that someone might be thinking this. Or, if I knew there was someone with such experience in the group, I’d probably spend my whole time imagining that they were thinking such things. And I can imagine all sorts of reasons why we might be being relatively neglected, not least that the poor tutor is having to do back-to-back 90-minute classes with us coming up second, so no wonder if he’s a bit vague and frazzled – but on the other hand, speaking as someone who has paid real money for the course…
I’ve commented before about the experience of feeling completely at sea in this class, which isn’t a normal experience for me in an academic context but can really make me empathise with some of my students. I guess I need to make lemonade out of these lemons in a similar manner: I never had to experience the feeling that I’m being short-changed by a lecturer in this sort of way. Yes, one can feel sympathetic and understanding and bloody cheesed off at the same time. And, yes, it comes with a sense that perhaps this is my fault, that if only I was a bit more capable of instantly identifying what key a given chord is in then I wouldn’t be floundering quite so much, and I might even understand how something can be both too dissonant and not dissonant enough, without suspecting that this might be one of those mess-with-your-narrow-rationalism Zen things…
*Completely irrelevant to this topic, but M. Petr also supplied one of the greatest examples of gormless military thinking ever: in 1939, he was called up to the French army and, as a native of the alps who knew mountains like the back of his hand and could spring from crag to crag like a mountain goat, assigned to the cavalry. Whereupon he was captured in the first week after an entirely ineffectual cavalry charge and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.
Attendance? I’m not sure there’s such a thing any more. The last unit I taught, half my students seemed to have found the doorway to the magical land of 100% Online within the first week, and most of the rest had joined them by week 4. I wouldn’t mind, but the unit isn’t taught 100% online – we’ve been under strict instructions to that effect. (And still are, even as infection rates rise at a steadily compounding 6-10% per day.)
Hey ho.
Any chord can theoretically occur in any key, surely – just as no single note is actually wrong in any key. So C-E-G could be an inverted G6 sus4 (G-C-D-E) in the key of E minor, with the D omitted to be awkward. But I’m speaking from a place of – not necessarily ignorance but – deep ineptitude; I’ve never got the hang of chording.
We don’t have a magical land of Online at all – I’ve told my final-year students that they can ask for this if they’re isolating and I’ll set it up myself, but only one has ever done so. Otherwise, big classes have recordings, and seminars have nothing – my final-year classes have video lectures from last year, but that’s it. And attendance is still well under 50% in a good week.
Yes about chords, up to a point, but given a chord sequence rather than a single chord in isolation, some answers are more right than others. I can do it, given time to work it out, but the question is asked expecting an instant response, and I’m too old for that.