Ok, twice this year...

[Chip McDonald]

I've had the following occur:

 

Today a new guitar student comes in. Go through the perfunctory motions, etc...

 

We get to the point of me asking "so, what music do you listen to?", and what does the kid say....?

 

 

Wait for it..........

 

Keep in mind, this is during a GUITAR lesson.....

 

Ok, here it is......

 

The kid says,

 

"I don't like to listen to music"

 

 

!!!!?!?!?!!!!?!?!?!?!

 

 

A few months ago I had a kid tell me he "doesn't really like music"....

 

I've been doing this for over half my life now: suddenly, in one year, 2 students claim to not really listen to music.

 

Not to mention I'm going to have to put in my 2002 lesson contract "student should BRING A GUITAR TO THE LESSON", since about 4 of the past 6 new students I've had DIDN'T SHOW UP WITH THEIR INSTRUMENTS, citing "well, you didn't tell me I had to bring it" or "since this is the first lesson I figured I didn't need it" or some such.

 

I'm losing my mind.

[not coaster MODERATOR]

Very rarely do I take a student younger than high school. They don't usually have the discipline to practice, tune their axe, learn to change a string or whatever. I turn down a lot of business just because it's not worth it.

 

People who pay for lessons from their own pocket take more pride in it. Tell the parents they're wasting their money.

 

(long day-I'm in one of those moods)

[KHAN]

Chip, do you live in the Twilight Zone?

 

--------------------

 

Random Detroitus: http://travel.tripod.com/usa/detroit.html

[Tedster]

Hey, that's okay, Chip. I think a lot of kids "playing" guitar these days don't like music.

 

"I broke a string"

 

"Oh, hey, I've got a spare you can use"

 

"That's okay, thanks anyway"

 

"Well, don't you want to fix it?"

 

"Why? It's cool this way...ya think I oughta break another one?"

 

"Well, you oughta at least re-tune it. It really went out when that string broke"

 

"Yeah, it sounds cooler now, doesn't it? Tuning is for dorks"

[Hippie]

It sounds like mom & dad have more money than sense.

[Sylver]

I had an aquaintance a few years ago that said that actaully tuning a stringed instrument was pretentious. He liked the way it sounded without tuning, and just threw a bunch of effects on it. I asked him how do you expect to get the songs to sound the same every time. His reply? "Songs?"

 

The scary part is that a few years later, my very practiced band showed up for a gig, and guess who was the other act. Even scarier is that we had a great set and these guys sounded like thier guitars were going through a trash compactor, and they went over better than we did. I am so sick of this anti-music, white noise BS that people trying to pass off as music. It's like in the art world, a few people do some really cool avante garte pieces, then, every yo-yo with a paint brush fancies himself an artist. Granted, music doesn't have to be technical all the time, it's really about feel. I mean, the Ramones really captured that teen angst thing cold. Thye were great for what they were, but at least they conveyed and emotion besides confusion.

 

Rant completed.

[BobSanders]

Sylver I couldn't agree more about the white noise. But rock is a platform for whatever you bring to the table. That's why it will outlast everything. If it required the discipline of jazz or classical music it'd be a whole different ball game.

[Chip McDonald]

Sylver: yeah. I'm lost; the anti-talent philosophy is literally killing me.

 

A notion occured to me today while I was in a Large Scary Flourescent Lit Home Electronics Warehouse Corporate Retail Place: modern society has become too large to grasp, even in a general sense.

 

I overheard a few conversations in this store regarding current technology, things about DVD and the like that basically left me realizing that for a large amount of people, "consumers", the technology has become almost reverse-borderline "magic". No, it's... hmmm.

 

I need to invent a term here. How about... hmm. no, I'll come back to that..

 

But the idea is that a lot of people are going through life right now, interfacing with technology that they have not even a vague awareness of how it works. This is different than it once was, I'll have to explain -

 

Technology is moving forward so fast that there's too much to absorb and understand for a younger person. People maybe didn't really understand how things worked when they came out when I was growing up, but maybe they had a vague awareness of how things work - they learned a microwave oven heated food by using radio waves to vibrate water molecules maybe, or before that a combustion engine burns gasoline to push against pistons, etc.

 

Kids today - they're surrounded by *so* much more technology. In addition to that, there's the Net - if something *has* to be understood, you can find out about it on the Net.

 

I cite this because the Internet has made me much more intellectually lazy than I once was. When I first discovered it I went nuts trying to absorb *everything*. Impossible. Right now I know there are FAQ's on some really neat and interesting technical stuff laying around - things about fractals, IC's, physics, how to build things - and infinite variety of Interesting Things.

 

I've now finally passed a hurdle where I can put it away. I know it's there, and I know how to find it if I need/want to.

