"Teach Them Well and Let Them Lead the Way"
For many years, my school district hosted an annual Academic Diversity Institute prior to the start of the new school year. At this institute, teachers had the opportunity to hear speakers and attend seminars that taught about and encouraged the implementation of new teaching strategies and methods in the classroom. The theme of the 2012 institute was "Reaching All: Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century." The keynote speaker at the 2012 institute reinforced many of the concepts and arguments that I had studied in my graduate school cohort program, from which I had graduated just three months earlier. As I listened to the keynote speaker, her words really resonated with me, further confirming my belief that the integration of technology in the 21st century classroom is critical to helping students to be academically successful, both in the present and in the future.
The keynote speaker tugged at my heartstrings through her incorporation of Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All". It is the song that my dad and I had danced to for our Father/Daughter dance at my wedding a year earlier. Although there is a very personal reason why my dad and I chose this song for our special dance, much of the meaning that he and I both share in connection with this song also carries over into my beliefs as a classroom teacher. My own analysis of Houston's lyrics further supports my belief about the importance of technology in the classroom.
"I believe the children are our future," as past and current generations have shown that they will be who shapes the workplace environment once they become the majority of the population. "Teach them well and let them lead the way" in how they will acquire, master, and utilize knowledge. "Show them all the beauty they possess inside" in order to intrinsically motivate them to want to learn. "Give them a sense of pride to make it easier" for them to find their own meaning in the standards that they must master in order to pass a particular course. "Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be" when we ourselves were students (Whitney Houston, "Greatest Love of All").
That last line in particular reminds me of how excited I was to use Ask Jeeves for the first time in my 9th grade Regional World Studies class in order to do research on the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. At the time, Ask Jeeves was a newly developed research tool on the Internet. My own memory of this experience reinforces the need for teachers to not only continuously learn about and incorporate new learning strategies and methods, but to also serve as a guide on the side of student learning and to let students find meaning in their own learning.
Whitney Houston
"Greatest Love of All"
August 2012
Kathryn Thayer, Social Studies Teacher
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Have One on Joanna Newsom
As I considered a range of options for my Humanities Moment, I instinctively knew it would come down to music, which is the element that moves me most often and intensely in my daily life. However, my tendency to live within particular soundscapes for hours or days on end also means that my moment is entangled with longer histories and hard to pin down in time and space. If anything, the album <em>Have One on Me</em> that yielded my “moment” has taught me a different, more unbounded relationship with time. But first, a little bit of background on the artist and how I discovered her. <br /><br />I found Joanna Newsom in a Facebook post by a scholar I had met at a James Joyce summer school in Trieste, Italy. I had loved this person's academic work on literary hoaxes but as our social media afterlives showed us, our most vital point of connection was our love for women musicians with strange voices. I made it a point to check out any song he posted, and in late 2015, one of those songs turned out to be "Sapokanikan" from Newsom's latest release, <em>Divers</em>. "Sapokanikan" is notorious (within admittedly niche circles) for rhyming its titular word--an indigenous place name--with "Ozymandian"--an adjective crafted from Shelley's famous poem ("Ozymandias") about transience, infinity, and human hubris. This parallel is a neat glimpse into how the rest of the song traces the ebb and flow and layering of human histories in a single place. The audacity of it could be obnoxious, just as the music video of Newsom skipping down the streets singing straight into the camera could be precious. But none of it felt overindulgent to me. <br /><br />The density of the lyrics allowed Newsom's voice to soar, at moments to hair-raising pitches that could have come straight from her harp or accompanying strings. Her earnest playfulness presented the mythic scope of her song with a disarming wink. And so my love for Joanna Newsom sprouted, easily and effortlessly. At times, I was troubled by how her love of myth led her to paint mystical pictures of "ethnic" cultures, or to string together different cultural references a bit too lightly and whimsically for the material histories of inequity that they grazed against. Nonetheless, I found the grand scale of her work personally liberating, and she always seemed to be aware of the fragility inherent in any overinflated image--whether in the way men saw women, or civilizations saw themselves. <br /><br />But while I grew obsessed with Newsom's discography, I could never seem to get into her album <em>Have One on Me</em>. An over two hour-long triple album, it already posed a challenge to attention spans, almost testing the quality of her fans’ devotion. But a bigger problem for me was that the album seemed to lack her trademark energy and graspable forms that usually provided an entry point into her complex compositions. Unlike the sparkling and robust folk tunes of her debut, or the almost classical shifts in pace and melody in her later work, <em>Have One on Me</em> had a meandering, repetitive quality to my ears. The lyrics were devastating as usual, the singing was heartfelt, the overall sound was polished, but I failed to find that hook, that leap, that burst of