August 6th, 2007

“There’s Big Ben, Parliament.”

Tomorrow I leave for London! If you were a regular reader back when I wrote this, you know that my sister moved there 11 months ago. So we’re going for a little over a week, to visit her and to do various touristy things.

I don’t plan to take a computer, or even get near one during this trip, meaning no updates for a while. I should be back with you sometime between the 16th and the 20th.

And I’m sure I’ll have lots to tell you.

Tags: FYI, Travel | No Comments »

August 2nd, 2007

The Beat of a Different Summer

Man this place is sweltering this time of year. When driving, it’s best to keep the A/C on full blast to offset the windshield-amplified sun, and to keep the windows down to let the steamy air that is accumulating in the car escape. Traversing Raleigh (“The Copenhagen of North Carolina”) in the heat always makes me think about the first time I was ever really exposed to this city.

It was 1999 and I had just finished my freshman year of college. I was back home in Cary, looking for a summer job. My mom and dad were encouraging me to try and land something at least generally art-related. After several weeks of cold-calling print shops and art supply stores, scouring the newspaper, and filling out applications in pen (this was back in that hard-to-remember era before all you needed to pursue employment was an internet connection), Raleigh Parks and Recreation called me for an interview. It went well and I ended up accepting a job as — despite feeling that I may regret this, I am now going to tell you — an “Art Wizard.”

My role was to travel around the city, from day-camp to day-camp, hitting a new one each morning and each afternoon, with a trunk full of supplies, and to lead the kids in structured art projects.

Though they’re right next to each other, and you can float from Cary to Raleigh without even knowing it, they each have their own grocery stores and movies theaters and malls, and there are very few reasons for residents of one place to go to the other. I had probably been to larger, more urban Raleigh all of five times before I started this job. Now I was going to have to get from one end of it to the other in the span of a day. Every night while I had this job, I’d have to sit down with a city map and figure out where the Nova and I were venturing the next day. For four years now I’ve been working and/or living in Raleigh, and I’m still turning down streets I’ve haven’t been on since ’99.

As I had no prior teaching experience either, this would also be new to me. My supervisors didn’t see this as a problem, as they had purchased a detailed curriculum for me which was supposed to work right out of the box, and which I stopped following after five minutes in my very first class, when I realized I was reading an explanation of how the ancient Greeks decorated their vases to 25 gape-mouthed four-to-six-year-olds who clearly had no idea what the words “ancient,” “Greeks,” or “vases” meant yet. I haven’t done any teaching since, but I have a strong suspicion that curriculum-writers sit up in big, tall towers all day long, spewing out stuff that they think might work, without even a thought to field-testing. Then they turn it in, collect a handsome fee, and set off in their yachts to southern Greece. Back in the classroom, I had defaulted to letting the kids draw whatever they wanted in magic marker on two paper plates each, while I tried to figure out how I was going to handle the rest of the summer.

Over the course of three months, I completed six cycles through all the campsites. This meant every two weeks, at halfway through a cycle, I would look at the next lesson plan to see what general theme they were focusing on, then I’d come up with my own project — something related to that theme, but that I thought my four-to-six, seven-to-nine, and ten-to-twelve year-old groups could actually comprehend, and would actually find fun. I then put in my order for the required supplies and prayed that no one would notice a difference between what I was asking for and what I was supposed to be doing in class. (They never did.)

As an example, I did a lot of unsanctioned step-by-step drawing lessons that summer. I remembered, over the course of my early art education, people coming in to art classes I was taking and setting up big pads on easels and teaching us to render cartoon cats and dogs. I always liked that. My kids did too, but in order to keep all these lessons going, I needed pencils. Vast amounts of pencils. Baltic Seas of pencils. Kids want to draw in pencil. They have to be able to erase. Kids, however, also obliterate pencils. Just stand next to a kid while holding a pencil and it will disintegrate in your hand. Each day, I would dole pencils out before I started a lesson and by the time I got to the last kid, the first one had summoned me over to request a new one, theirs being broken in half, with the point worn down to a useless nub and the eraser ripped out and laying halfway across the room. We hadn’t even drawn anything yet. How did they manage this? How, I ask you? Also, getting everyone to share two cheap plastic sharpeners and not get their shavings everywhere was a big challenge.