 

BUT - what about kids born into this? I've had more than 30 years to learn about how the world works; what would I have done if all of this was suddenly plopped in my lap at say, age 10? I used to read 3-8 books a week when I was a kid. Everything at the library. What would I have done if I *knew* there was "too much" out there? What would I do if I *knew* somewhere there's an expert at something so obscure no one else would care about it, BUT maybe me - but there's no point, because someone else has already taken care of becoming the "expert"?

 

I think... people are now becoming sort of techno-zombies. Kids are theoretically learning "more" in school now, BUT - I run across kids that have these enormous common sense problems, things *you wouldn't believe if I told you*, that no one would have had when I was a kid. *No one*.

 

So I'm proposing that for a lot of people today - they've turned off their intellectually curious side. They totally only interested in efficient use. Music - they tune into the instant gratification, give that a grade, don't think about *why* they have a reaction. Everything is just an extension of the action of pushing a button.

 

To *me*, when I press a button on a remote, I'm conscious of what the button is made of, the process of the design of that, the molding/manufacture, the ergonomic considerations (or lack thereof), the internal construction, circuit board considerations, voltage considerations, logic flow, mechanical aspects, infrared considerations, physical aspects of the beam, what's going on inside the electronic device I'm controlling, the evolution of that device, how it functions, the physics of it... etc. etc....

 

It just occured to me tonight that for MOST people - you press the button and "it happens".

 

I'm not saying they *couldn't* understand it, but that the drive to is gone completely.

 

SO,

 

when someone comes into a lesson and apparently has no clue that they should bring their guitar to a GUITAR lesson - it's not that it's obvious, it's that they literally *don't have a lot experience at thinking*. People are being *trained* to remember sequences of events it seems, but not actual cognition.

 

I think this also explains why, even though we're now in the 21st century, there's such an upsurge in silly things like astrology, tarot card reading, and so forth. Shamanism occurs in cultures where the populace simply have no exposure to deductive reasoning. It doesn't matter that people are being trained to regurgitate factoids about history, or how to find the root of a number, instead of how to hunt buffalo or make a pot out of clay: the technology doesn't matter.

 

Reasoning has left the building.

 

This explains why, and I've always found this curious, some people will behave as if you're almost a god sometimes if you figure something out with "no prior knowledge". It's not "there" for them. Maybe if you don't use that aspect of the mind regularly at a young age, it goes away, leaving a "blind spot". People seem clever these days, but only in a "learned it from the media" way?

 

I'm continually amazed by what is being "taught" kids these days, but at the same time they all leave me with my mouth gaping at things like "oh, I have to push the thing (string) into the thing (fret)?" (this happens with about 2 in 5 new students I would guess).

 

Hmm.

 

Likewise, I can see how in an earlier civilization bright people who could reason well could really, *really*, manipulate a mass of humans into doing ridiculous things. One always wonders about events leading to the apparent insane practices of the Aztecs, or early Egyptian culture.... strange idol worship practices, apparently obvious scams and tyrannical leaders who evoked insiduously rabid followers. In a simpler culture, that lacks deductive reasoning - strange, I can really see how easy it would be to manipulate masses, something I never really wanted to accept before.

 

After I left the aforementioned Retail Warehouse, I found myself at the 24 Hour Grand Temple of Flourescent Light and All Retail Generic Goods. I'll admit: people have been bugging me to at least buy a cheapo DVD player, and I was looking for certain hackable models. At the Flourescent Temple I walked past a large wire bin of DVD movies for $5 apiece. Something I normally would not have noticed, but since I was thinking about spending money on such a non-productive thing I thought I would look....

 

I had to wait in line. People were *rabidly* scrounging through this large bin. From afar I could look and tell it was pretty marginal: movies I would NEVER waste time watching.

 

BUT I heard things like "hey, this is (generic movie title) - this was made by the makers of The Rock" at which point a husband replied (derisively) "yeah, but of course it's not that quality of a movie, ha ha ha, but.. well, it's only $5"...

 

People were clamoring, picking up JUNK, movies that.. ahhhg. They were *rabid* - to just buy this JUNK, because it was DVD's and cheap. They were pushing each other, rustling through the bin, grabbing at such "gems" like "Young Guns II", movies with Alicia Silverstone, or something similar.

 

The overall impression I got was *exactly* like what one might expect to have seen during an appearance of Christ. People clammoring for some contact, ANY contact with the incarnation of God, maybe a shred of robe, a taste of wine turned from water. Instead, "hold" artifacts churned out by the Church of Popular Media.

 

Sigh.

