For a music teacher, I live a remarkably music-free life.  Aside from the hours I spend in instruction and performance in my studio and church, I rarely listen or play much on my own.  I’m not sure why.  I think it began after I moved back home from New York; I found I had heard enough noise there to last through a very  extended silence, and I didn’t miss music even on long car trips and at home by myself.  Over the years I came to enjoy it again, but my laziness usually wins out: it takes effort, even the smallest sort, to put something on while I’m otherwise occupied.

[Aside: The other thing is that, as a visual learner, I cannot abide clutter in any form, and music feels like clutter unless I am focusing solely on it. I really do enjoy my students’ playing (and my own, when I can carve out some time for it) but it’s because it’s the only noise around.  Even a wiggly or talkative sibling in the room can ruin a lesson for me.  In the car, if I’m driving, I focus so much on the music that I’m afraid I won’t be able to pay attention; my last speeding ticket, several years ago, was the result of a rare trip with the radio on.  And my biggest complaint is to restaurants that blare a soundtrack so distracting I can’t converse.  Even sidewalk cafes feel the need to wire the outdoors so that you can’t possibly enjoy a moment of silence, save the tinkling of glasses and forks and the ocean’s swell of human voices enjoying each other's company.]

All of this is to say that it’s shocking and saddening how often I forget what music really means to me.  So it was an unexpected and memorable surprise to discover the Cite de la Musique at the Parc de la Villete one afternoon during our trip.  I wandered in to pass the time while the students were sketching in the park; I ended up staying long after everyone else had left, exiting only reluctantly when it closed.

(The Parc de la Villette, of course, is the sprawling complex of museums, lawns, and carnival rides that turned a seedy area into a bustling family-friendly mecca.  It’s punctuated with bright red follies that are a fun, lively, challenging example of deconstructivism, and I may have just a tiny crush on the architect. A tiny one.)

Though my French is pretty good (and was at its peak after nearly two weeks of constant practice) I most appreciated that the museum was set up multilingually.  An audio guide is included in the admission price – an unobtrusive pair of headphones wired to an iPod-sized device that hangs from your neck or handbag.  Throughout the museum, there are short audio samples – instrument demonstrations and soundtracks to accompany the videos on the screens throughout.  You just enter the number that accompanies the headphones symbol next to the exhibit you want to learn about.  And there are literally hundreds of them – everything from historical background to critique and performance.  I wandered through the displays of instruments –grouped by period, family and geographical location – in awe.  It was an amazing experience.  Here are a few of my favorite photos:

A huge bell – taller than me.  Probably a good thing this one was behind glass; it would have been really tempting to hit it with the clapper!

Intricate detailing inside a stringed instrument – a lute, I believe.

An antique wind instrument – much like a saxophone – with anthropomorphic tendencies.

One of the first keyboard instruments; clavichord, I think (I should have taken notes!)  I thought it was interesting that the colors of the keys are now reversed.

A guitar with gorgeous inlay patterns.

My favorite!  I think this guy is some kind of recorder.  Love his toady face.

Part of a huge set of Asian instruments; I think she’s part of the side of a huge gong.

Obviously, for a musician, the Cite de la Musique is an imperative stop on your Paris journey!  I hope you get to see it someday.

What does this do to people, over time?  We’ll probably never know, of course; our lives are sufficiently complex that it’s impossible to isolate one specific feature.  But yesterday, I started thinking about it when I got into a disagreement with a student about the article she wants to write for the school paper.  She had the brilliant idea of a food issue, in which all the writers would share recipes and review restaurants and food-themed movies and TV shows.  Everyone was on board, chattering excitedly and throwing around ideas.  For her article, she asked to review nice restaurants in the area, possible candidates for pre-Prom dinners and fancy dates.  I told her, great; make up a list.

She returned her list to me the next day: it consisted of five or six steakhouses in Baltimore.  Hmm.  I gently suggested she branch out a little: what about seafood, for which Baltimore is renowned?  No, she’d only been to one seafood restaurant and hadn’t liked it.  What about a Brazilian churrasceria or one of the venerable pasta houses in Little Italy?  She hadn’t been there either.  What about people who don’t eat meat?  “Well, there’s other things on the menu.”  I suggested she talk to some other people about good restaurants, but she didn’t want to do that in case they might be wrong.  Bottom line: she wanted to write an article consisting solely of restaurants she had been to and liked a lot.

