More on teaching

So that piece of writing I put up yesterday, "To teach a child piano," is worth reading for its own sake (Larry says it's one of the best things I've ever written) but is also worth reading because it's going to be the other half of what I'm working on right now.

The first half is MELISANDE, and I have just a bit more to go on the "Enter the Princes" song before I will have completed what I need to complete before we start workshopping and concept-albuming the first act.

Larry also has a first half to his work, and it's also what you might consider an enormously personal project with enormous creative potential, and one of these days either he or I may tell you what it is.

But our other half, the part we're working on together, is this pedagogy book and the ways in which it may improve our own methods of teaching.

We've been talking about this for over a year, but first we had to plan a wedding and then I suppose we had to wait until my freelance writing career was taken over by bat-and-ball slop recyclers, because it didn't make financial sense for me to jump completely into pedagogy while I was still capable of earning $500 an hour comparing travel credit cards.

(Nobody was paying $500 an hour, in case you're curious. They were paying 50 cents a word, and I was writing 1,000 words an hour.)

Larry and I are not at all foolish, which is to say that we probably are foolish in ways we don't yet understand, but one of the things we understand very well is the intersection between time and money. We want both MELISANDE and LARRY'S SECRET PROJECT to be quality work, which has a direct relationship to information (you may remember my definition of quality as "the ability to provide unforgettably new information continuously") but a potentially indirect relationship to remuneration.

Which would be fine, if these projects were not at all expensive, but they are. Larry's work involves attaching cameras and sensors to our piano and 3D printing custom piano mutes. My work, if it is successful, will involve travel and production.

So we want something that will support our work in as many ways as possible, and since both of our personal projects involve teaching – remember, MELISANDE is a student theater musical – it makes sense to expand our piano studio and formalize our methodology.

It also makes sense for philanthropic reasons, and this is something we've been talking about more seriously as we've considered our responsibilities to not only our community but also the human species. Larry and I both know how to teach a specific skill that can help another person more efficiently organize their minds. Coincidentally (or perhaps not coincidentally), this skill allows the person who enacts it to connect directly to the minds of others – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and so on – and may give them the opportunity to transfer an experiential presentation of organized cognition to a listener or audience member.

It also allows the piano student to work one-on-one with a teacher, which not only ensures the successful transfer of information at the individual level (assuming the teacher continues working on a specific concept until the information is transferred instead of, say, turning the page and allowing the student to fumble through the next piece) but also allows the student to assess themselves independently. It gives the student the chance to learn what they can do, free of social signaling and associated status games.

Which is still the most important thing a person can learn –

what they can do –

which is why Larry and I want to teach it.

So expect more on that as I start writing it all down, and more on MELISANDE, and more on Middlemarch just because it is interesting, I still can't believe this book exists, and a little less fuss about politico-socio-economics (since the books I've been reading have all come down on the side of "do good work and make fair trades and stay away from status games" regardless of any political party or philosophical movement with which they are associated, that seems to be the core of how to live and I am astonished that we still haven't figured out how to implement it without cruft but that's my own naïveté [and I suppose there must be a book out there that says "you don't need to work, people will give you things if you prove your status" but I don't think I need to read it]) and then of course the occasional post where I sort out my thoughts by placing them into paragraphs and parentheticals.

Once again –

aren't you glad you're reading my blog?