The Importance of Artistic Education: Blogging Live from Piano Lessons

I am currently seated in a pink armchair, listening to my brother take a piano lesson, having just finished my own. Our teacher, Barbara Rubinstein, coaches him on the different chords that make up his latest jazzy endeavor. Musical terms that have become so familiar to me over the years drift past, reminding me of how much we have learned.

      After today’s class discussion about the way our society values the arts, I began to wonder how much different my own life would be if I had never been exposed to music in the way that I have. The first thing that strikes me would be a real sense of loss. Music seems to be the basis of many other aspects of my life. Music education has taught me how to focus and set goals, how to be creative while being disciplined, and how to keep a sense of constant discovery while learning.

        When you learn how to play a musical instrument, much of the study is self-driven and self-motivated, so the student must understand how to keep themselves practicing. The teacher is not present and monitoring all of the time, unlike in other classes that a student might take.

      A second point is that of inspiring creativity. Learning music requires a lot of rules that have to be followed at first, but most of them can be bent or broken as the student progresses to higher levels. As the saying goes, “You have to learn the rules before you can break them”. This enables students to be creative while providing them with some structure and foundation, rather than just saying "do whatever".
     Finally, music teachers seem to truly understand the value of learning for learning's sake. They have always preached to me that no one should ever stop learning or stop appreciating the journey of discovery.
     Learning music, similar to learning a foreign language, is best started at a young age. This is why every school should give their students the opportunity to experience music education. American society currently does not place a very high value on artistic education, saying that "America's business is business". But as we have seen in light of the recent economic downturn, that is not really working very well. Why not try to change the system at a time like this, when it is clearly not working anyway?

Fantasea: My Childhood in Ruins

Okay, so maybe the title is a bit melodramatic, but a few fond childhood memories did take a bit of a beating today. My family and I went to the Shedd Aquarium with our foreign exchange student, because we could not in good conscience let her leave Chicago without experiencing the museums.
     My excitement at reliving some of the magic that I remembered from my visits to the aquarium when I was younger diminished slightly as soon as the dolphin show, now known as "Fantasea" began. I remembered a pretty cool display of dolphins doing tricks and trainers explaining a few things about the animals. What we got this time was a flashy, dumbed-down show with little actual substance. They removed every remotely educational aspect from the script and replaced them with actors dressed up in white jumpsuits, which were supposed to look like beluga whales, I guess. 
      I also felt like a was being brainwashed the entire time, because they kept flashing their logo (see picture) and mentioning that they are sponsored by ComEd (which is another issue altogether).
      Maybe somewhere along the line the director of the program decided that they needed to draw in a younger audience and, in an effort to make everything more kid-friendly, made the show into something fit for Cartoon Network rather than the Discovery Channel. My own qualms about preserving my youth aside, I think that the revisions made to the show demonstrate a real lack of faith in today's young people. We have begun to assume that no child can be interested in learning without adults dumbing it down and making it fun and colorful for them. This is so wrong. It is quite limiting on creativity, since it gives kids an already-packaged story behind the show, rather than letting them absorb it in their own way.
    Whatever happened to learning for learning's sake? If kids cannot appreciate the world as it is now, instead of as some fake construction created by a corporate sponsor, how will they ever? Do you think this kind of thing is helpful or harmful to children?

Benefits of Life Advice?