I made an appointment with the guidance counselor to talk this through, since I felt a lot of hostility toward the mere suggestions I’d dared to make.  But after that, I started thinking about how all this “Like”ing might have affected her ability to see the bigger picture and consider, if not respect, the opinions of others.  My students aren’t even offended when I say, “Who cares what you think?”  They simply dismiss the thought.  Of course people care.  It’s their opinion, and opinions are interesting, especially their own.

“I was shocked,” he says. “I thought, so, what do you DO all day?”

Now he takes more than a little pride in mentioning the fact that we also don’t own a television.  When we got married, my parents generously gave us their old one, but we never used it except for movies.  I refused to pay for cable, something I saw as a downward spiral ending in hundreds of dollars a month, so we only got a few channels.  My sister used to watch the Ravens games, which she said were blurry but at an acceptable level.  We may have turned the news on once or twice during a hurricane.

When we purchased a new computer, we discovered the screen was almost as big as the television we owned, so we gave away the television.  We continue to watch movies.  But television has crept back in, thanks to the Internet, where almost every show can be found for free, via legal means or otherwise.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.  For awhile, we only watched LOST, which I still maintain is the best show I’ve seen in a long time (and maybe ever.)  We’d go over to our friends’ house (or, more recently, my parents’ house, after converting them one summer) and watch, discuss, rail at the lack of answers and the plethora of questions.  I liked the fact that watching television became a planned social event, not just something to do to pass the time.

But then I started watching a few shows out of curiosity, mostly to keep up with my students.  Is Grey’s Anatomy really that wretched?  (It’s worse.  You have no idea.)  Is Desperate Housewives that vapid?  (Likewise.)  Is Scrubs that funny?  (No, but according to many of my friends, I haven’t given it enough of a chance.)  Is the Office?  (A resounding YES!)  For some reason, I’ve become totally hooked on The Mentalist; it’s not a groundbreaking show, but it’s funny and dramatic and I’m interested in the psychological aspects of the protagonist’s investigative technique.

What I’m starting to realize, though, is that I’m getting more tolerant.  I’ll sit through stuff I never would have before.  Last summer we watched several seasons of Weeds, which was funny at times but really not very high-quality and certainly didn’t affirm the kind of values we have.  This year Rob’s been watching Flash Forward, and I notice that I usually end up paying more attention to the crossword puzzle or my pile of vocabulary quizzes than to the screen.  I don’t want that.

So yes, we don’t have a television.  And yes, I brought the subject up myself, but not so I could brag about it.  Because I think in the end, it doesn’t matter.  More and more people will be following the Biltons’ lead and ditching TV for . . . TV.  In a different form.  I thank thee, Father, that I am not like other men.

“They can crack the alphabetic code,” he said. “But they can’t stay focused and comprehend what they’ve read. And if they run into something that doesn’t seem right to them, they simply don’t believe it. I’m not talking about differences of opinion; I’m talking about facts. They don’t even form an argument against it, they just decide that it doesn’t feel true to them, so it must not be.”

Last weekend’s conference was saturated with quotes like this. My favorite was from a teacher who discussed 1984: it’s fantastically depressing, he said.  It’s about guilt and shame and lies and it’s awful.  I love it.  But I don’t care whether you love it.  It’s not about that.  It’s about the value of the novel.  What is the value in reading about surveillance, government?  If you can see value in it, your personal feelings about the book are really irrelevant.

Another teacher showed us all this cartoon.  There were a few scattered giggles, and then he asked us (about 200 in that session) honestly, if we’d “gotten it.”  About 25% raised their hands (I was not among them; although I did know who was in the cartoon, I didn’t get the football connection.)  The presenter explained that although we were all [presumably] intelligent and literate, we were missing a meaningful connection to the work.  This, he explained was how kids could read “Catcher in the Rye” but not understand Holden’s struggle with identity.  They get the words.  They just don’t get the deeper meaning.