 

Oh well. Yeah, I know, I'm probably loony for finding such profound implications in a shopping trip for a cheapo DVD player (which I couldn't bring myself to spend money on), but it seems to explain some things. Pop shamanism has replaced a short renaissance of Reasonable Thought I think. I suppose this is something less of a concern for the more Nietschian-bent; I realize most successful business people play on this aspect, and probably have for ages. It seems like it's now dominant as a whole-culture mentality though. How does one place one's self ethically in this scheme? The more carnivorous are apt to go farther obviously...

 

I know, stop thinking so much. This is probably why friends suggest I get a DVD player, huh?

 

(and you thought this was just a post about guitar lessons... (it did start out that way, though....))

[not coaster MODERATOR]

You know Chip, I've been thinking about those two kids who aren't taking their lessons very seriously.

 

Take 'em out back and give them a good old fashioned Dogtown beatdown!

 

 

just kidden around,

 

Cereal

[michael saulnier]

Chip,

 

You're in a unique position to be a kind of "Yoda" to the kids you come in contact with. Maybe you can take the attitude that if say 1 in 10 of the kids you try to reach really respond, well that's a victory.

 

You had suggested adding "bring a guitar to the first lesson", to your introduction sheet. Why not add some of the other "obvious" things... strap, change of strings, pick, notepad, tuner, that they need to practice, some "suggested" listening, bring a list of their favorite music, etc.

 

You seem like a "easy going kinda guy", but for a kid, meeting a guitar player / teacher might be an intimidating thing. Especially one with major chops and who didn't "struggle" with becoming a guitarist. Maybe if you go overboard in a "helpful" way with your first contacts with the kids, you'll eliminate the ones who "don't want to practice" or who "don't really like music" and the kids who will respond to you will actually self select.

 

Or maybe the whole society is just ruined. In that case, suicide is probable easier... (just kidding)...

 

Good Luck with all this in 2002 and keep the reports from the front coming...

 

guitplayer

[KHAN]

Ya gotta love the South.

[gtrmac]

I'm trying to keep in mind that when I started to play Rolling Stones songs on my guitar with my band my father's reaction was pretty much the same. "That stuff's just noise!" But he still bought me a Telecaster and a Vibrolux amp that year. With the current popular music being what it is not liking listening to music could be a healthy reaction!

[Chip McDonald]

Originally posted by guitplayer:

You're in a unique position to be a kind of "Yoda" to the kids you come in contact with. Maybe you can take the attitude that if say 1 in 10 of the kids you try to reach really respond, well that's a victory.

 

Well, I do.

 

Actually....

 

It would seem that for the final exam at some of the local high schools, a paper was required to be written. What's funny is that as part of this paper, the student has to interview someone as a reference regarding something....

 

I was interviewed by I think it was 18 students, some I hadn't seen since they were 12...

 

I actually teach the children of some formers students at this point, and it's funny to hear what they say their parents say about when they were taking lessons. I *ALWAYS* try to break through, always. I always assume I will, because otherwise it's just a push-button job, and that's not how I teach guitar/music.

 

The problem is that recently the mountain I climb is turning into a sheer vertical wall of ice. I mean, come on - they're saying they don't listen to music!

 

... and they find nothing strange about that.

 

You had suggested adding "bring a guitar to the first lesson", to your introduction sheet. Why not add some of the other "obvious" things... strap, change of strings, pick, notepad, tuner, that they need to practice, some "suggested" listening, bring a list of their favorite music, etc.

 

When I first started teaching, I only had to say how much they cost. People would call me in advance if they couldn't come, they showed up on time, eager to learn, practiced, and paid on time.

 

Now, I essentially for some students describe things as a process in such detail it's like writing a technical manual. What used to take 5 minutes in a lesson now requires 2 lessons. I know it's not me; now and then I get a "normal" person and it goes as it should, and it's quite refreshing.

 

Maybe if you go overboard in a "helpful" way with your first contacts with the kids, you'll eliminate the ones who "don't want to practice" or who "don't really like music" and the kids who will respond to you will actually self select.

 

Unfortunately I compete for students at a store with 4 other guitar teachers. Ironically, one used to be a former student ...still sort of is, if you know what I mean. So - I'm grateful for having essentially a full schedule right now, even though it's half filled with insane people; I can't really afford to be picky. I don't get benefits or vacation time, so....

 

Or maybe the whole society is just ruined. In that case, suicide is probable easier... (just kidding)..

 

Might be, ha.

 

I mean, I don't want to lead a more pathetic real life version of "Mr. Holland's Opus".