In discussing Huck Finn during class, we talked about the life advice that Huck gives and receives throughout the novel. He seems to take in the opinions and views of everyone else, while never actually processing it or thinking for himself. From an outsider's perspective, this is pretty easily recognizable. However, I thought about it a little more and realized that this directly applies to my own life.
       There are little "helpful quotes" everywhere, all telling me how to live my life correctly. They cover the Trevian Tracker (the little school assignment notebook) and they plaster the walls of the hallway. When I was in sixth grade I read the "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" quote by Confucius. Not gonna lie, it got pretty old after the first fifty times.
       Personally, I think that getting life advice crammed into your ears is not helpful at all. In fact, it is actually harmful to a person's morality. If an institution wants to impress students with some sort of life lesson, they have to find a more effective way of doing so. 
      The reason why sayings like this are not a good idea is the same reason why we try to discover knowledge rather than receive it in class. If one is simply told something, the message often does not stick. But, it they truly learn it for themselves, it will be ingrained in their minds for a lifetime.
      It is wrong to shove quotes like this at young children and to tell them that they have to live by them to have a successful and moral life. It is not true and it is far oversimplifying ethics. If we cannot honestly trust kids to discover their own moral fibers, then out society is pretty far gone. I believe that ethics should be discussed and discovered, but never wraped up neatly in cute little wall posters. Thoughts?

The Color of Band-Aids

Today in class we examined an article by Peggy McIntosh called "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack". It was about the ways that our society favors people who are white over people of color, whether or not it is intentional and purposefully racist. 
         The article consists of a lost of fifty different examples of this phenomenon, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. That aside, number 46, which I do agree with really caught my attention: "46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin."
         I think that the reason why this particular example stuck out to me is because it is something that I take for granted. Of course a flesh-colored band-aid would match my skin color. I also have never really considered the matching a bit deal. Sometimes I even wear blue band-aids with little glow-in-the-dark Spongebobs on them. But the practical applications of a band-aid's color are not really in question here. 
      The real issue is in the assumptions that our society makes based on race and color of skin. We like to call ourselves a "post-racial-America", but even if direct hate crimes and racial profiling have come to an end, all of these little things, like white band-aids add up to a very uneven society. I think that these small, seemingly unintentional and harmless discrepancies are often more damaging to race relations than the larger, deliberate examples of racism. 
    My reasoning is twofold. First of all, I explore the phenomenon of right-handed scissors. Obviously, no one hates left-handed people for being left-handed, yet the average lifespan is shorter for these few. Why? Many things, like scissors, are built for people who are righties. This can make life more dangerous for the minority of people who are not. This is similar to the band-aid story. Small things can add up very quickly.
     The second argument is that when racism takes such a subtle form, it becomes ingrained in society without people noticing it. If we accept these things as normal, we are accepting that one group of people should live with more privilege than another group. Things are overlooked that should not be.
     After reading this article, I think that I have already become more aware of this sort of racial bias in my personal experience.

Superbowl Commercials and Feminism

Like most Americans, I spent this evening sitting around the TV with family and friends, eating guacamole and watching the Superbowl. As much as the football game itself fascinates me, I have always been intrigued by the commercials. Several years ago, I started keeping track of the different categories of ads. For example, a few of the most common types from this year were TV shows, cars, and beer.
       Out of the 113 commercials that aired between the kickoff and the end of the game, 30 were for CBS shows. But the ads that I found the most interesting were far from the most common. They were the two godaddy.com commercials, featuring the "Go Daddy Girl".
    Both the ads depicted a woman being recognized as the Go Daddy Girl. Another woman in the ad then asked if she was "go daddy material". Then she ripped the front of her shirt open, and the commercial ended, directing viewers to visit the Go Daddy website if they wanted to see more.
       My question hardly even needs to be stated. Are these commercials inappropriate? I would say yes. The Superbowl has been branded as a family show ever since the Justin Timberlake/Janet Jackson fiasco a few years ago. In the years following their "wardrobe malfunction", CBS has tried to make the even more family-friendly  by having much older bands play the halftime show. So why ruin the efforts with such sexist and provocative ads? The network chose to deny other ads on the grounds that they were not in keeping with the station's values. Why on earth did they not deny this one too? I am all for the funny ads, but this one made me feel more like I was about to see pornography.
      If we keep portraying women as sex symbols in media, true equality can never be achieved. C'mon, CBS.

Have You Seen Our Finals Schedule?????

