How Mindfulness Makes Us Happier & Better Able to Meet Life’s Challenges: Two Animated Primers Explain
The West has very rich contemplative tradition. Monastics of the early Christian church practiced forms of meditation that have been adopted by many people seeking a deeper, more serene experience of life. Given the wealth of contemplative literature and practice in European history, why have so many Western people turned to the East, and toward Buddhist contemplative forms in particular?
The answer is complicated and involves many strains of philosophical and countercultural history. Some of the greatest influence in the U.S. has come from Tibetan monks like the Dalai Lama and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, onetime teacher of Allen Ginsberg, and founder of Naropa University and the ecumenical Shambhala school of Buddhism. Trungpa Rinpoche contrasted theistic forms of meditation, both Hindu and Christian, with the mindfulness and concentration practices of Buddhism, writing that the first one, focused on a “higher being” or beings, is “inward or introverted” and dualistic.
Buddhist mindfulness meditation, on the other hand, is “what one might call ‘working meditation’ or extroverted meditation. This is not a question of trying to retreat from the world.” Mindfulness “is concerned with trying to see what is,” he writes, and to do so without prejudice: “there is no belief in higher and lower; the idea of different levels, or of being in an underdeveloped state, does not arise.” In other words, all of the imported concepts that push us one way or another, drive our rigid opinions about ourselves and others, and make us feel superior or inferior, become irrelevant. We take ownership of the contents of our own minds.
How is this relevant for the modern person? Consider the videos here. These explainers, like many other contemporary uses of the word “mindfulness,” peel the concept away from its Buddhist origins. But secular and Buddhist ideas of mindfulness are not as different as some might think. “Mindfulness,” says Dan Harris in the video at the top, “is the ability to know what’s happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it.” (Some might prefer the more succinct Vipassana definition “nonjudgmental awareness.”) Without mindfulness, “there’s no buffer between the stimulus and your reaction.” With it, however, we “learn to respond wisely” to what happens to us instead of being pushed and pulled around by habitual reactivity.
As the video above has it—using the Cherokee parable of the two wolves—mindfulness provides us with the space we need to observe our sensations, emotions, and ideas. From a critical distance, we can see causes and effects, and create different conditions. We can learn, in short, to be happy, even in difficult circumstances, without denying or fighting with reality. The Dalai Lama refers to this as observing “the principle of causality… a natural law.” “In dealing with reality,” he says, “you have to take that law into account…. If you desire happiness, you should seek the causes that give rise to it.” Likewise, we must understand the mental causes of our suffering if we want to prevent it.
How do we do that? Is there an app for it? Well, yes, and no. One app is Happify—who produced these videos with animator Katy Davis, meditation instructor Sharon Salzberg, and Harris, creator of the mindfulness course (and app) 10% Happier. Happify offers “Science-based Activities and Games, and “a highly secularized, some might say decontextualized, form of mindfulness training—including the “Meditation 101” primer video above. For those who reject everything that smacks of religion, secular mindfulness practices have been rigorously put to many a peer-reviewed test. They are widely accepted as evidence-based ways to reduce anxiety and depression, improve focus and concentration, and manage pain. These practices have been used in hospitals, medical schools, and even public elementary schools for many years.
But whether we are Buddhists or other religious people practicing mindfulness meditation, or secular humanists and atheists using modified, “science-based”—or app-based—techniques, the fact remains that we have to build the discipline into our daily life in order for it to work. No app will do that for us, any more than a fitness app will make us toned and healthy. Nor will reading books or articles about meditation make us meditators. (To paraphrase Augustine, we might say that endless reading or staring at screens amounts to an attitude of “give me mindfulness, but not yet.”)
Harris, in character as a mouse in a V‑neck sweater, says in the video above that meditation is “exercise for your brain.” And like exercise, Trungpa Rinpoche writes, meditation can be “painful in the beginning.” We may not always like what we find knocking around in our heads. And yet without acknowledging, and even befriending, the feelings and thoughts that make us feel terrible, we can’t learn to nurture and “feed” those that make us feel good. If you’re inspired to get started, you’ll find several free online guided meditations at the links below.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Stream 8,000 Vintage Afropop Recordings Digitized & Made Available by The British Library
Stability or cultural vitality: many nations seem as if they can only have one or the other. The Republic of Guinea, for instance, has endured quite a turbulent history, yet its musicians have also enjoyed roles as “pioneers in the creation of African popular music styles and as the voice of a new Africa.” That’s the view of the University of Melbourne’s Graeme Counsel, who over the past decade has made a series of trips to the Guinean capital of Conakry on a mission to preserve the great variety of music, part of the tradition now broadly labeled “Afropop,” recorded during the decades of state-sponsored cultural abundance after the country gained independence from France in 1958.