vibrancy or ethereal lull that would transport me to Joanna’s universe. <br /><br />At some point in the Spring semester of 2021, I was relying desperately on music to help me complete a dissertation chapter draft while my country was being ravaged by the second wave of COVID-19 and the disregard of a cold-blooded central government. My nerves were frayed--I craved a protective cocoon of music but not one so stimulating that I would be led away from my work. <em>Have One on Me</em> suddenly seemed like a good option. It may have been my least favourite Joanna Newsom album, but it was still Joanna Newsom. The album was expansive, elegant, and my distance from it could only help my focus. It turned out to be a great choice--the intricacy of the sound became a calming swirl around me as I plunged into the depths of my writing. <br /><br />But after days of writing successfully to <em>Have One on Me</em>, something changed. The album was no longer a soothing but distant friend, no longer an amorphous mass of pretty and mysterious textures. I felt as though I had suddenly obtained the ability to see and hear at close range. Songs had intimately familiar outlines and phrases. The album wasn’t untethered, it was a deeply emotionally grounded narrative that left no stone unturned for the sake of the story that might lurk beneath. In a sense, <em>Have One on Me</em> occupies the most relatable of genres--the breakup album. But like Bjork’s <em>Vulnicura</em>, it is a breakup album that stretches and grasps and generates more than it fixes, fixates, or breaks down. The title track laughingly announces the singer’s separation from a hurtful ex-lover. “Baby Birch” mourns the loss of a baby, never held or seen. “California” makes an emphatic choice to protect the “border of… [the singer’s] heart” but still admits that the powerful habits of love wind her up like a cuckoo clock. It is easy to confuse something capacious for something overindulgent if we have been taught to trust bite-size pieces of wisdom and catharsis. <em>Have on One Me</em> was a vital corrective to those habits that I’ve acquired. <br /><br />And I could not have been more wrong about the album’s pacing--I realized that everything about it was dynamic. Some songs, like the title track, are a richly embroidered tapestry, with subtle incremental shifts in the musical pattern. “Baby Birch” starts as a slow, pained crooning and swells into a tumultuous but triumphant section with strong percussion. “Go Long,” a bewilderingly compassionate indictment of toxic masculinity, switches between a regular and a high register with an unearthly ease while the shimmering harp in the background takes over in a wordless concluding meditation. The final song, “Does Not Suffice,” imagines the ex-lover’s home slowly returning to a masculine starkness as the singer removes all her items of clothing before her departure. It is once contemptuous and empathetic, self-aggrandizing and vulnerable. The gentle, ambling melody is almost identical to an earlier song, “In California,” with a whiff of added melancholy and fewer variations this time round. The ending however, is a dark and thunderous banging on a cluster of musical instruments all at once. <br /><br />In the height of my newfound obsession with this album, I listened to it all the time--with headphones on, through my portable speakers, on my laptop speakers, and even directly through my phone. When “Does Not Suffice” drew to a close, my phone surprised me by the sheer contained violence that exploded from its inadequate sound system. As the instruments pounded away, it felt as though there was a ghost trapped in my device. I remember that visceral quality straining past technological barriers as a reminder of much energy there is in Joanna Newsom’s music, and particularly in the album that I had underestimated.
Joanna Newsom
<em>Have One on Me </em>(2010) by Joanna Newsom
Spring 2021
Anushka Sen, 30, Ph.D. Candidate, teacher, emerging translator
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J.C. Bach and the Exhaustion of Feeling
I was around 16 years old at the time of my humanities moment. I had been playing the viola for 7 years. As usually occurred, I became bored with practicing the first movement of J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C minor that my teacher had given me for an upcoming recital, so I decided to skip to the next movement. The second one was not one that my teacher ever assigned her students, so I hadn't heard it before. After a somewhat cobbled together sight-reading attempt, I decided to look up a recording.
The song was hauntingly beautiful, filled with slow, elongated melodies and fast, anxious lines. I don't know what Casadesus intended to communicate with it, but, for me, it was a song about grief. The slow passages are restrained emotion, how one might feel when they are trying to keep themselves from feeling their sadness. The piece then becomes more anxious, as if unable to stop from considering what's going on. After the climax, it wanes, as if exhausted by the full cycle of the feeling. All of this was clear to me immediately upon listening.
The piece both changed the way that I played music, but also changed the way that I considered music in my life. It was what I turned to play immediately after the passing of a loved one. I played it in my senior recital. I have returned to it over and over ever since. It encouraged me to seek out musical moments in my life, and to consider the emotional and personal significance of humanities works.
J.C. Bach
J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C Minor, 2nd Movement
2012
Megan Kitts, 25, Philosophy Ph.D. Student
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Understanding Life Through Music
When my Humanities moment struck me, I was dumbfounded. Being at the young age of fourteen, I don’t think I fully understood the power of music. I knew that I loved music. I knew that I could connect with music. I knew that music had some power over the world, as everyone around me loved music and connected with it also. I just don’t think that I fully knew the profound power of music until this moment.