[Sylver]

Chip, I think you really hit on it with the "pop shamanism" idea. For the latter part of the twentieth century, consumer participation has been increasingly hand to mouth. Most things are pre-packaged, pre-digested and cloaked in a aura of holy mystery that makes most things disposable. How many people have ever had a DVD player FIXED? Not many I would say. If it doesn't work when you get it, you take it back. After 3 months, you send it back to the company and they send you a replacement(Probably the newer model, because the one you bought is no longer made). It breaks after the warrenty expires? Throw it out and buy a new one. God, we are so removed from technology. Remember that in the early radio and tv days people had these units for years and even replaced thier own tubes and adjusted them themselves(Anyone remember the old tube testers at the local five and dime?).

 

What's my point? Ummmm, not sure there is one, besides that we're all OLD! J/K, but it occurs to me that everything does cycle, so there has to be a revival sooner or later, right? Right? Right? That's what I'm hoping for anyway.

 

Jack

[D_dup3]

Originally posted by Chip McDonald:

 

 

modern society has become too large to grasp, even in a general sense.

 

Kids are theoretically learning "more" in school now, BUT - I run across kids that have these enormous common sense problems

 

 

See the dichotomy ? THERE IS NO CURRENT COMMON SENSE ! Common sense can only exist where/when it is common/shared.The "village" we look at is too large/wide-ranging to provide common experience for many.

As far as the original theme of this thread, this is a reflection of the successful co-opting of music from a shared experience to a sold commodity.This is further demonstrated by the proliferation of remixing(it can be a valid art, but seldom is) & music constructed entirely from pre-made parts---hey, "parts is parts"!

How can kids like what they don't know ?

Best o' luck to us all in the future (the future, Conan ?).

 

[ 01-28-2002: Message edited by: d ]

[Chip McDonald]

Originally posted by d:

 

 

See the dichotomy ? THERE IS NO CURRENT COMMON SENSE ! Common sense can only exist where/when it is common/shared.The "village" we look at is too large/wide-ranging to provide common experience for many.

 

"Common sense" is a misnomer,really. What I mean is "a knowledge base containing the basic operating parameters of the physical world". Meaning - if you press on this type of material it's likely to do "this", if you turn this screw-like device this way it's likely to do "this", if you tighten this metallic string the sound will go "up", that kind of thing. Never mind basic inductive reasoning - kids are not playing outside anymore, or being creative to the point of learning from building things using found objects, that sort of thing.

 

As a kid you *learn* from playing. You learn things about the dynamic of clumping of different materials by making dirt clods, you learn water won't stick to wax crayon, you learn oil floats in water, you learn friction makes things hot when you skin your knees on carpet, bending a malleable object (like a coat hanger to make "something") also makes things hot, brittle materials (ice shards) shear differently then flexible ones (plastics), you make a lever longer on one side (teeter totter) and it increases the weight you can lift on the other, ... on and on, basic building blocks of being able to interpret what goes on in the physical world and how to solve problems in it.

 

I think at a young age that is the *reason* why we're driven to play, to learn about the world. Sitting in a room playing a videogame isn't the same thing.

[gtrmac]

Certainly the constant absorption, beginning at birth, of brain deadening quasi-stimulation from a TV set must have something to do with the apparent atrophy of the brain in young people. I have two kids, and I worry about their future quite a lot. My wife and I try to pay attention to what's going on though. She has been a full time mom now for the last seven years, since the older boy was born. I'm trying to get him to start playing an instrument now. It only matters to me that he learns that worthwhile goals require work and patience, a lesson that learning an instrument teaches well. If he does learn he will also find the rewards of accomplishment and the joy of making music. He's only seven but I am trying to convince him to begin. He wants to play drums god help me.

Hey Chip, did you take a lot of stuff apart when you were a kid just to see how it worked. Now when you take stuff apart it all looks the same. I take stuff apart all day at work. Well actually I take stuff apart half the day and I put it back together the rest of the time. It really all looks the same to me. I don't think about what's happening when I press the buttons on the remote though.

I don't think it matters that there are experts in every field now. When I was a kid there was Albert Einstein and Isaak Asimov. That didn't discourage me from enjoying math or science. There was also Wes Montgomery and Segovia, didn't stop me from enjoying playing the guitar.

I also was a book addict as a kid. I already knew how to read and write when I started first grade as a matter of fact, my mother taught me. It was a bit of a problem for the teacher at first but she resovled her confusion by letting me work on my own while the others were learning to read. I spent the time writing a book. It was called "Mac's Book on Space" with illustrations by me also. It was put on display in the school lobby for a while when I finished it. There was already too much for one person to know at that time. No one told me so I continued reading.

My opinion is that our society will collapse eventually. The cracks in the foundation are already visible. At this point though it is still better for those of us in the rich countries than it will be when it falls. And it is surely better than what came before. I'm surely decadent when I say that I would not want to trade my electric guitars for a hard day in the fields just to keep from starving. It's just a crime that so many suffer that the few may prosper and it doesn't have to be this way. Now I'm really rambling though.