“Under the leadership of music lover President Ahmed Sékou Touré,” writes Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier, “the government was soon sending out guitars, saxophones, and brass instruments to 35 state-funded prefecture orchestras as part of a new authenticité policy.
This directive encouraged a cultural revival that mixed traditional sounds with contemporary music, particularly Cuban and Latin rhythms.” The effort had its own record label called Syliphone, which recorded and distributed this new Guinean music until the mid-1980s, and the powerful radio signal of Radiodiffusion Télévision Guinée (RTG) turned listeners on to it well beyond the new country’s borders.
Counsel, already a collector of Syliphone records, discovered during his PhD research in 2001 that the Guinean government still held a collection of that era’s music (though “a large part of the archive had been destroyed in 1985 when the RTG was bombed by Guinean artillery during an unsuccessful coup”). Applying for and receiving, ultimately, three rounds of funding from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, he set about digitizing and cataloging the unexpectedly numerous and perhaps expectedly disorganized and poorly maintained reels of magnetic tape he found, working through bureaucratic hassles, coups d’état, and even a massacre.
“Nothing would deter me,” writes Counsel in a series of essays (part one, part two, part three) on the project, “not the authorities’ indifference towards the sound archive, not the recalcitrance of their attitudes, nor the tragedies of everyday life in Guinea. Nothing.” The fruits of his labors have now become available at the British Library’s online Syliphone archive, which boasts over 8,000 Guinean Afropop tracks recorded over 26 years. Meier names among the “legendary” music it makes available “the loose rhythms of the Bembeya Jazz National, the horn-heavy melodies of the Super Boiro Band, the Latin-influenced beats of Orchestre de la Paillote, and the all-women Cuban-infused les Amazones de Guinée.” Those musicians’ names may not ring a bell for you now, but a little time with the archive will guarantee a long-term inability to get their songs out of your head.
Find the 8,000 recordings here.
via Hyperallergic/Electronic Beats
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: An Animated Introduction to the Most Insightful Study of American Democracy
We cannot rightly see ourselves without honest feedback. Those who surround themselves with sycophants and people just like them only hear what they want to hear, and never get an accurate sense of their capabilities and shortcomings. And so the best feedback often comes from people outside our in-groups. This can be as true of nations as it can be of individuals, provided our critics are charitable, even when unsparingly honest, and that they take a genuine interest in our well-being.
These qualities well describe one of the sharpest critics of the United States in the past two centuries. Alexis de Tocqueville, aristocratic French lawyer, historian, and political philosopher, who traveled to the fledgling country in 1831 to observe a nation then in the grip of a populist fever under Andrew Jackson, a president who became notorious for his expropriation of indigenous land, ruthless relocation policies, and embrace of Southern slavery. But the groups who flourished under Jackson’s rule did so with a tremendous enthusiasm that the French thinker admired but also viewed with a very skeptical eye.
De Tocqueville published his observations and analyses of the United States in a now-famous book, Democracy in America. Though we’ve come to take the idea of democracy for granted, for the young Frenchman, a child of Napoleonic Europe, it was “a highly exotic and new political option,” as Alain de Botton tells us in his animated video introduction above. De Tocqueville “presciently believed that democracy was going to be the future all over the world, and so he wanted to know, ‘what would that be like?’”
With a grant from the French government, De Tocqueville traveled the country (then less than half its current size) for nine months, getting to know its people and customs as best he could, and making a series of general observations that would form the vignettes and arguments in his book. He was “particularly alive to the problematic and darker sides of democracy.” De Botton discusses five critical insights from Democracy in America. See three of them below, with quotes from De Tocqueville himself.
1. Democracy Breeds Materialism.
For De Tocqueville one kind of materialism—the excessive pursuit of wealth—disposed the country to another, “a dangerous sickness of the human mind”—the denial of a spiritual or intellectual life. “While man takes pleasure in this honest and legitimate pursuit of well-being,” he wrote, “it is to be feared that in the end he may lose the use of his most sublime faculties, and that by wanting to improve everything around him, he may in the end degrade himself.”
