Category: Reflection
Congratulations! Your lesson bombed.
Something happened today. It happens with some regularity, and today it made me feel a bit sad and disappointed. A new lesson I planned bombed. Kind of. It didn’t really bomb so much as I hadn’t prepared enough. Or maybe it was that I had the wrong expectations for my students. Probably both of those things. I find this happening towards the end of the year sometimes. I try to give my students a little more autonomy, to treat them more like high schoolers, and it fails miserably. I let them spend last week in Scratch, explaining that they should choose the tutorials that match the skill level they’re at, and then I expected they would all be at a basic level of proficiency one week later. Ha! I presented a loose concept today, expecting that they would just play around and have fun with it. I presented the lesson, said “Go!” and my first class of sixth graders just stared at me.
“um, okay…. maybe I’ll start the project along with you on the big TV.” We went along step by step, creating a button sprite and giving it multiple costumes. I was explaining every step, and quickly realized only one of nine students (my first period is really small) was cruising along on her own momentum. I quickly scrapped it and said “you know what, let’s just do this other game…” that I’d been perfecting for years. A maze game. A Mr.GD classic. Thankfully such things exist, it’s only taken about six years to get to that point.
There are a few different lesson-planning lessons I can take from this. The kids might need a bit more hand holding. We might require more direct instruction at the end of the year, when the wheels on the bus start to wobble, with the nuts loosening from the bolts at an alarming rate. I shouldn’t expect the kids to get themselves ready for a big project; that’s my job. Similar to one technique I like to use for making music, I should probably reverse engineer the unit around a shiny final project. In music, this means diving into a full chorus at the beginning of the writing process, composing everything in a dense 8-16 measure loop. Then I’ll isolate some of the percussive and auxiliary elements and tease those out into the intro, outro and other sections of the song. In the classroom, I should create a big project addressing the themes I’d like to explore (in this case, Media Literacy) and then reverse engineer intro-lessons out of that. The final project will be a witty satire of how hard it is to unsubscribe from an app or web-based service, flashing with buttons and confusion. The first lesson will be how to make one button, and then program it do something.
Okay, well, that idea is cued up on the pedagogical to-do list, with much of the thought work and foundation already laid out. In the meantime, HERE is the Scratch game I created yesterday. I anticipate several forthcoming Deluxe and Lite versions.
Been a while
I’m here right now for a few reasons. One is an interview with Seth Godin that mercifully pulled me away from doing the dishes. He’s a consistent inspiration for myself and many others, but in this particular clip he mentions blogging every day for many days in a row. Why? Because it’s a privilege to be able to do so. He then makes a remark or two about discipline; something about how you don’t do something every day because you want to, you want to do something because you do it every day. I haven’t even finished the interview yet, and I haven’t really started doing the dishes yet, but here I am, 113 words into my first post in almost exactly seven years.
I should really get back to the dishes…
But, I’ve wanted to get myself writing recently, and that’s the other main reason I’m here instead of at the sink. There’s a bit of a roadblock in the shape of “Well, what kind of writing?” I try to find ways that my unique experiences as a middle school teacher, especially throughout The Pandemic, might be worth writing about. I also toy with some ideas around writing fiction, maybe science fiction. I have a Google Doc with 5-10 premises or story ideas that are slowly but surely amassing real estate somewhere in my conscious mind. As anyone who’s ever accomplished anything knows, however, it’s not what I write, it’s that I write. So here, look: tee hee! I’m writing. Boom.
It really is time for the dishes now. For now, I think my first goal is to publish this, and to publish again much sooner than 2030, a mere seven years from now.
Who taught ‘cha?
An introduction by way of my greatest influences, musical and otherwise.
This video is part of a project I worked on for Digital Youth Network, through DePaul University.
The Journey Begins
I’ve been kicking around in my head and on paper (as well as several brainstorming Google Documents), the idea of starting a small business. With fits and false starts, I believe in approaching my third decade of existence that I’m finally on to something. There’s no proof yet, I may be on the wrong path. Let’s find out, shall we?
I intend to use this blog to document my ascent, descent or constant swirling, whichever motion pattern I find myself in as I struggle to earn a living, be a person and enjoy life. Please, wish me luck. Hopefully the attention I fidget and squirm for will keep me in check, helping me to adhere to the pursuit of my goals.
No, not “beets”.
What I want to do is sell beats. You know, beats. Like, “Awwww, that’s a dope beat! Turn it up!” The kind that rappers rap over. Not Schrute Farms. Not beets. Not drum rhythms or patterns. Nor, in the strictest sense a single note a musical “beat”; but a song, with no vocals on it that a musical artist would purchase (or lease) to use as a backing track for their own performance. Mostly, these will be rappers or singers recording their own vocals onto my beat, though in theory a guitarist could lease a beat. Or a kazooist.
You know, beats. Instrumentals.
I’ve been a practicing musician now for about 19 years, beginning to study the drumset when I was in the 5th grade. While studying music education at The Berklee College of Music, I was lucky enough to be amongst the first class whose tuition also covered a Macintosh G4 laptop. Nestled amongst the other prerequisites like Harmony, Ear Training (with a few different Teachers, including John Funkhouser; what a tiny little classroom), World Civ, Arrangement and Conducting was M-Tech 111 (Shout out to Kai Turnbull – a hard name to forget).
I’m sure that now if you poll Berklee’s current freshman class you’d find a great deal of them are fluent in digital audio production. The same was not true nine years ago when I was a new student there. Of course sampling and digital production had been around for some time, but this notion of if you have a Mac you can do absolutely ANYTHING was only beginning to take hold. I’m thankful Berklee had the progressive outlook and commitment to outfit each student with a top-of-the-line laptop and an Oxygen 8 MIDI controller.
Oxygen 8 v.1
This is a time when there was no MacBook Pro. No Dropbox. Myspace reigned supreme. Ableton Live was in its infancy. iPods were white and, if anything, uniform. The weight of the near-term future was heavy though and I got hooked, slowly, but surely on digital musical production.
I wouldn’t have guessed that nearly ten years later, I’d put my bed in my livingroom to accommodate for a full-on home studio in the “bedroom”, that my drums would be stacked, in their cases in the front hallway, while a MIDI controller glimmered and twinkled between two powerful near-field monitors while I churned out both sample-based and wholly original music. This is due, largely in part to M-Tech 111. Due also in part to a suggestion a fellow student made when I said I was struggling to learn Harmony. “Have you tried writing your own music? That really helps.” That’s funny to think of now because I’m still shamefully ignorant about harmony, but I’ve written an awful lot of music.
In addition to tracking and musing on mypath up to and beyond this point,I also plan on helping out Rappers. You know, like, MCs.
As a drummer, beat-maker, engineer and producer I’ve worked quite a bit with other musicians, vocalists and MCs/Rappers. I can help you count 16 bars. I can help you learn the difference between triplets, 16th notes, 16th note triplets… rests, breaks, hits, stabs, kicks. What makes a good chorus? How can you accurately explain how you’d like a rhythm to be different? Did you really mean to say “half-time” – or is it “Shuffle”? Was that a “Rim-shot” or a “side-stick“?
I’m going to try to help you find out.
OkayTonyBeats 