Pumpkins & Cattle

This is for everyone who has seen the pumpkin. I don't even have to qualify which pumpkin I am refering to... it is simply "the pumpkin"

This past Halloween one of the teens carved a pumpkin that said "Rachael and Jenn" and we put it on our front step. There were A LOT of tea lights in it. This was, as he said, so it would "glow brightly for all to see", or something like that. And there the pumpkin glowed. And then began to rot... and rot... and rot and snow fell on it... and I didn't want to touch it... and was going to wait until it froze to rid myself of it... then students thought it was funny... and began talking to it... and announcing "THE PUMPKIN" every time they got out of the car when they arrived... that I couldn't get rid of it... and it's still there... no longer rotten as much as... petrified. And will be, now, until nature has it's way with it and it becomes ashes to ashes... or something dramatic like that.

It has come in handy actually. Just yesterday I used a couple of its candles to throw at a beligerent squirrel that was digging up the bulbs I had planted the day before.

On another note, but holiday related and a focus on something this same pumpkin-carving teen said this past Christmas that had me laughing. I don't know why I haven't blogged about this yet, though I had promised to a while ago...

Anyway, I had the teens over early in December to help me put up my Christmas garland outside. Earlier in the day I was in my garage and SWORE I heard cows mooing... what? I definately went through the "am-I-crazy" mental check and landed on, "I am really hearing cows". I live right in the middle of a city. Not sky-scraper land, but busy streets, buisnesses, regular city siren noises, etc... and then among the regular din I heard... mooing. It was incredibly surreal. So that night the teens are over and I shh everyone and ask them what they hear... and of course it went silent at that moment. THEN! A loud chorus of cattle mooing rises up out of the cold night air! and everyone screamed... and dropped what they were doing to investigate. Two cars took off while a couple of us stayed behind (way too crowded in those cars) and they came back reporting that there was a cattle auction building down and across the street. A cattle auction.

So later on I'm outside putting more garland up and this pumpkin-carving teens comes outside and yells, "JENN! The Cattle are LOWING!"

Spring has arrived. It has been in the 70's and 80's for the past few days. Spring rains, thunderstorms, warm breezes you could drink as well as many sunny days. I love Spring. Flowers are starting to come out and I planted some new things on Sunday. Just wonderful.

Last week, last Tuesday, was a gorgeous day. I went to the playground at a nearby park on my lunch. I was finishing a knitting project and an Eastern Indian woman sat down next to me. Nothing unfamiliar. I work with a lot of Eastern Indian families. There is a large population of families from India in the quad cities. This woman did not speak much English at all so we just sat next to each other; she was watching me knit. After a few minutes she reached out her hands to my knitting and I handed it to her. She began finishing what I was working on and she was quick! I held the yarn for her, feeding it when it got too tight. I eventually took out another project and worked on that for a while. So we were two ladies knitting in the park. It was really enjoyable. I'm not uncomfortable with non-verbal communication. Anytime I travel, this is bound to happen - that I run into someone that can't speak English - so I've become acustomed to finding ways to interact with people without necessarily speaking with them. So had this woman. She could probably understand more than she could speak, but her vocabulary was not wide. It was really enjoyable, though. I'm not a "women's place is in the home" type of girl, nor am I a raging feminist, but I do appreciate these sort of things that seem to fall most often into the category of "women's work" and it was really quite nice to be two ladies sitting on a park bench knitting.

It got me way farther with my hat project too.

Music Class

Every music class from 3 - 6 that I teach does the same routine straight away when they come in the room. It takes up the first 5 minutes of class, more or less. They put their attendance stickers on the name chart, get a pencil, a clipboard (they don't really have desks) and they writing/drawing paper. The paper has half blank space and have lined space. At the top is a place to write composer, title and performer. It's called "Art of Listening" and I do it so that the students will gain exposure to a large volume of music, composers and styles that they would never choose to listen to on their own (yet) nor would know how to find. Most of the students are surprised to find out what music they actually like. Some are favorites - Beethoven's 5th, Beethoven's 9th (Ode to Joy), William Tell Overature, Bach Toccata and Fugue in Dm (the "Halloween Organ Song") - most of the jazz of Ella and Duke are over their heads, but they're getting familiar. We do a brief talk on the composer/performer, style and piece and then we're on to the days work.

They're job is to either write a story or draw a picture that's appropriate to the style of the music (you don't want to hear a lovely pastoral suite with a picture of vampires running around... I have to give this direction or this is what you'd get every time from the 4th and 5th grade boys) Also, they can't cop out and just draw the instrument they're hearing. They need to try to see a story in the mood of the music.

Some students have written some amazing short pieces during this time. Some have drawn some very insightful pictures. Some just draw princesses. The exposure's important.

Yesterday we listened to Chopin's Etude 12, also titled "Revolutionary". A wonderful solo piano piece in a heavy minor with gorgeous cascades of scales rushing up and down through the octave's behind dramatic chord stuctures wide with range and tone. If you know music, it's a relatively familiar work. Very dramatic... Chopin was good at this. An Eturde is simply an exercise, like a skill drill, in some particular area of technique, so when you listen to Chopin's you think "if these were just his 'exercises'... I have played Chopin many times and it is always challenging, but sublime.

Yesterday's song, though, was interesting in what it evoked in the students. Across the board with my 5th graders, probably 90 - 95% of the students wrote or drew a situation where someone was stuck... walking up stairs that never ended, getting swallowed in a whirlpool that never stopped spinning them, falling down an endless hill, running from something without escape. I was fascinated by this. They music really does, because of the endless roll of scales, have a sense of continuum for sure, but I was so impressed that the student's "felt" it... really felt it deeply enough that what they thought to say through their work echoed this perfectly. It was really perceptive and contigous class-wide. And it was something I never heard in the piece and I was wondering what maybe Chopin was trying to say himself. Like I said, the piece was written as an exercise, but he never passed up an opportunity to say something emotionally.

Later on that day I was speaking with another student, Older, about 17, who I had just had do some research on a couple composers earier this week of pieces he's playing. He was surprised by some of the things he discovered and we discussed how every composer, whether writing personally or for a commission, always brings themselve into the piece. Every thing they experience informs their work and they speak to us through their music. It's like reading their autobiography.

What resulted in the class was a wonderful moment where these young people realized that these songs aren't just random pieces of musical history - without point, without connection. But that they speak to us and create moods and worlds. That these composers are still reaching through time to tell us stories from their present and their past and even what they saw in the future; that it's a conversation with voices that still speak with us today. In fact that they aren't voices of ghosts but those still living among us, relating to us, pulling us and pushing us, sharing space with us... daring us to tell stories of our own.