[G. Ratte]

Kids are theoretically learning "more" in school now, BUT - I run across kids that have these enormous common sense problems

 

Yeah, knowledge vs wisdom. I've noticed this a lot with a lot of my more technical-type peers (I'm 31) and younger people. The guys that were on the Internet in the early '90s, reading Mondo 2000 and on BBS's before that.

So much detail work, specialized knowledge and fact collection and overwhelming amounts of trivia. And if you're not abstracting all this stuff into meaningful patterns and conclusions (wisdom) then you just get... lost. And sink into an ocean, in deep over your head. That's the overstimulation. You're feeding your head too much to necesssarily make sense of it. Non-stop novelty.

 

There's a name for this group of kids in Japan... they're like Mega-Fanboys, who sit around in their rooms on the 'Net collecting bits of info and pictures and whatnot on obscure pop stars. Their social standing comes from how much crap trivia they can accumulate.

And a zillion parallels with any sort of obscure-music-scenester everywhere else (on topic!). Overzealous sports fans. Beanie Baby collectors. People who knit sweaters for dogs.

 

Someday, a giant asteroid will strike the earth.

 

G. Ratte'

[Hippie]

Chip,

ironic you should mention a 'knowledge base'. I just came out of a meeting at work where I was recieving shit for 'not contributing enough articles to the knowledge-base server'. The gist of my defense was basically, 'if you want to be a technician, you do not pick up the info. through heresay or incorrect sources'. You must do the research yourself, and really learn it, no way around it -period. It's insane, any jack-ass I work with can input KB articles for new emps. to learn from. My gripe is people are inputting their own 'opinions' of the way things work, which are often incorrect, so I do not participate in contributing to KB & I am the bad guy! Now, its got to the point where the younger techs. are saying 'I didn't do that paticular task because there was no knowledge-base article', and this has become a viable excuse for not doing their job! The company fully supports this line of thinking. It's crazy, everybody wants the answers, but no one wants to learn the material. I am starting to fear for the future of this country.

[phaeton]

Chip:

 

Screaming Spin-thoughts, Batman!! I thought i was the only one that felt that way;

 

The blatant consumerism that lives in Grand Colluseums of Flourescent light-

 

People fighting over DVDs because it's *new*. I be these are the same people that have repurchased all of thier entertainment all over again on each one of the following:

betamax, laserdisc, vhs, dvd

phonograph, 8-track, cassette, microcassette, CD, mp3...

 

are you seeing a trend here?

 

To *me*, when I press a button on a remote, I'm conscious of what the button is made of, the process of the design of that, the molding/manufacture, the ergonomic considerations (or lack thereof), the internal construction, circuit board considerations, voltage considerations, logic flow, mechanical aspects, infrared considerations, physical aspects of the beam, what's going on inside the electronic device I'm controlling, the evolution of that device, how it functions, the physics of it... etc. etc....

 

It just occured to me tonight that for MOST people - you press the button and "it happens".

 

All i can say is o-my-gawd. You hit the nail on the head with this. The sad thing is, i know people *my* age (nearing 30) that are just like this. We're talking 110lb women driving 3-ton SUVs. Never goes into 4 wheel drive, and if it did, they wouldn't know why `it sounds funny and won't go fast'. Don't know what kind of engine it has, how to check the oil, or what that red light on the dash means when it says "temp". If they get a flat tire, they get on the cell phone and call someone to change it for them, for $150, because they don't know how.

"I don't know, i just drive it because it looks cool."

 

Ok, maybe not everyone is a gearhead. That's ok, but there are certain things you MUST know to operate and maintain your automobile, regardless of what it is.

 

Nowadays, we have people going out and blowing > $2000 on a brand new computer. Most of them can't tell you what brand it is when you ask them. Most of them don't know the difference between a right click and a left click. They are excused if this is thier very first computer ever, but that isn't the case more often that i'd like to say.

I get calls all day from people that don't know how to do the most mundane task on thier computer, and these are people that have owned them for years. I'm talking something as equivalent as having a driver's license and car for 5 years and not knowing what an emergency brake or turn signal indicator is.

 

There are a lot of things in this world that i understand all the way down to the molecular level (like the t.v remote analogy). Maybe this is excessive, but i don't understand how it is that people don't injure or kill themselves with ordinary household objects more often than they do- because they don't *want* to learn or understand just a little bit about the world around them.

 

I didn't say *can't* understand, i said "don't want to" understand.

 

This explains why, and I've always found this curious, some people will behave as if you're almost a god sometimes if you figure something out with "no prior knowledge". It's not "there" for them. Maybe if you don't use that aspect of the mind regularly at a young age, it goes away, leaving a "blind spot". People seem clever these days, but only in a "learned it from the media" way?