De Tocqueville, says De Botton, observed that “money seemed to be quite simply the only achievement that Americans respected” and that “the only test of goodness for any item was how much money it happens to make.”
2. Democracy Breeds Envy & Shame
“When all the prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished,” wrote De Tocqueville, “when every profession is open to everyone, an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects.” Unable to rise above his circumstances, and yet believing that he should be equal to his neighbors in achievements, such a person may blame himself and feel ashamed, or succumb to envy and ill will.
De Tocqueville was far too optimistic about the abolishment of “prerogatives of birth and fortune,” but many Americans might recognize themselves still in his general picture, in which “the sense of unlimited opportunity could initially encourage a surface cheerfulness.” And yet, De Botton notes, “as time passed and the majority failed to raise themselves, Tocqueville noted that their mood darkened, that bitterness took hold and choked their spirits, and that their hatred of themselves and their masters grew fierce.”
3. Tyranny of the Majority
De Tocqueville, De Botton says, thought that “democratic culture… often ends up demonizing any assertion of difference, and especially cultural superiority, even though such attitudes might be connected with real merit.” In such a state, “society has an aggressive leveling instinct.”
It wasn’t only attacks on high culture that De Tocqueville feared, but what he called the “Omnipotence of the Majority,” a phrase he used to denote the power of public opinion as an almost totalitarian means of social control. In volume two of his study, published in 1840, De Tocqueville devoted particular attention to “the power which that majority naturally exercises over the mind…. By whatever political laws men are governed in the ages of equality, it may be foreseen that faith in public opinion will become for them a species of religion, and the majority its ministering prophet.”
From this prediction, De Tocqueville foresaw “two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.”
De Botton goes on to discuss two closely related critiques: democracy’s suspicion of all authority and its undermining of free thought. Rather than encountering the kind of marketplace of ideas the country prides itself on fostering, he found in few places “less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion, than in America.” The criticism is harsh, and De Tocqueville did not flatter his hosts often, and yet for all of its “inherent drawbacks,” De Botton writes at the School of Life, the Frenchman “isn’t anti-democratic.”
His aim is “to get us to be realistic” about democratic society and its tendencies to inhibit rather than enlarge many freedoms. As Arthur Goldhammer observes at The Nation, De Tocqueville believed that “True freedom lay not in the pursuit of individualistic aims, but “in ‘slow and tranquil’ action in concert with others sharing some collective purpose.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Japanese Priest Tries to Revive Buddhism by Bringing Techno Music into the Temple: Attend a Psychedelic 23-Minute Service
Many religious leaders would like to liven up their services to attract a younger, hipper flock, but few have the necessary background to pull it off in a truly impressive way. Not so for the Japanese Buddhist priest Gyōsen Asakura, who answered the higher calling after a career as a DJ but evidently never lost his feel for the unstoppable pulse of electronic music. Getting behind his decks and donning his headphones once again, he has begun using sound, light, and the original splendor of Fukui City’s Shō-onji temple to hold “techno memorial services.” You can see and hear a bit of one such audiovisual spiritual spectacle in the video just above, shot at a memorial service last fall.
“Buddhism may be approaching something of a crisis point in Japan,” reports Buddhistdoor’s Craig Lewis, “with 27,000 of the country’s 77,000 Buddhist temples forecast to close over the next 25 years, reflecting shrinking populations in small rural communities and a loss of faith in organized religion among the country’s population as a whole.”
He also sites an Asahi Shimbun survey that found 434 temples closed over the past decade and 12,065 Japanese Buddhist temples currently without resident monks. Can this temple in a small city, itself known for its phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the Second World War, do its part to reverse the trend?
Gyōsen Asakura frames his techno memorial services, however incongruous they might at first seem, as in keeping with the traditions of his branch of Pure Land Buddhism. “Originally, golden decorations in the temple are expressions of paradise light,” he told THUMP. “However, the light of a traditional temple has not changed its form from 1000 years ago to use candlelight, even after electricity was invented. I felt doubtful about that, and then I thought about expressing paradise with the latest stage lighting such as 3D mapping.”