I was fourteen, and riding as a front seat passenger in my guardian's van. We didn’t have a destination, we were simply just driving around and listening to music through the aux. I had just chosen the song “Wake Me Up” by Avicii and turned to gaze out the window while we were driving. I was relaxed and enjoying the music.
It was then, while I was listening to that song, that I was struck with an overwhelming and paralyzing feeling. I’m not entirely sure what this feeling was, but it was peaceful. I realized that life did not last forever. My breath caught in my throat, and I felt that I was fully in the moment. Up until this point, I guess I could say that I was slightly spaced out. Not just spaced out in the moment, but spaced out to life in general.
It was surreal. Time felt frozen. It was like the world stood still. In this moment I had come to understand something bigger than myself and the rest of the world. It was like I was let in on a secret about the known universe. This feeling was fleeting, and only lasted maybe three or four seconds. However, within these three or four seconds my understanding of life and the universe had changed.
Then, time unpaused, and the world continued to move. I sat there, enjoying the peace, with a greater understanding. A greater understanding that life moves on and death is a part of life.
Then I turned away from the window and started a conversation with my guardian. I continued to be in the moment. I felt rejuvenated. I felt like I was where I was supposed to be. This moment helped to change the way I look at life and death. I don’t fear death. I just live my life one day at a time. I don’t let time creep up on me as much as I let it before. This moment put a lot of things into perspective for me. I know that the song helped me to realize this, and added to my moment of realization.
This moment was surreal. The song, “Wake Me Up” by Avicii holds a special place in my heart. It helped me to have one of the biggest revelations in my life so far. I feel at peace when I listen to the song. I love this song.
Looking back, it’s also one of the reasons that helped me realize the power of music. Music has a way of being relatable in so many ways, and can influence a person to do so many things. It helped me to see the power of music in a way I hadn’t before. This moment helped me have an understanding of life through music.
Avicii, “Wake Me Up”
Sydney Downard, 18 year old senior in high school
understanding-life-through-music
Swing Life Away
One thing I can tell you for sure is that music can save the soul. For me music is my outlet. Music has always played a role in my life, especially when I was in high school dealing with the ups and downs of the average teenager on top of depression etc.
Not only a song, but this band in general, has gotten me through a lot of tough times in my life. My humanities moment hit me when I was in a pickle in life and everything was at a standstill. I had this song "Swing Life Away" by Rise Against. The main chorus is "We live on front porches and swing life away. We get by just fine here on minimum wage, if love is a labor I'll slave till the end."
Honestly even now when I'm feeling my worst or in a funk I still blare this song.. It makes one realize that you have to work hard in life but as long as you have something worth working for that happiness will come. It's crazy how a song can uplift your spirits or take you to another world if you allow it to.
Melissa B, 27, Student
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God in Music Form: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
My mother received her undergraduate degree in Art History after her three children had graduated. As siblings with the label first generation college students, we like to think we inspired her to get her BA. But in reality she was the inspiration by making sure we were prepared and supported for our post-high school graduation.
One aspect of that support was sharing the courses she was taking at Mt. Holyoke College. One of those was a music course. It was 1990. I was in high school and I heard for, for the first time, Beethoven’s symphonies. It was remarkable. When I got to college, I would play the final minutes of “Ode to Joy” as my papers were printing on the dot matrix device we used. Later, as a teacher, I would play it for my students… just because. Leonard Bernstein’s performance after the fall of the Berlin Wall was the preferred version. More recently, the flash mob versions on YouTube are moving experiences that breathe life into the mundane, inspiring creativity and generating energy.
So, my humanities moment, hearing Beethoven’s ninth for the first time, has become a sustained experience with connections to people, events, emotion, and worldviews. It is both a bond and an inspiring reminder about what makes us human. It’s perfect.
Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies
1990
Craig Perrier, 46, Curriculum Specialist for Social Studies and Adjunct Professor
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The Concert
After 40 years of attending rock concerts I still get excited about them. There’s nothing like counting the days until the band is in town or when I am going to leave to attend a concert or festival in another state. I think about the many conversations I have had with complete strangers in the seats about what songs might be played and special guests that might show up at certain performances. Even scoring tickets to high profile shows in large cities during an artist's multi-night run is fun and the on sale date is greeted with great anticipation.
There’s nothing like that moment when the lights go off and the faint glow of flashlights lead the band members to the stage. Who knows where the music will bring you over the next few hours? One thing i know for sure I will always be looking ahead to the next one.
Bill Perrier, 50, Insurance sales
the-concert