More than anything though, this was the summer that I — a white, middle-class person, from the suburbs — spent my time in lower, working, and lower-middle class areas almost exclusively, and around African-American people almost exclusively. I had never been privy to the nuances of “black culture” in this area before.

Something that jumped out at me right away was that, while I was used to hearing people call their elders “Mr./Ms. That Person’s Last Name,” my kids always referred to me as “Mista Bob.” When addressing the kids, the counselors would refer to me this way too:

“Everyone take your seats. Mista Bob is here to teach you an art lesson.”

“Antoine is asking for another pencil, Mista Bob.”

And (when they were acting up): “You children are disrespecting Mista Bob!”

I grew extremely fond of many of the communities I visited, and I like to think they grew fond of “Mista Bob,” but I’m not going to lie to you and say we locked arms and sang “We are the World” when I visited. There was a lot of very apparent distance between us. This is why I felt the need to “put myself out there” and make a deeper connection with them. I did this about halfway into the summer, through the power of percussion.

African-American people enjoy their rhythm. This was not and is not me going all “Imus” on you and relying on stereotypes. I saw it everyday. The boys and girls I taught “beatboxed” and did step routines together — activities I’ve witnessed other groups of children doing…never. The vast majority of these kids also drummed on the tables with their hands. A lot of them were pretty good at it. Of course, I was better.

At that point in my life, I’d been playing drums for 10 years, pretty much non-stop. (My parents will vouch for this.) Not to brag on myself, but I was capable of laying down a “fat” beat, er, “phat” beat or two. I’m sure I didn’t look it. I was scrawny and pale and uncoordinated (nothing like now, of course), and if one had to venture some guesses as to my character traits I’m sure “rhythmically-challenged” and “scared of loud noises” would come up more than once.

So when it was time to do the music-related art unit, and the lesson plan recommended making maracas out of paper plates (paper plates were a cornerstone of this art program) and dried beans, I decided we would do this project, but this would be prefaced with a little table-drumming. For two weeks, I opened each class with a little demo on the nearest horizontal surface. Almost immediately after I started, jaws dropped. From paradiddle one, I had their attention like never before. I played them some examples of different types of beats that one could play on a table-top with one’s hands, inviting the kids to play with me and to see if we get the whole room going together. I got a little faster and more complex with each one, ’til no one else could keep up, and the room was boiling over with giddiness. Even the counselors’ interests were peeked.

For a grand finale, I asked the kids if they thought we could divide the room up into three groups, each playing a different pattern, so they would all could come together to create a beat, like the elements of a drum set do. They were always up for this. So we established some dividing lines in the room, and I started “Group 1” playing the hi-hat’s typical steady eighth notes. After those kids were keeping it up on their own, I moved to “Group 2” and started them thumping out a kick drum pattern, then I had “Group Three” act as the snare and really smack down on the 2 and 4…. 9 times out of 10, this took. Even kids who didn’t get the concepts of sharing or teamwork or pencil-usage yet were functioning as part of a musical unit. They would keep it going for a few seconds, ’til they got so excited over what they were doing that it dissolved into hysterics.

I am currently working on a screenplay of such events entitled Mista Bob’s Opus. Johnny Depp is slated to star.

So this was my summer of driving around Raleigh in the hotness, drawing countless cartoon bulldogs and telling my students to adorn theirs however they wished — girls thus opting for a bow and eyelashes, and boys for a spiked collar and often a rocket launcher of some kind — and it was also my “Summer of Diversity.” (Though it wasn’t technically that “diverse”…. Still, I stand by this word choice, as these are sensitive times, and I know it to be safe.) This was an important experience for me, because I actually saw what was going on with a different race and class of people, just a few miles from me. I saw people living life, as I did, but in a different way. Different triumphs. Different joys. A whole set of hardships I can’t even fathom.

These aren’t such bad things to be reminded of, every time you get in a broiling car.

Tags: Car, Music, Recollections | No Comments »