After all, as he said to Japankyo, “people used to use the most advanced technologies available to them at the time in order to ornament temples with gold leaf,” so why not harness today’s technology to evoke the Buddhist “world of light” as well? And in any case, ecstatic sensory experiences are nothing new in the realm of faith, though ecstatic sensory experiences of Gyōsen Asakura’s kind do cost money to put together. And so he, in the way of most religious projects the world over, has asked for donations to fund them, using not a bowl but the crowdfunding site Readyfor. Judging by 383,000 yen (more than $3300 U.S. dollars) he’s already raised, quite a few techno-heads have seen the light.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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Read More...Kraftwerk Plays a Live 40-Minute Version of their Signature Song “Autobahn:” A Soundtrack for a Long Road Trip (1974)
“The joys of motoring are more or less fictional,” wrote Zelda Fitzgerald to Ludlow Fowler, a friend of her husband F. Scott, in 1920. But what an inspiring breadth of fiction they’ve inspired on the page and screen, mostly set along the seemingly endless road-miles of America. But look over to Germany, a land of drivers renowned for their love of and respect for the automobile, and you find a whole other sort of, as it were, driving-driven creativity. Most famously, 34 years after Fitzgerald wrote to Fowler, a young Düsseldorf band by the name of Kraftwerk looked to the joys of motoring and laid down their signature song: “Autobahn.”
Taking up 22 full minutes of the eponymous 1974 album (though less than three and a half as a single), “Autobahn,” which rock critic Robert Christgau described as emanating from “a machine determined to rule all music with a steel hand and some mylar,” uses the kind of electronic composition techniques Kraftwerk would go on to popularize to evoke the feeling of movement on the titular German highway system.
“We used to drive a lot,” percussionist Wolfgang Flür once recalled. “We used to listen to the sound of driving, the wind, passing cars and lorries, the rain, every moment the sounds around you are changing, and the idea was to rebuild those sounds on the synth.”
But as veteran road-trippers know, you aren’t really driving unless the driving hypnotizes you: not only should you spend prolonged stretches of time on the road, you should ideally do it to a rhythmically and temporally suitable sonic backdrop. And so we offer you this live 40-minute version of “Autobahn” which, in the words of Electronic Beats, “demonstrates what a musical force the group was back in the day,” taken from “a show in the German city of Leverkusen that fuses the group’s latter-era techno-futurism with its earlier free-jazz psychedelic freakiness.” To keep the road-robot mood rolling, why not fire up the animated “Autobahn” music video from 1979 we featured last year? But please, don’t watch while you drive — especially if there’s no speed limit.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Mesmerizing GIFs Illustrate the Art of Traditional Japanese Wood Joinery — All Done Without Screws, Nails, or Glue
Traditional Japanese carpentry, whether used to build a dinner table or the entire house containing it, doesn’t use screws, nails, adhesives, or any other kind of non-wooden fastener. So how do its constructions hold together? How have all those thousands of wooden houses, tables, and countless other objects and structures stood up for dozens and even hundreds of years, and so solidly at that? The secret lies in the art of joinery and its elaborate cutting techniques refined, since its origin in the seventh century, through generations and generations of steadily increasing mastery — albeit by a steadily dwindling number of masters.
河合継手 Kawai-tsugite pic.twitter.com/WQwxeZ7t4M
— The Joinery (@TheJoinery_jp) May 17, 2016
“Even until recent times when carpentry books began to be published, mastery of these woodworking techniques remained the fiercely guarded secret of family carpentry guilds,” writes Spoon & Tamago’s Johnny Strategy. If you find it difficult to grasp how simply cutting two pieces of wood in a certain way could unite them as if they’d grown together in the first place, have a look at a Twitter feed called The Joinery, run by a young enthusiast who has collected a great many of these carpentry books. He’s used them, in combination with mechanical design software skills presumably honed in his career in the auto industry, to create elegantly animated visual explanations of Japanese carpentry’s tried-and-true joinery methods.
三方組仕口 Sampo-gumi-shikuchi pic.twitter.com/OdgpaTBvcs
— The Joinery (@TheJoinery_jp) May 3, 2016
Archdaily points to the work of architect Shigeru Ban as one example of how this “uniquely Japanese wood aesthetic” has survived into the modern day, but the man behind The Joinery imagines even more ambitious possibilities: “3D printing and woodworking machinery has enabled us to create complicated forms fairly easily,” he tells Spoon & Tamago. “I want to organize all the joinery techniques and create a catalog of them all,” so that anyone with the tools might potentially make use of their beauty and sturdiness in hitherto unimagined new contexts. And so another traditional Japanese craft that has looked doomed to outmoded oblivion, what with all the more advanced and efficient fabrication and construction techniques developed over the past 1400 years, may well thrive in the future. To learn more about the art of joinery, you’ll want to explore this 1995 book, The Complete Japanese Joinery.