 

Reasoning has left the building

 

Another one right on the money. (no pun intended)

 

 

Likewise, I can see how in an earlier civilization bright people who could reason well could really, *really*, manipulate a mass of humans into doing ridiculous things. One always wonders about events leading to the apparent insane practices of the Aztecs, or early Egyptian culture.... strange idol worship practices, apparently obvious scams and tyrannical leaders who evoked insiduously rabid followers. In a simpler culture, that lacks deductive reasoning - strange, I can really see how easy it would be to manipulate masses, something I never really wanted to accept before.

 

One of the things that keeps me up at night, tossing and turning.

 

hrmm.. well shoot. I could go on and on, but i should stop or i'll write a book. Not to mention that i'm totally off-topic.

 

sorry

[gtrmac]

I am starting to fear for the future of this country.

 

I'm afraid of the present! Come to think of it the past wasn't too good either. Maybe humans are slime, life is meaningless and we should all just pursue lives of destructive materialistic gluttony. The asteroid would be a fitting conclusion in that case. Hey, wasn't there a movie about that?

[jaccursi]

And I just wanted to see what you guys had to say about guitar lessons....

 

Nowhere is lack of common sense and basic physical knowledge more apparent than at an art school. The worst part is we have welders and big power tools! (Not to mention lots of flammables). Just last week I watch a classmate struggle with a power drill and a drywall screw for at least 10 minutes. Yeah, I could have told her to switch the drill to "forward" but it was fascinating --smoke, flying screws, broken fingernails.

 

Don't get me started on the SUV trend-- that sums it up for me...

[Chip McDonald]

Originally posted by gtrmac@hotmail.com:

Hey Chip, did you take a lot of stuff apart when you were a kid just to see how it worked. Now when you take stuff apart it all looks the same.

 

Of course I did all of that (and put it back together before the parents found out). There's still plenty of cool stuff to disect today and learn from, they're just not doing it. The curiousity isn't there anymore. The drive of curiousity has been usurped I think by the over-stimulation of modern media.

 

I don't think about what's happening when I press the buttons on the remote though.

 

But that's probably a pseudo-magical thing to a lot of people today. They have *no* idea how they work - probably some think it's even radio waves. Certainly the ones who know it's infra-red light probably aren't considering the coding schemes and timing issues involved.

 

I also was a book addict as a kid. I already knew how

 

But see - kids *don't read books anymore* *Literally*. You'll find the occasional recluse, but most kids have never read a book these days. I got on this tip one day about it, started asking my younger students "what's the last book you read?" and that turned into "have you *ever* read a book all the way through?". A lot hadn't, thought it was funny...

 

to read and write when I started first grade as a matter of fact, my mother taught me. It was a bit of a problem for

 

It's funny, I was thinking about that at a gig at a bookstore sunday night. Walked through the kid's section...

 

I *never* read kid's books. The first book I read was a Star Trek compilation of some of the old episodes, I just suddenly knew how to read one day and picked that book up out of a box at school in first grade and never looked back. I used to HATE being ushered to the kid's section at libraries; and then having to argue with the librarians about WHY I should should be ALLOWED to check out a stack of books on radio telescopes, jet airplane engine maintenance or whatever interested me that was written for "adults". Like what am I going to do, hurt the books? I remember one librarian asking me to read from a book and explain what it was about, and then being accused of lying about my age, and then.. whatever. The whole concept of "children's books" always ticked me off, along with those toys that had children's suggested target ages on the box... Luckily my parents let me read whatever whenever, and never forced those kiddie books on me. If that had happened I think I'd be a very, very different person now.

 

Probably a less odd person, though....

 

letting me work on my own while the others were learning to read. I spent the time writing a book. It was

 

I went to a Montessori school. You went as fast of a pace as you could handle, it was great. You were rewarded for figuring things out, and if it turned out you could operate on a 5th grade level in 1st grade they let you do it.

 

THAT IS THE WAY THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM SHOULD WORK.

 

It blew my mind when I went to another school and you had to stop and wait for people to catch up. I was even sent to the office because I kept finishing a bozoish Reader's Digest reading test before they put the time limit up, even though I passed the comprension tests perfectly. That was the beginning of the Warping of My Mind...

 

The school system has to be reformed. It's broke, it obviously doesn't work, no one likes it, and it's getting worse. I teach some kids who can only barely communicate ideas; while they know calculus they can't figure out which gear to turn on the headstock of a guitar to tune without tracing the string from the bridge to the nut....

 

My opinion is that our society will collapse eventually. The cracks in the foundation are already visible.

