the other way

I am taking ten classes this semester. TEN. I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea, but it’s how it worked out. Normally, I’m all over how insanely  busy this is keeping me, but…

This week, I was sick with a sinus infection. A pretty bad sinus infection. I cannot recall ever being this ill or this miserable from being ill. I was essentially in bed for 2 days. I missed a week’s worth of 5 of my classes and a few more besides. As if missing class wasn’t bad enough, it’s not like I was the kind of sick where I could kind of do things sometimes. I was pretty much wiped out by it for those two days. I’m someone who pushes through illness at pretty much all costs and hates missing class, but I just couldn’t this week, not with this infection.

So now I need to catch up on everything I’ve missed. 200+ pages of reading. Two response journals. Learning to play several percussion instruments I’ve never touched for a playing test Tuesday. French diction test Monday over material I missed. Two four-page papers. A take-home quiz. On top of my regular practicing for lessons, piano, and ensembles. 

Honestly, all that in a weekend, I could manage, even with the fact that I’m still a struggling to breathe kind of sick. But no. This weekend is women’s choral festival. Which I agreed to host before I got sick and cannot back out of and will take up my entire day until 4pm or so on Saturday. 

I know everyone has shit on their plates. I know this. My plate is just a little fuller than normal right now, and while I know I’m going to be okay and find a way to manage…I just do not know exactly how that’s going to happen right now.

At some point late last semester, I went through and determined how many man-hours and hours per person it took a choir to prepare for a concert. I don’t have those calculations on me, but I will definitely share them here later. 

The point is, I’ve been thinking a lot about time and work in relation to music and just how much music goes into a semester of my life here. Let alone a year. Between piano, voice lessons, basic skills, choir, small ensemble, and percussion, how many pages, measures, songs, hours?  

I want to know these answers, not because I can really do anything with the information (although I can), but because I am interested to see it represented this way. I mean, I already know; I live it for Zeus’ sake. I have no reason to do this other than ever-present and insatiable curiosity.

With my obsessive need to write things down and record things has actually enabled me to do this. And I’m pretty freaking stoked about it.

sophiamaria:

as summaraized by selected quotes from chapter 2 of my ED 120 (Introduction to American Education) textbook:

• Education is a process of human growth by which one gains greater understanding and control over oneself and one’s world….Education is also characterized by continuous development and change. The end product of the process of education is learning….Education knows few boundaries…education is too important to be left to chance….the informal educative process [life] is simply too unreliable.
• In effect, what you were taught in elementary and high school represents your community’s wager—that is, its social bet. It is what the older generation thinks you and your schoolmates will know to live well in the future.
• Our culture tells us what to do.
• Cultures, including school cultures, can be good or bad…
• …socialization, defined as the general process of social learning whereby the child learns the many things he or she must know to become a well-functioning and acceptable member of a particular social environment.
• …schools encourage compliant behavior as opposed to personal initiative. 
• In the model of the school as acculturator, schools exist to advance society by ensuring that the young know and appreciate the dominant ideas and values of their society’s culture. The goal of cultural transmission in US public schools is to teach the American way of looking at the world and the American way of doing things.
• Without even being conscious of it, our teachers instruct our young in our version of reality and our way of handling the real world….to transmit the unique culture of the country to its newest members, the young.
• Conflict is viewed negatively, and society works toward finding consensus among various groups and eliminating any conflict.
• The presence of new Americans in a school can be a valuable resource in the effort to increase multicultural understanding and appreciation. Although US schools need to transmit American culture [!], we must realize that what we call “American culture” has always embraced many cultures [therefore we should embrace the token ethnic person!]
• Many of you would say that you attend college because you expect to earn a more comfortable living with a college degree than without one. Americans generally expect that more schooling will lead to greater personal wealth, and, in general, they are right.
• …the school’s responsibility in promoting a healthy social order….schools existed to help mold or guide students into what their society needed and expected of them. A teacher’s job was to help students understand their role in the broader social order.
• They are important because they help to structure the classroom socially as a system of rewards and punishments.
• Things happen because it is time for them to occur and not because students want them to happen.
• Waiting is a familiar activity for elementary school children….Denial of desire is another common experience for the elementary student.
• Delayed gratification and denied desire are learned in school.
• Students are often asked to behave as if they were alone, when they are actually surrounded by thirty or so other people.
• As Jackson remarks, “These young people, if they are to become successful students, must learn how to be alone in a crowd.”
• The ability to control desires, delay rewards, and stifle impulses seems to be characteristic of successful students…
• All too often, students play passive roles in classrooms dominated by regimentation and conformity.
• If teachers preach or push too hard, some students resist. To avoid resistance, individual teachers strive to find the appropriate balance in their classrooms between requiring academic rigor and allowing students to opt out of learning entirely.
• The average or unspecial students are generally ignored…
• Effective, as currently defined in most of the educational research literature, refers to students’ achievement test scores in basic skills such as reading and mathematics.
• Wether one is measuring school effectiveness by test scores on math and reading tests or by the more holistic measures, certain features stand out in the schools that most successfully socialize students to behave in ways that the school values

Reblogging this to say that no one in my class found any of this objectionable…including the teacher. What the actual fuck. 