梨くずしの逆組み継ぎ Nashi-kuzushi-no-gyaku-kumitsugi pic.twitter.com/5T2EG0VGHm
— The Joinery (@TheJoinery_jp) January 4, 2017
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Inside the Creepy, “Abandoned” Wizard of Oz Theme Park: Scenes of Beautiful Decay
The romantic allure of the ghostly, abandoned theme park is difficult to resist. Case in point: The Land of Oz, above, a not-entirely-defunct attraction nestled atop North Carolina’s Beech Mountain.
Debbie Reynolds, accompanied by her 13-year-old daughter, Carrie Fisher, cut the ribbon on the park’s opening day in 1970.
Its road was far from smooth, even before urban explorers began filching its 44,000 custom-glazed yellow bricks, eventually forcing management to repave with painted stand issue models.
One of its two founders died of cancer six months before opening, and later a fire destroyed the Emerald City and a collection of memorabilia from the 1939 MGM film.
Crippled by the gas crisis and insurmountable competition from Disney World and its ilk, the Land of Oz closed in 1980, thus sparing it the indignities of Yelp reviews and discerning child visitors whose expectations have been formed by CGI.
Its shuttering attracted another kind of tourist: the camera-toting, fence hopping connoisseurs of what is now known as “ruin porn.”
An isolated, abandoned theme park based on the Wizard of Oz? Could there be a holier grail?
Only trouble is…the Land of Oz didn’t stay shuttered. Local real estate developers cleaned it up a bit, luring overnight visitors with rentals of Dorothy’s house. They started a tradition of reopening the whole park for one weekend every October, and demand was such that June is now Land of Oz Family Fun Month. The International Wizard of Oz Club held its annual convention there in 2011. How abandoned can it be?
And yet, unofficial visitors, sneaking onto the grounds off-season, insist that it is. I get it. The quest of adventure, the desire for beautiful decay, the bragging rights… After photographing the invariably leaf strewn Yellow Brick Road, they turn their lenses to the lumpy-faced trees of the Enchanted Forest.
Yes, they’re creepy, but it’s less from “abandonment” than a low-budget approximation by the hands of artists less expert than those of the original.
It’s safe to presume that any leaves and weeds littering the premises are merely evidence of changing seasons, rather than total neglect.
What I want to know is, where’s the sex, drugs & rock’n’roll evidence of local teens’ off-season blowouts—no spray painted f‑bombs? No dead soldiers? Security must be pretty tight.
If creepy’s what the perpetuators of the abandonment myth crave, they could content themselves with the amateur footage above, shot by a visiting dad in 1970.
Those costumes! The scarecrow and the tin man in particular… Buzzfeed would love ’em, but it’s hard to imagine a millennial tot going for that mess. Their Halloween costumes were 1000 times more accurate.
(In interviews, the one generation who can remember the Land of Oz in its prime is a loyal bunch, recalling only their long ago sense of wonder and excitement. Ah, life before Betamax…)
The documentary video below should settle the abandonment myth once and for all. It opens not in Kansas, but New York City, as a carload of young performers heads off for their annual gig at the Land of Oz. They’re conversant in jazz hands and certain Friends of Dorothy tropes, surely more so than the local players who originally staffed the park. Clearly, these ringers were hired to turn in credible impersonations of the characters immortalized by Ray Bolger, Burt Lahr, and Judy Garland. Presumably, their updated costumes also passed muster with Autumn at Oz’s savvy child attendees.
Still craving that ruin porn? Business Insider published Seph Lawless’ photos of “the crumbling park” here.
If you’d prefer to rubberneck at a truly abandoned theme park, check out the Carpetbagger’s video tour of Cave City, Kentucky’s Funtown Mountain. (Though be forewarned. It was sold at auction in April 2016 and plans are afoot to reengineer it as as “an epic playground of wonder, imagination, and dreams.”)
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Opposition Letter to Teach to One Signed by 180 Parents
December 7, 2016
Updated with additional signatures — December 16, 2016
Superintendent Ayindé Rudolph
Assistant Superintendent Cathy Baur
Mountain View Whisman School District
750‑A San Pierre Way
Mountain View, CA 94043–3133
Dear Superintendent Rudolph and Assistant Superintendent Baur:
We are the parents of current and incoming Graham and Crittenden sixth graders. After one trimester of the Teach to One (TTO) pilot, we have significant concerns with the program and its impact on our children as they prepare to enter the competitive high school environment. We recognize and praise the district for considering innovative ways to supplement student learning (Membeam, Lexia, Khan Academy). However, TTO does not appear to be serving our students as well as the traditional teacher-directed method.