Earlier this afternoon, I was looking up dates for the end of the school year and I discovered some shocking information. According to the official New Trier Calendar, our first day of second semester finals is on a Friday. The weekend after is Memorial Day weekend, so we have the following Monday off. Then exams will wrap up on Tuesday and Wednesday. Oh, yeah. And the commencement ceremony for the seniors is on that Sunday.
      Aside from the problems this causes for my personal calendar, this raises some issues.
      First of all, I think that having three extra days in between the first and second days of finals is awkward and possibly harmful to students' studying. The end of school is a distracting enough time, and to draw finals out for a time longer than necessary encourages end-of-year slumps. Will students really be able to use those three days effectively? I don't think so.
     Also, having a weekend surrounded by finals really defeats the purpose of a weekend. We are supposed to have those two (or three) days to catch up on work and sleep, and maybe to have a social life. But if students spend the weekend stressing about what is to come on during the next week, we can't rest.
    The lack of a true weekend also means that many New Trier students and their families will not observe Memorial day at all. Especially in light of the current war, every American should make that extra effort to acknowledge our armed forces.
     Finally, Memorial Day weekend has traditionally been a family-oriented time. It is the last major block of freedom most people have before everyone parts ways for the summer break. Without it, a lot of annual events and family vacations will likely be forgotten.
    I have a feeling that the reason for this strange schedule is to make extra time for the potential construction over this summer. Is it worth it? What are your opinions?

The Virtue of Incentives in Education

After watching Barry Schwartz's speech in class today, one of the thing that he said stuck out to me in particular. (You can view it here.) He told a story that served as a warning against relying on incentives to live a virtuous life. Apparently, in Switzerland citizens would ask if they would be opposed to having nuclear waste stored in their neighborhoods. Somewhat surprisingly, about 50% of them said that they would be okay with it because they felt like it was their duty as citizens. Here comes the crazy part. Another group of people were asked the same question, but they were also offered six weeks' salary as a compensation for the waste storage in their neighborhood. This time, only 25% accepted the plan. 
       This story clearly demonstrates a very interesting aspect of human behavior. We will agree to do something on strictly moral grounds until financial gain is brought into the picture. Then we suddenly take on a much more self-serving attitude and can no longer do the right thing based solely on what we believe is right an wrong. 
      Since I do not live in Switzerland and no one has ever surveyed me about nuclear waste storage, this specific example does not directly pertain to my daily life, but its message does. Our education system today is largely based on providing students with the incentives to learn. We receive grades for almost every assignment and we make a huge deal about final semester grades. For almost every student at New Trier, grades are a huge motivator to learn. 
     But why not learn just for learning's sake?
      To take myself as an example, I genuinely like to learn. I think new concepts are pretty cool. In Spanish, we are supposed to be learning how to speak another language, but sometimes I feel as if all that I am really learning how to do is get a good grade in the class. If we are assigned two pages in the workbook, I always do them, but I usually do not really put much thought into it. I do the minimum amount of writing so that I can get all of my homework points. I know that I am not the only person in my class who is guilty of this. But when I try to make myself feel guilty about blowing off my homework, I realize that the incentive of getting a good grade in Spanish really hurts my ability to learn properly. I truly believe that if I didn't have to waste so much time trying to get a good grade, then I could properly learn the language, which is something that I am interested in doing even without the grades (which is why I signed up for the class in the first place).
       My final point comes from the Chicago schools. Recently, they created a program that paid students for getting good grades. (I don't know what the current state of the program is, but the basic idea is still relevant.) I think that the problem with adding extra, unnecessary incentives to things is that the new incentives actually undermine the original ones. This "money for grades" program is telling students that getting good grades is not enough reward in itself. For that matter, grades in general send students the message that learning for learning's sake is not worth it. We need that extra validation from an outside source, rather than just being able to be proud of ourselves. I'm not sure that this is healthy.
      What do you think??