Partly, it inspired me — the methods he and others had pioneered, ways to involve and engage and motivate their students, were incredible.  Partly, it depressed me.  The idea that kids need to be tricked into caring about learning and reading and absorbing information, even if they don’t personally love it or even value it — well, it’s disheartening, to say the least.  Guys, this is what school is about: learning for the sake of learning, learning because it’s a healthy and smart and interesting thing to do.  It won’t all be relevant, and very little of it will be relevant right now.  You have to believe that there’s an end to these means, and if you don’t, why are you even going to school in the first place?

I’ve written about this before, my kids’ aversion to facts — but it still galls me.  It’s also a little frightening, the way they can pump out bland, canned opinion so readily, but be so reluctant to do an interview, look up a statistic or otherwise prove what they’ve just thrown out into the open as Truth.  Frightening, but not surprising.  They see and do it all the time.  No one’s to stop them from unleashing a tirade of expletives and bad grammar upon a blogger or even a newswriter with whom they disagree.  No one will demand proof of “You Suck” written under a Youtube video or iTunes playlist.  Why do I think they will leave all that behind when they enter my classroom?

It’s all most troubling, and I don’t have a lot of answers.  Most days I just try to show them my own enthusiasm and hope that rubs off!

*I know, the CC post is five days old — ancient, in blogspeak — but I am just catching up on everything I missed over the weekend.  Irony of ironies, it turns out that we were both in Philly this weekend, just didn’t realize it until Monday!

Thought you might like to play around with this new tool, which apparently has already made the rounds among the cool English teachers: it’s called Wordle.

Basically, you just type in a bunch of words — a story, some ideas, etc. — and the program randomizes the arrangement, but uses the frequency of repeated words to determine their size; thus, a common word will appear larger, while a less common one will be smaller.  I used the Gettysburg Address for mine:

You can play around with the arrangement, colors, fonts, etc., and ask it to ignore certain words (it automatically leaves out conjunctions, articles, etc.)

The teacher who presented this explained that it was useful as a character mapping tool.  Each student would list three descriptive adjectives for a character — the narrator of Rebecca, for instance.  Many used the obvious “wife” and “sad.”  Some said “plain” or “replacement.”  It was a great way to do a character analysis without even breaking a sweat.  A fun program, too!

A former professor e-mailed it to me and said she could see it as an interesting activity for students to do — create a poem that could be read backwards and forwards.  I know it’s a little vapid and cliche, but I like it, and I think it could be inspirational to a demographic about which most are pessimistic.

Anyone who has searched for something simple on the Internet has probably had a similar experience.  I recently tried to find out how to store my local apples over the winter.  One website said they MUST be wrapped individually in newspaper.  Another said they must NEVER, without exception, be individually wrapped.  Many others offered variations on these two themes.  It can be a lot to unravel and come to a decision.

So for a teacher, trying to successfully pilfer a set of lesson plans for use in her classroom, a bit of narrowing down is needed.  I recently met with some of the teachers in my department to share my favorite websites for lesson planning.  Here are a few good ones:

• Biography:Exhaustive files on many notable figures: videos, photos, interviews and more.

• Department of Education: The “Teaching Resources and Lesson Plans” link (top right on the Teachers page) is very well-organized.  The “Language Arts” section will be most useful, but also check out World Studies, U.S. History and U.S. Time Periods.  Links in these sections take you to other government sites, like the Library of Congress and NEA.

• Discovery School: The “Puzzlemaker” tool creates word searches and crosswords; the Lesson Plan Library is not super-extensive, but hits some major works.

• The Internet Archive: TONS of videos, especially hard-to-find documentaries and old movies.  Also lots of searchable, downloadable texts, many from Project Gutenberg.

• Rubistar: A huge database of rubrics for all kinds of projects.  You can modify them or create your own.  And you can save them to the site, so you can access them anywhere!  Other features are available at the main 4teachers site, but this is by far the most useful.

• History Channel: Lots of brief videos; some biographies.