We have found the TTO pilot to be ineffective in inspiring and encouraging our children. Living in Silicon Valley, we appreciate taking chances, examining impact and changing course if things are not working. After 3+ months of TTO, we feel that TTO is not the right solution for our students.
Overall, although laudable for its innovation, the TTO program is still under development and the kinks have not been worked out. Continuing to require the program, now that we have first-hand experience with the problems, would be a disservice to our children. We have fabulous, qualified and committed math teachers at Graham and Crittenden, and they should be permitted to teach our children, as they are trained to do. Online learning can be productive for extended learning, such as homework. But at this point, nothing matches the efficacy of a face-to-face student-teacher relationship in communicating complex and important materials. Students are not getting this from TTO in its current form. Some parents’ frustration has reached the point where they are now looking into other school options for seventh grade, which would be very unfortunate.
We understand that the district is currently evaluating TTO. With this letter, we respectfully ask that:
- TTO be discontinued for the spring 2017 trimester and thereafter.
- If the district wishes to continue with TTO, either:
- Make it optional for all students and provide a traditional teacher-led option for those who don’t wish to participate, or
- With the involvement of the parent community, restructure the program so that TTO is substantially minimized or limited to a subpopulation where it has proven to be beneficial.
- The district solicit parent feedback prior to implementing major curriculum changes going forward.
Below please find a list of items that summarize many parent concerns regarding the TTO program:
- The TTO curriculum does not follow a logical pathway, enabling students to build a strong math foundation. TTO removes the thoughtfulness behind math curriculum development, by presenting topics in an illogical and incoherent order. By jumping around among concepts, students fail to make connections between subject areas. Students may “pass” an Exit Slip without the opportunity to build mastery in core middle school math concepts. When topics jump around illogically, parents find themselves forced to teach earlier concepts to which the student was never exposed in order to assist with understanding the concepts at hand.
- Much of the instruction is quite shallow, in some cases even misleading and factually incorrect. Topics which would normally take days or even weeks of classroom instruction are sometimes completed in a single day. Further, this superficial exposure to math concepts will disadvantage all students. This will be especially evident when they join neighboring Los Altos middle school students in high school.
- With TTO, students are often tested on materials that they have never been taught, causing anxiety, frustration and dislike for math. In a time where we want to encourage students to build foundational skills for cutting edge STEM fields, TTO seems to be affecting student attitudes toward math and problem solving. Many parents report a striking change in their child’s attitude toward math this year. The students generally have very positive feedback about math teachers at Graham and Crittenden, but many students hate TTO and now dislike math.
- TTO does not support the Common Core curriculum, where student understanding is based on how the student arrived at a solution, not the final answer alone. With TTO, students choose a multiple choice answer without ever showing their work. This will not prepare them for high school math or advanced math classes, where the final answer just represents a fraction of the overall process.
- One benefit of the TTO program touted by the district is that “The program will reduce the time teachers dedicate to student assessments and allow more direct instructional time with students.” In fact, the students have little contact with teachers. With the Emotional Intelligence aspect of learning, students benefit from positive reinforcement of a teacher, especially in math where they have to push a little harder to get to a solution. Assigning more growth mindset videos is not a solution to overcoming frustration and encouraging perseverance. Furthermore, teachers appear to serve an administrative function, affording little instruction time. The few teacher-led sessions are degraded, as teachers must figure out their lessons with little advanced notice based on what TTO provides.
- The program doesn’t educate students or parents about what level of math skills the students are working on, so we have no idea if they are working at a fifth grade level or an eighth grade level.
- Parents and staff have identified multiple and pervasive errors throughout the TTO materials including: mistakes in answers, illogical questions, link errors, etc. The instructional material is often confusing and of poor quality. This is further complicated by the fact that there is no textbook, so when a student struggles with concept in the homework, they are left to looking for answers online.
- The TTO homework algorithm seems to be flawed. Sometimes students receive homework that is misaligned with their playlist. Other times the homework either too advanced or too simplistic for the student.