Why do I cling so hard to organization? Calendars, color coding, lists, syllabi, due dates, and more. Why? They make me less anxious about what I have to do, sure. Where did I learn this? Not from my parents, certainly. Not from any teacher. I guess it sort of started in high school out of…necessity? But it couldn’t have been necessity, because I floated through weeks not knowing what day it was, yet still having everything done that needed doing. 

I didn’t even use the organization I had in high school. I was picky about planners and meticulous about writing everything down that was due or to do, but I never referred back to them. I wrote things down, remembered them, did them, done. I remember being TSgt Harris’s poster child for using a planner. 

I really don’t know where this came from in such…full force. Now, if it’s not in my planner, it’s not happening. My planner and digital calendar are very specifically and unvaryingly color coded. I’m even pickier about planners now. Everything must be written down and referred back to and checked and double checked. I’ve always been goal oriented and organized, but never quite this obsessive in either of those ways. And that really is the right word for it: obsessive. I live on 3 calendars and my brain has been preoccupied for several days with the idea of a fourth. 

There’s this image in my head of a calendar. A pretty big calendar. Four months (the remainder of the semester), and I can see them all at once. The days are each big enough for me to write a list on. Instead of a running list of things to do, this is a calendar of due dates, each day containing a list of things that are due then. I can see everything task, assignment, memorization deadline and its due date, right there on the calendar. All color coded in my way, of course. Checked off when things are done, of course. When February is done, I’d probably leave it on the wall. It would say “I did these things,” and “These are the things I failed at, forgot, didn’t do, didn’t make time for.” 

I wanted a calendar like this last semester, but it seemed so impossible. I’ve been thinking about it even more lately, and finally visualizing it as something that could exist. That’s when these images crept in. But every time I try to imagine how I’d want it, I inevitably come to how big it would need to be, and it keeps needing to be bigger and bigger, until it takes up the whole north wall of my bedroom, and then it looms and grows teeth and keeps growing and growing until it looks like a Word document you accidentally zoomed in to 400% and all you can see are three letters.

I like being organized…until it scares me.

I don’t have anywhere to live.

1. What things do you want me to know about you so I can help you be successful in class?
   I’m not a freshman, which I don’t say because age or maturity is any kind of issue, but because I had class last semester with most of the people in this class now and I just generally don’t fit with their mentality. I’ve done the freshman thing already, the stress and the identity crisis and I’m not interested in doing it again or being treated like I am.
2. What questions do you have about this class and the requirements?
   None, I think it’s all in the syllabus.
3. What fears do you have, and how can I alleviate them?
   I’m pretty terrified of needles, but I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that.
4. What style of learning best fits your needs?
   I believe in the Socratic method and the Marketplace of Ideas. I question things. That’s how I learn.
5. What are your passions/ non-negotiables in the college classroom?
   I have to be able to ask why. I have to be able to be myself and express my personality. Like this questionnaire. I’m not ever going to ever bother being any other way than how I am, it’s just not worth it.
6. What are your pet peeves?
   People with no integrity. People who are constantly freaking out about everything. Crime shows with obvious endings.
7. What are your strengths and weaknesses as a college student?
   My strengths are being organized and prioritized, as well as holding my education as one of the most valuable things I’ll ever have. My weaknesses are group projects and applying myself toward tasks I don’t see the purpose in.

sophiamaria:

• Go see Moneyball with Dad 
• Move in with Patra!
• Drive Leah to school in the mornings
• Decorate the Christmas tree
• Christmas brunch here!
• Find a Christmas present for Mom
• Achievements in Aviation
• Benefit show
• Puzzle time with Christina and Michelle
• Tea with the Wild Ladies of Afternoon Tea
• Downtown. At least once.
• Basic Skills test!!!!
• Work after the new year is rung in.
• Hang out with other kids who are back in the LW (which includes re-creating this)
• Bake for both Patra’s and Leah’s birthdays
• Massive amounts of acquiring and listening to new (to me) music
• Finding another class for next semester
• Start reading/read/finishing reading as appropriate: Tangerine, Bossypants, This is Your Brain on Music, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald short story anthologies (read Of Mice and Men and bits of others instead of the anthologies)
• Learn the Level II skills barrier
• Learn a bunch of music so I can just hit the ground running in voice lessons when the semester starts

I didn’t realize how punny that title is until after I’d typed out the whole list.

So, I was not paying attention to this list at all over break, but I accomplished pretty much everything on it! The only things I didn’t accomplish were tea and Moneyball, both of which hinged on other people, and I’m not going to be bummed about not accomplishing that kind of goal. I didn’t read all the books I wanted to, but I read a few others, so I’m fine with that. I might have found another class for next semester (might not have, though, I e-mailed the professor), but I put a lot of effort into looking for one (I was really open-minded about it and flexible to change, but nothing fits!), so I’ll be fine with it if this class doesn’t pan out.

And I did a lot that wasn’t on this list.

I feel like I’ve done a lot of nothing, but I’ve also done a lot of somethings. I got a lot done for me. I feel genuinely recharged and ready to do battle with this semester. Mentally, physically, spiritually, intrapersonally, interpersonally (as much as I ever am)…it’s just all there, organized, prepared, and ready to go. I really can’t even describe what a good place I’m in.