Rhythm in Life

It’s a rare opportunity to be able to share with a child the experience of a live performance of something that is timeless in character. We heard Dave Brubeck play live last week. He’s an outstanding pianist, and surrounds himself with equally outstanding musicians.

He's best known for music of different rhythms: Take Five is in 5/4 time, Blue Rondo à la Turk is in 9/8. These are unusual rhythms, common time being four beats per measure. Both Take Five and Blue Rondo are (for most people, anyway) intrinsically appealing, even if the source of the appeal remains a mystery to most.

Recognising what makes these pieces unique is itself a form of meta-awareness. Rhythm, like harmony, isn’t always something we notice. Rhythm isn’t the centerpiece of music. It isn't even in the background. It just is.

So it is in life. We encounter people who "march to the beat of a different drummer." We may hold them out to be oddballs, or we may find them mysteriously appealing. The question remains whether we see everything there is to see about a person so that we understand why it is we see them the way that we do. We don't usually look for "rhythm," so we don't always recognise it in other people. Something that forms a significant portion of our impression of other people is below the radar. It’s just there. It takes meta-awareness to notice it at all.

It isn’t clear yet whether my daughter even marginally appreciates the experience of hearing Dave Brubeck perform live. Maybe the next time she hears “Take Five” on the streaming audio server at home she’ll notice what isn’t there: the improv of the live performance that isn't in the studio recording. Perhaps she’ll be aware of the music she doesn't hear.

Or perhaps not. She's only 6.

But she will know what is in the frame, snapping her fingers as she counts out the rhythm while Dave and the band play: 1-2-3-4-5-1-2-3-4-5 …

Situational Awareness

Sometimes, we are to our children as the Acme Corporation is to Wile E. Coyote: we supply equipment that enables the pursuit of some objective, only for the pursuit to end in misadventure. While these are certainly opportunities to teach responsibility, determination, or just better hand-eye coordination, they are also opportunities to help our children develop situational awareness.

From the perspective of executor, it is difficult to critically root-cause the reasons for our successes and failures. We must learn how to externalize so that we recognize the difference among execution failure (the Coyote flying of his own volition with the aid of the Acme Bat-Man costume, only to slam into a mountain because he didn’t have his eyes open), situational failure (being run over by a truck whilst setting a trap using “free bird seed” as the bait), and structural error (powering up the outsized electro-magnet and attracting every sizable metal object – steam rollers, boats, busses – in a very large geographic region and thus becoming the target of his own plan.)

By looking holistically and retrospecting an entire situation and outcome, we learn that it is worth iterating through some pursuits (note to self: keep eyes open), while others are just outright bad ideas (question to self: could what I am about to do become a self-targeted missile?) And it’s important to know when we failed but have no data points on the fitness of our solution, as the proverbial truck will trump the best laid plans of coyotes and men.

Society doesn’t necessarily value this. It encourages us to deny responsibility and be victims of outcomes rather than responsible for them. Is not the Acme Corporation responsible for the misadventure of the coyote? Does the manual to the Bat-Man costume explicitly require that the operator keep his or her eyes open at all times? And what business do they have selling such a powerful electro-magnet in the first place? Whether the coyote is a Super Genius or not is irrelevant; the Acme Corporation is culpable!

Understanding as completely as we can the spectrum of events that form both situation and result allows us to take better informed decisions and improve our quality of life. It gives us independence and greater confidence in our future actions, things we do not get if we deny the responsibility we have for our fate. But it is up to us to develop this capability - and stress the value of it - to our children. In a blameless society, constructive-critical self-assessment is not something our children are likely to learn from anybody else.

Learning How to Teach

Earlier this month, I learned how to teach my daughter how to ride a bike.

We worked backwards. First, we made sure we knew how to work the brakes. Then we learned how to maintain balance. Finally, we learned know how to make a standing start. Put it together, and you have an end-to-end ride.

She tattooed two brick walls, a fence and a shrub on her first day with a low, even, prime number of wheels. She didn’t immediately recognise what it is she was learning with each passing impact.... er., experience, so she needed a bit of coaching. She also needed some encouragement to get back on the metal-and-plastic horse. But get back on she did, and her maiden voyage from start to (intentional) stop is now in the books.

In learning how to teach a subject, we increase our own mastery, giving us as teachers the potential to learn as much as our students from the act of knowledge transfer. But teaching offers even greater possibilities. Sometimes our students surpass our own knowledge, and become the masters from whom we learn. While this may be upside for the teacher, this is not necessarily an easy transition for the student. They may find it difficult to cope with the change in role-state, struggling to cope without defined boundaries. Rather than evolve into a master, the student may rebel or drift because they are not properly prepared for this change.

We hope that our children's capabilities will surpass our own. For that to happen, we must pay attention to more than just their tacical execution: we must also be situationally aware enough to recognise when they have outgrown us as teachers. This allows us to change that aspect of our relationship so that even if we’re in their wake as executors, we remain sufficiently engaged with them as they carry on their journey into undiscovered country.

Although she had a difficult first day, she couldn’t spend enough time with her bike on the second. May she direct it on many voyages of discovery.

Three Questions

There's a children's book by Jon J. Muth called The Three Questions. It's based on a story of the same name by Leo Tolstoy.

A young boy is searching for answers:

• "When is the best time to do things?"
• "Who is the most important one?"
• "What is the right thing to do?"