- While we are prepared to support our students in math, TTO requires too much parent involvement. Many parents spend significant time at home providing math instruction because there is no textbook and because there are few in-class teaching sessions by math teachers. Many parents have hired tutors to make up for the lack of teacher-student interaction. This is unfair to both the parents and teachers. Many families lack the academic or financial means to provide this extracurricular support to their students. Graham and Crittenden have excellent math teachers who are passionate about teaching math. Further, performance results may be flawed in favor of TTO as a result of parents providing daily direct instruction and/or tutoring to supplement TTO’s deficiencies.
- The lack of textbook and complete dependence on the internet interferes with math study in the classroom. Glitches in the system/Internet mean that students often miss instructional time, are unable to complete their Exit Slip, or are late to their next class. Not only does this compromise time in math class, but this affects learning in other subject areas. Unfortunately this has happened quite a few times to many of our children.
- Small group collaboration seems to be ineffective at this stage. One child likened this to practicing a complex piano piece without an instructor–you practice and practice, and when you meet your teacher, you realize you learned it incorrectly and must now unlearn what you taught yourself. Without the foundational skills, it is inefficient for a group of students to work out a problem without teacher guidance or foundation. Further, at this age, some students goof off and interfere with others’ ability to learn. The lack of teacher support makes this a constant problem.
Thank you very much for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Signature of 180 parents
Read More...Hear a Great 4‑Hour Radio Documentary on the Life & Music of Jimi Hendrix: Features Rare Recordings & Interviews
The legacy of Jimi Hendrix’s estate has been in conflict in recent years. Since his father’s death in 2002, his siblings have squabbled over his money and battled unlicensed and bootleg venders. But Hendrix’s musical legacy continues to amaze and inspire, as Janie Hendrix—his stepsister and CEO of the company that manages his music—has released album after album of rarities over the last couple decades. Not all of these releases have pleased Hendrix fans, who have called some of them mercenary and thoughtless. But it is always a joy to discover an unheard recording, whether a live performance, wobbly studio outtake, or semi-polished demo, so many of which reveal the territory Hendrix intended to chart before he died.
In 1982, some of that unreleased material made it into a four-hour Pacifica Radio documentary, which you can hear in four parts here. Produced by what the station calls “some of Pacifica’s finest” at its Berkeley “flagship station 94.1 FM,” the documentary does an excellent job of placing these recordings in context.
With help from Hendrix biographer David Henderson, the producers compiled “previously unheard and rare recordings” and interviews from Hendrix, his family, Noel Redding, Ornette Coleman, Stevie Wonder, John Lee Hooker, John McLaughlin, Chas Chandler, and more. After a newly-recorded introduction and a collage of Hendrix interview soundbites, Part 1 gets right down to it with a live version of “Are You Experienced?” that pulses from the speakers in hypnotic waves (listen to it on a solid pair of headphones if you can).
“I want to have stereo where the sound goes up,” says Hendrix in a soundbite, “and behind and underneath, you know? But all you can get now is across and across.” Somehow, even in ordinary stereo, Hendrix had a way of making sound surround his listeners, enveloping them in warm fuzzy waves of feedback and reverb. But he also had an equally captivating way with language, and not only in his song lyrics. Though the received portrait of Hendrix is of a shy, retiring person who expressed himself better with music, in many of these interviews he weaves together detailed memories and whimsical dreams and fantasies, composing imaginative narratives on the spot. Several extemporaneous lines could have easily flowered into new songs.
Hendrix briefly tells the story of his rise through the R&B and soul circuit as an almost effortless glide from the ranks of struggling sidemen, to playing behind Sam Cooke, Little Richard, and Ike and Tina Turner to starting his solo career. We move through the most famous stages of Hendrix’s life, with its iconic moments and cautionary tales, and by the time we get to Part 4, we start hearing a Hendrix most people never do, a preview of where his music might have gone into the seventies—with jazzy progressions and long, winding instrumental passages powered by the shuffling beats of Buddy Miles.
As has become abundantly clear in the almost four decades since Hendrix’s death, he had a tremendous amount of new music left in him, stretching in directions he never got to pursue. But the bit of it he left behind offers proof of just how influential he was not only on rock guitarists but also on blues and jazz fusion players of the following decade. His pioneering recording style (best heard on Electric Ladyland) also drove forward, and in some cases invented, many of the studio techniques in use today. Processes that can now be automated in minutes might took hours to orchestrate in the late sixties. Watching Hendrix mix in the studio “was like watching a ballet,” says producer Elliot Mazer.