• Web English Teacher: Incredibly diverse and wide range of resources from teachers who cared enough to share their lesson plans with the world. This is my secret weapon. Try not to spend all day here!

The Lamar County School Board in Missouri recently implemented a policy forbidding teachers and students from having any text-message conversations or social-networking friendships.

Jim Keith, an education lawyer who represents several school boards in Missouri, has been giving talks to teachers in which he explains that most of the inappropriate student-teacher relationships start out on a friendship level.

Keith spoke of one instance where a parent thought her child was spending extra time with a teacher who was trying to help her child overcome shyness. At Keith’s urging, they checked the child’s phone bill and found 4,200 text messages between the teacher and student.

“As an educator, there is a line of demarcation between you and your student,” Keith said. “It’s a line that you cannot come close to, let alone step over. You’ve got to establish it from Day One and say, ‘I’m not your buddy; I’m not your friend; I’m just your teacher.’ “

The article focuses mainly on the possibility of sexually inappropriate relationships, but I think there’s just as much harm to be found when teachers forget about the natural impediments of friendship between them and their students.  This is very, very hard for me.  My students are just on the verge of adulthood, and they have fleeting periods of depth and maturity that are so convincing I believe for a moment they are just like me.  Then they want to debate a recent quiz grade or offer an excuse about homework, and I suddenly remember they are children; barely so, but children still.  And that makes me the adult.

I have other reasons for staying away from social networking, but this is the greatest.  Even if I posted every detail of my life, there is little that could be incriminating in the future (I’m not sophisticated enough for dual identities.)  But just the thought that my students could be friends with me, know that I’m going shopping with my mother or having friends over for dinner, makes me feel uncomfortable.  We’re not friends.  My job is to be their teacher.

But.  BUT.  Meeting in the school lobby early on a Friday morning, and then wickedly, gleefully, walking OUT.  Waiting for the train in the crisp fall air.  Talking to your students about their college plans, favorite football players, your shared love of pulled pork and dislike of overzealous air-conditioning systems.  Letting slip a sympathetic, “That sucks,” and not realizing it until four or five sentences later.  Feeling not like teacher and student, but like humans — just humans out for a day of fun.

The Newseum is incredibly well-designed and boasts more than a dozen interactive, dynamic exhibits.  My students said gleefully, as we left, “That did NOT feel like a museum!”  We played a game about ethics; they got to get in front of a live camera and read the teleprompter; we watched countless short and long film segments, read gripping accounts of reporting as it merged with personal lives, searched databases of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs and journalists killed in the line of duty, and more than once were overcome by emotion while reading about or re-experiencing a historical event.  Case in point: watching a documentary about sports coverage, I got choked up hearing the TV announcer squalling, “The RED SOX are WORLD CHAMPIONS!”  And we all know how I feel about sports.

I visited about a month ago in preparation for the trip, took copious notes, and made up a four-page handout with trivia to collect during the trip and writing prompts to respond to for homework.  Between that visit and yesterday’s, about four hours each, I think I saw just about everything, though I barely scratched the surface of the wealth of information in each exhibit.  I’m seriously considering a membership.  (For families, that’s the only way it would be affordable, at $20 a pop for tickets.)

My colleague and fellow chaperone took a photo of us at one of the exhibits, a story about the Berlin Wall that included several sections of the actual wall.  The East German side was bleak and blank, but the West German side was filled with angry, playful graffiti.  I wish I could publish it here, but for privacy reasons I don’t want to put photos of my students up.  You’ll just have to imagine it: we stood, smiling, relaxed, having a great Friday full of ideas and freedom.  That’s what field trips are all about.

Tonight, during a piano lesson, a dad stepped out to answer his loudly ringing phone.  It was the third or fourth time it had happened that day.  Trying to keep my cool, I continued working with his son.  A minute later, a loud buzz came from the student’s pocket.  “Hang on,” he said.  “I gotta take this.”

“Okay,” I said, standing up.  “This lesson is over.  I’ll see you next week!”  I left him gaping on the piano bench.  Sorry, folks, but enough is enough.