 

I agree. You can't have a society where people can't communicate with each other in a rational fashion. You also can't build a society on essentially emotional automatons. Lucas's THX-1138 is so prophetic, the worker coming home to turn on the tv to watch some canned random violence with no other real self-realized purpose.

 

It's a big joke where I work that the kids that are there can't form complete sentences or spell anything. I would assume it's worse here in the south than elsewhere (I can only imagine what it's like in some parts of rural Mississippi and Alabama), so I predict it will be another 2 years or so before it reaches the elite echelons of the media to warrant making it a story (for the same people who apparently spend all of their time watching news about the stock market and other sundry things probably most people in the U.S. have no connection to). Then again, the way things are going, maybe not...

 

I remember when you NEVER saw something mispelled on television or the newspaper. After all, it was their BUSINESS to get it right. Nowadays it's unreal, and the complete non-sensical sentences they say sometimes like "the soldier was shot dead and later died", "the woman took ill" or some such is very surreal in a 1978 flashback sense.

 

SO I make another prediction: a news broadcast show will come out based around the premise of some guy sort of lounging around, ala "The Man Show", where the guy "relates" the news in a "common talk" way. It will be a pseudo-joke, sort of like _Ananova_. It will become extremely popular, and will supplant a lot of assumed untouchable news sources like CNN. Seems kooky, but just remember it...... Earliest possibly next year, latest within 3 years.

 

At which point - interelations with strangers in public is going to be so fractionalized there's going to be all sorts of new problems we can't anticipate right now. It will be interesting, but annoying and sad at the same time.

 

a hard day in the fields just to keep from starving. It's just a crime that so many suffer that the few may prosper and it doesn't have to be this way.

 

It doesn't, but unless you're in a position to change it your empathy should be proportionate. At least that's my personal rationalization. I could donate all of my "wealth", live on the dole, and it wouldn't alter anything.

 

Someone that pulls $250,000 or more a year - that's different.

[TAZZ]

Chip,

 

You should be setting all this to music!!!!!!!

 

And maybe you should get out LESS often!!!!!!!

 

Hang TOUGH!

[G. Ratte]

I went to a Montessori school. You went as fast of a pace as you could handle, it was great. You were rewarded for figuring things out, and if it turned out you could operate on a 5th grade level in 1st grade they let you do it.

 

WOW! Hey, in the early '70s I was living in Augusta, GA and went to a Montessori pre-school in the area (Walden Hall, I think). My parents were pretty "progressive" but I mostly just remember being confused and wondering what was going on...3,4 yrs old. Learning to write cursive. They had cool toys with little plastic gears and lotsa LEGOs.

 

What's Montessori about, anyways? Has anybody messed with the Suzuki Method? My mom's a music teacher so there were always various educational books around I'd see references to, but never picked up on it too much. Avoided learning music 'til I was a teen 'cuz I could never deal with mom teaching me anything directly. Ya know how it goes.

 

G. Ratte'

[fantasticsound]

Chip, I heartily agree!

 

The simplification of your original post is:

 

This is the calculator culture. Calculators are everywhere, so students are not required to show they know the process of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Just press the right sequence of buttons with your data input, and the magic box spits out the answer.

 

The same is true for the internet. Shove a term in a search engine, and poof! All you want, and more, on just about anything. Except it doesn't work as well as the calculator. Searches miss many items, or deliver the wrong items. Without the knowhow to reason, a researcher loses the ability to adequately narrow the search parameters.

 

Increasingly, we need to encourage our kids to disect, tear apart, investigate, and seek understanding of the way things work. It's a 24/7/365 struggle to enlist their curiosity. But it's a worthwhile, and necessary struggle. Press on, Chip!

[Gabriel E.]

When I was a kid I played with Lego. The peices just came in just a few different shapes and sizes and I could make anything I wanted. You could buy kits for spaceships, towns, police stations etc, but after you'd build that, you'd break it all down, add the parts to the pile and make something really cool like a supertanker, oil rig or a squadron of WWI fighters. Despite my poor math skills, I'm pretty good with electronic and mechanical stuff and problem solving and I credit my thousands of hours of Lego playing for this (deductive reasoning).

 

Now Lego comes in ready made kits that really only allow you to make one thing - its all prefab. The parts for the Lego ship can only used to make a ship. The Lego motorcycle is one piece. All the shit is so dumbed-down that it doesn't allow kids to imagine or learn how to put something together that only exists in their head.

 

I think that with increased consumerism over the last 20 years or so, there has been an increased literalism. In order to sell stuff, it's designed to be as easy to understand as possible. Disney gave Huey, Dewey and Luey regular voices instead of "duck" voices - obviously because some dumb kid in a focus group somewhere didn't "understand" a couple of words of dialogue. The Pink Panther now talks in a nasal whine. Again, someone incapable of understanding subtlety didn't get it so marketers changed the whole thing so as to not miss any potential customers/marketing tie-ins.