This documentary keeps its focus squarely on Hendrix’s work, phenomenal talent, and uniquely innovative creative thought, and as such it provides the perfect setting for the rare and then-unreleased recordings you may not have heard before. Pacifica re-released the documentary last year as part of its annual fundraising campaign. The station is again soliciting funds to help maintain its impressive archives and digitize many more hours of tape like the Hendrix program, so stop by and make a donation if you can.
Related Content:
Jimi Hendrix’s Final Interview on September 11, 1970: Listen to the Complete Audio
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Hear Controversial Versions of “The Star Spangled Banner” by Igor Stravinsky, Jimi Hendrix, José Feliciano & John Philip Sousa
Debates over whether or not we should destroy or alter U.S. icons seem to turn on a critical question: are national symbols quasi-religious totems of some transcendent sacred order? The kind of imperial project likely to end up a collection of crumbling monuments with every other empire of the past? Or are they living emblems of a secular republic whose primary embodiment is its people? A country, like its people, that must reconstitute itself with each generation in order to survive?
Either way, the nation’s symbols have always withstood creative destruction, détournement, and recontextualization. Subjecting national iconography to the interventions of artists and activists restores a sense of proportion, showing us that our government and its symbols belong to the people, rather than the other way around. The idea is a powerful one. So much so that its expression never fails to excite controversy. And few expressions have provoked more ire than performances of (or responses to) the national anthem that deviate from the staid traditional arrangement.
We could point to very obvious anthem controversies, like Roseanne Barr’s irreverent 1990 rendition. But certain other interpretations have had much more serious artistic intent, like that of naturalized citizen Igor Stravinsky, whose 1944 version (top) came from his “desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” Stravinsky’s earnest ambition was thwarted. He couldn’t help but add his signature, in this case a dominant seventh chord, to the arrangement.
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The Boston police responded by issuing him a warning, claiming, we noted in a previous post, “there was a law against tampering with the national anthem” (there wasn’t). Stravinsky “grudgingly” pulled the anthem from his Boston Symphony bill. Over twenty years later, the blind Puerto Rican folk singer José Feliciano played the anthem before the 1968 World Series in his own emotionally-charged style. And like Stravinsky, he was motivated by love of country. “I had set out to sing an anthem of gratitude to a country that had given me a chance,” he later recalled, “that had allowed me, a blind kid from Puerto Rico—a kid with a dream—to reach far above my own limitations.”
Much of the country did not respond in kind. Even during the performance, Feliciano could “feel the discontent within the waves of cheers and applause that spurred on the first pitch.” Afterwards, he learned that “a great controversy was exploding across the country because I had chosen to alter my rendition.… Veterans, I was being told, had thrown their shoes at the television as I sang; others questioned my right to stay in the United States.” Feliciano admits, “yes, it was different but I promise you,” he says, “it was sincere.” So was the most radical of “Star-Spangled Banner” interpretations, Jimi Hendrix’s feedback-laden version at Woodstock the following year.
A veteran himself, Hendrix wasn’t motivated by wartime patriotism or personal gratitude, but by a desire, perhaps, to tell the truth about what his country was doing to thousands of people in Southeast Asia—“Napalm bombs,” as he said at the time, “people getting burned up on TV.” It’s a subject he occasionally touched on lyrically; here he let the guitar tell it, “turning the music to a literal interpretation of the lyrics: bombs bursting in air, rockets lighting up the night,” writes Andy Cush at Spin, “Hendrix began to slyly use the music’s own martial bombast to reflect the violence carried out under his nation’s flag.” He was hardly the first to exploit the song’s inherent bombast.
Almost 100 years before Woodstock—before the national anthem was even the national anthem—one of the most iconic of American of composers re-arranged “The Star Spangled Banner.” John Philip Sousa (who would go on to write “Stars and Stripes Forever”) conceived the song in the “manner of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture,” New Yorker music critic Alex Ross tells us. (You can stream the Wagnerian adaptation of “The Star Spangled Banner” here.) He was “young and little known at that time,” Ross remarks, “and his slyly Wagnerian take on the future national anthem was eclipsed by the famously mediocre and expensive Centennial March that Wagner himself penned for the occasion.” There’s no indication Sousa’s arrangement provoked a national upset. But it did set a precedent for what we might as well call an American tradition of musicians altering the anthem, using it to speak not to Francis Scott Key’s America, but to their own.
Related Content:
Isaac Asimov: “I Am Crazy, Absolutely Nuts, About our National Anthem” (1991)
William Shatner Sings O Canada (and Happy Canada Day)
Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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