The book concludes:

"Remember then that there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. For these, my dear boy, are the answers to what is most important in this world.

This is why we are here."¹

We denominate our business achievements in some currency (Euro, Pounds, Dollars, Francs, Yen...) but the richness of our lives is determined by how we interact with other people. We don't always get this right. Sometimes we get it horribly wrong. When we do, we hope it is not so wrong that we are disallowed the opportunity to ask and answer these questions again.

To live this is difficult enough. Being on the receiving end while somebody else gradually comes to grips with it is a challenge - and privilege - of parenting.

¹ Excerpts from Muth, Jon J. The Three Questions Scholastic Press, 2002.

Confidence Building Doesn't Replace Real Learning

In the Girls Just Want to Have Sums episode of The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson asks her math teacher: “Confidence building can’t replace real learning, can it?” This is quite an indictment of current educational values.

Nearly everything in which children participate - sports, arts, school - is accompanied by a constant barrage of reinforcement, to the extent that children are showered with awards and trophies for just about everything they do. Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try, the “you’re all winners!” messaging won’t change the cold, hard reality that in any given activity, some people are better than others.

Of course, there are two sides to the participation trophies: if everybody won, then everybody also lost. Our children’s cabinets are filling up with “loser trophies.”

Skill and performance aren’t matters of opinion, they’re matters of fact. Denying this undermines a person’s development of self-awareness. At younger ages, participation in everything from arts to sport is primarily concerned with skill discovery and skill acquisition. Achievement is important, but achievement is meaningful only after sufficient skill development has taken place. To wit: recitals from introductory music students have more cute value than musical interpretive value. Cheapening achievement creates false confidence, and undermines work ethic to achieve. Nothing is served by this, as everybody will, sooner or later, come face to face with their limits. The question is, will they recognise that success comes from hard work and dedication and not just from showing up.

We shower children with awards and recognition because we hope to build confidence. This reinforcement is external and temporary. Confidence comes from within. It is a byproduct of self-awareness, a result of knowing our strengths and weaknesses. Self-awareness comes from success and failure, independently achieved. There are no awards for self-awareness, but it engenders strength of character. Better to nurture this in children than to fill their cabinets full with loser trophies.

True Joy is Serious Business

In the 26-27 January edition of the Wall Street Journal, James F. Penrose reviews After the Golden Age by Kenneth Hamilton, a book that traces the change from passionate, individual interpretation of classical music towards dogmatic recital of what is believed to be the composer’s original intent. In describing Mendelssohn’s very strict interpretation of music, Mr. Penrose quotes Seneca: Res severa est verum gaudium. In English: "true joy is a serious business." This is a charge to all parents.

The joy that young children experience knows no bounds. As they grow, that joy is gradually overrun by cynicism. To master that cynicism, and to still experience joy in this world, children must learn to balance discipline with passion. Passion without control is recklessness. Control without passion denies a person the experience of life.

We guide children on this path in everything they do. Mindless execution in pursuit of technical perfection stifles creativity. Performance may be technically excellent, but lacks the soul of the performer. Similarly, execution requires discipline. Performing in the absence of any sense of discipline denies the fact that excellence requires a context. To wit: an unstructured collection of stanzas isn’t a Haiku simply because one asserts that it is; in actual fact, it’s nothing more than a poorly written poem.

Those who achieve this balance can produce works of profound joy. When one hears Seiji Ozawa’s interpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one hears unquestioned technical talent balanced with aggressive interpretation true to the baroque style. One never hears the piece in the same way again. When one reads Kenneth Yasuda’s thesis on North American Haiku, The Japanese Haiku, one realizes that in the hands of one who is master of language, the rhythm and rhyme of the Haiku is liberation, not limitation. One destroys nearly every Haiku he has written and begins anew. When one hears Benny Goodman’s interpretation of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto (K. 622), Mozart’s enthusiasm for the clarinet is uniquely evident in Goodman’s recital. That enthusiasm is immediately conspicuous by its absence in one’s own recital. One sets about re-learning the piece from the first measure. Those among the generation of people in our charge who learn to balance excellence with passion will contribute their own rich interpretations and add to the world's collective experience of life.

It is our responsibility as parents to engender this in our children. The scope of this responsibility goes beyond what it is our children elect to do, it applies to who they are: each individual’s life is a work art, thus a potential source of joy. Guiding a child as she or he masters the tools of the artist in the media of life is serious business indeed.

Silence is Golden

Read this on a Gem sugar packet in Athlone. In Gaelic: “Is binn béal ina thost.” In English, “Silence is golden.”

We are all of us subjected daily to an aural onslaught. Some is incidental, byproducts of the way we live. Some is intentional, targeted attempts to command our attention. Some is psychological, ploys to “set a mood” in a commercial experience. All of it is an invasion of serenity.

One wonders if we have not become that much more mentally steeled. To maintain our modicum of peace, we must subconsciously allocate mental cycles to tune out the noise now indigenous to our environment. This means we constantly expend energy to maintain a semblance of tranquility. It also means there's a brisk business done in noise-cancelling headphones.

Gold was, at one time, the coin of the realm. ‘twas precious to be sure, but far more accessible. ‘tis accessible no longer, not since the abandonment of Bretton Woods. ‘tis now a commodity, and far more dear indeed.

The same fate has befallen silence.