 

Of course kids nowadays have no common sense and arent smart (not necessarily unintelligent) - everything they've been exposed to has been designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

[Chip McDonald]

Originally posted by gratte:

WOW! Hey, in the early '70s I was living in Augusta, GA and went to a Montessori pre-school in the area (Walden Hall, I think).

 

Small world! What's your age, do you remember anything from there? I was there in the early 70's as well. Grew up around the corner on Pinehurst, the road on the big hill across from N.A. hs.

 

My parents were pretty "progressive" but I mostly just remember being confused and wondering what was going on...3,4 yrs old. Learning to write cursive. They had cool toys with little plastic gears and lotsa LEGOs.

 

What's Montessori about, anyways?

 

The cursive thing was funny. I remember going to another private school and *no one* wrote cursive, and it's was weird to do so... Ironically I can't really do it anymore.

 

The Montessori method at the time was sort of an.... experimental way of teaching a normal grade school, although now I think it's an accepted "main stream" approach. It's a very regimented procedural approach to education originally meant to help kids with learning disabilities, but when applied as a school curriculum it's supposedly a great thing - which I'm inclined to believe.

 

The curious thing is how it's structured around enabling a "complete" way of learning. Some of the procedures found in Montessori method books are described as:

 

"EDUCATION OF THE SENSES AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE DIDACTIC MATERIAL: GENERAL SENSIBILITY: THE TACTILE, THERMIC, BARIC AND STEREOGNOSTIC SENSES

 

Education of the tactile, thermic and baric senses

Education of the stereognostic sense

Education of the senses of taste and smell

Education of the sense of vision

Exercises with the three series of cards

Education of the chromatic sense

Exercise for the discrimination of sounds

Musical education

Tests for acuteness of hearing

A lesson in silence "

 

Does your memory of what they made you do make any more sense after reading the above? It's very clever, it basically a way of teaching awareness of your surroundings, and how to interpret it, and then codify it. Every moment is supposed to be a learning experience. I would think that probably helps turn out a good musician as well....

 

 

"Sense exercises/a species of auto-education

Importance of an exact nomenclature, and how to teach it

Spontaneous progress of the child / the greatest triumph of Scientific Pedagogy

Games of the blind

Application of the visual sense to the observation of environment

Method of using didactic material: dimensions, form, design

Free plastic work

Geometric analysis of figures

Exercises in the chromatic sense "

 

... and that's just a small fraction of it. They place great stress on the "spontaneous progress" aspect, which has sort of warped me to this day - I am intellectually impatient I think because of this. In fact, probably has all to do with how *I* teach guitar. But all of that interactivity and constant *real* education at such an early age I think really sets the stage later on. I think when you take a kid a very young age and continually immerse them in an environment where basically every moment is spent trying to educate the senses and thought process in this manner, it's bound to pay off.

 

Yeah, that was the place that had a box of novels in first grade you could pick through and take home. Along with an assortment of crazy musical instruments... I remember taking home real trumpets, playing with all sorts of percussion bits, xylophones, violins. No questions, no "don't touch that you might break it". A great thing at that age.

 

If every school in the country was ran this way, with teachers trained in these methods and with the "learn spontaneously as fast as you want" approach we'd have a cultural renaissance in the U.S. in 20 years.

 

Oh well.

[Chip McDonald]

Originally posted by TAZZ:

Chip,

 

You should be setting all this to music!!!!!!!

 

Ahg, I suppose I am in a tangential way....

 

 

And maybe you should get out LESS often!!!!!!!

 

Ack, the only time I go out now is to go to a gig or to get groceries....

[Chip McDonald]

Originally posted by fantasticsound:

This is the calculator culture.

 

It's so funny, and once again ironic. I remember in grade school going "why can't we use calculators, we already know how to do basic math!?" and not being allowed to.

 

Now - not only can they use calculators to do basic math, I know some kids that just plug in numbers on their laptop and basically do nothing at all. *Nothing*. They *are* learning in a very thin way about more advanced forms of math, but... I don't think they're learning to *think*.

 

I'm all for calculators for basic math, I always hated what amounted to tests of your anal retentiveness (673.897 X 8976.3215). Higher levels - man, it's weird how fast that changed to a student being allowed to use calculators/laptops.

 

Gabriel - you're right about Legos. They're too defined now. Anyone remember Lincoln Logs? They're probably not on the market now because you MIGHT get a splinter (OOOOOOOOhhhhh), but there was only two parts and you could make very elaborate constructions out of those basic two parts. It took actual THINKING and CREATIVITY...