I don’t know whether to be alarmed or edified by what Messino is overhearing from my office. I don’t even know what he’s overhearing, but apparently it’s interesting(?).
I think Paul makes a good point in his earlier blog. What is going on in K-12 education is analogous in music to playing the main theme, adding the retrograde inversion lagged by several measures, throwing in random modulations at random intervals, changing the theme, starting over, and perhaps deciding that “I am not the Walrus, but I may want to be the Giraffe for awhile.”
After this “exciting” and “innovative” performance we tell students that, for their final exam, they will be required to hum the tune they have just heard. Huh? After all this incoherent blather, nobody has any concept of tune, let alone how to judge whether it’s right or wrong, good or bad, at grade level, or something else.
Would that they just listened to Charles Ives, whose music can be understood as simultaneously streaming independent lines (which we hear at random intervals), and is entirely coherent by comparison. That’s why we can figure out mixed idioms like “Don’t get your shirt in a lather.” (Can’t we? We know that “keep your shirt on,” and “don’t get yourself in a lather” are coherent ideas in themselves.)
I note for those who may yearn for Extendable Ears (why?) that my office door is occasionally closed. It’s to keep the noise and blather on the “street corner” outside my office door from coming in, not to keep commentary inside. I do have a secret plan for working in education policy, however. Email Messino for details.
