Piano Lesson Memories

This is part of a series I am working on about my history of music education.

How to Bury a Fly Named Chester

During my 8th grade advisory period (sometimes called homeroom at other schools), I was leading my students through an extremely important team-building activity...clearly. While this was happening, one of my students was chasing a fly around the room. After repeated attempts from me to get him to stop, I finally said, "Joe, that fly is the reincarnated spirit of my childhood pet dog named Chester. Do not hurt Chester the Fly. Join us at the table!" What did he proceed to do? He pointed his rubberband at the fly and WHAM! He got Chester! The poor fly's guts exploded on the ceiling.
Students swormed around the scene of the crime, swaddled Chester in tissues, and claimed tupperware as his temporary coffin. Then, students set up signs and made a little alter in the corner where Chester had died. Funeral arrangements began immediately. It just all happened so quickly.
The next day, I asked each student to write on a sticky note what they had learned from Chester the Fly. Even Joe. Some replies: "To not be annoying or else you'll get rubberbanded." "I learned that even a fly can be entertaining during Ms. Fitz's boring activity." "Even flies can have funerals."

Then, I brought my whole advisory group behind the school with the remains of Chester the Fly. We found a good tree and began digging with spoons. Our beloved swaddled Chester was laid to rest with the lessons he taught us entombed with him.

Chester taught me a lot, too. Life is short. Celebrate it.

You never walk the same path twice.

 It is an enormous privilege to spend extended periods of time with middle school students who are growing almost as fast as an infant's brain.  I can literally see them growing, both in height and intellect. I care so deeply about these students, it physically pulls at my heart. While I was on a run the other day, one of the eerily warm 60 degree January days, I felt light opening out of what some people call my heart chakra. It was an orange light. I painted a quick sketch of it (below.) I think the weather and a hardy run helped, but I attribute it to thinking about the enormous responsibility of being someone's teacher. I was not on drugs, everyone, just warm weather endorphins and sensing a real connection with my students! After the awful obligatory task of reducing a student's learning in art class to a letter grade, I set to reading my mini-surveys they filled out at the end of the semester. I realize more deeply how the smallest and biggest choices I make in the classroom can impact a student. No letter grade or scoring rubric will show that. I love these young people and I'm learning how to show that.

Another part of teaching art to middle school students is emphasizing the importance of respecting your space and the materials you use. Sometimes the emotional maturity needed to perform these tasks (i.e., participate in clean-up time) can only be described through theatrical interpretation by Paul Rudd:

Dear Lisa Frank, What Skills Do Middle Schoolers Need?

 As I am preparing to teach a class called "Middle School Skills" to a group of incoming 6th graders on Monday, I started digging for memorabilia from my own middle school years to try and channel the feelings of that time of life. (I've been told I am permanently 13 years old so this wasn't a big stretch.) I came across this amazing letter that dropped me right back into the hallway... carrying heavy text books, trapper keepers (those things were so awesome, a foreshadowing of my love of bookmaking and paper arts perhaps?), and erasable pens, wearing rolled plaid skirts with oxford shirts tucked in 'just enough', and perpetually denying that you had a crush on someone. And as you will see in the letter, I was declining offers to smoke Pixy Sticks. Allow me to explain. Remember those candy paper sticks filled with flavored sugar called Pixy Sticks? We'd go to Helen's corner store and buy the sugar candy and then we'd walk to the park, pound back the stick of sugar, (then some of us) would light the hollow paper wrapper at one end, and pretend to smoke it. I kind of feel like I'm going to get in trouble with someone for telling you this. But it happened. I saw it. I was too chicken to say yes but felt pretty cool to be asked. UGH! Now that is getting at the complex, socially awkward heart of middle school.

You can't tell this letter was addressed to me because my avatar (I didn't know what this word meant then) in junior high was Martha. I have no idea why. We also addressed letters to each other with our personal symbols so that if a teacher caught us they would have to figure out who was the "shooting yin yang star" and who was "martha a.k.a. squiggle line with dots."
I also don't know who wrote me this letter. The symbol system worked!!! I must have lost my ability to decode our pseudonyms when I turned into an adult! I have narrowed it down to about 3 friends from middle school who I am all still in contact with regularly, or at least on Facebook. (Hi guys! Which one of you wrote this? Are boys still putting your belongings in inappropriate places?) If you went to grade school with me, you can probably figure out who is who in the body of this letter. I hope there is enough distance from junior high now to share this. Ha! I'll let you all interpret the rest of this gem of a letter. But I'm still left to wonder, what skills do middle schoolers need? Are you there, Lisa Frank? It's me, Martha.

Turtles and Dutch People are Awesome...and other scary tales of learning Spanish

I've been trying to complete a little sculpture about fear and learning. The sculpture began taking form on my trip in Mexico. As much of my thinking happens, it is taking shape by writing about it, tearing up the writing, and then gluing it back together. After my time in Latin America, I have thought a lot about what it means to be foreign, in every sense of the word, and to be different and try to learn.
Prior to this trip, I had spent two years of grad school thinking and practicing to be an art teacher-straddling the worlds of "teacher" and "student" and thinking about power and privilege and access to information. Going to Mexico put me firmly back in the role of student, in an unknown territory, with many privileges voluntarily stripped from me. I lived the paradox of having the means and privilege to travel across borders but to also be totally paralyzed and infantilized by the newness around me and a language I didn't speak. How do I wash my clothes? How do I ask for medicine at the drug store? How do I explain who I am and what I'm doing there? To be a learner is to be a foreigner and it requires courage, patience, the ability to be alone for a long time, and self-love.
My goal -to learn Spanish- was met largely through one-one-one intensive courses with tutors who only spoke Spanish with me.  As I've recounted before, learning a new language can be magical: the new sounds coming out of my mouth, the strangers who became friends in a new language with me, or hearing a new common phrase click in my head as I walked down the road. But learning, of course, can be excruciatingly painful and lonely. I recall towards the end of my trip, I was really trying to blast through the Intermediate Spanish plateau that so many learners struggle to surpass. So much information was coming at me during one class and instead of seeing it as a fault of the teacher, or for speaking up for myself or asking to change course, I started blaming myself. That abyss between student knowledge and teacher understanding of their student is amplified in a language learning setting. An easy example: The teacher explains in Spanish what homework I should do, then I go and do something else and return with the wrong assignment. I really thought I understood. How many times do we think someone is not listening to us when really it was just interpreted differently? During one class, I felt so upset with myself that I hadn't figured out a conjugation and, according to my own goals, I was way behind. I fought back tears while the teacher talked even more loudly at me trying to shout the pronunciations and concepts into my skull. (Increased volume does not increase clarity and understanding, just my adrenaline.) Despite being an adult who chose to be in that room and was paying for it, I felt like a 13 year old who wanted to cuss him out and leave the room. I felt this strange hostility bubbling up when he asked me questions I couldn't answer. Stop exposing my ignorance, maestro! In that moment, I learned to be a more compassionate teacher and swore to never forget that feeling of being lost and isolated. I try to imagine that feeling when the power reverses and someone else "just isn't getting it" when I explain something seventeen times over. That's the feeling of being lost at sea without touching and seeing the bottom of the ocean but laughing at the turtle under your belly....that is the feeling I'm trying to  squeeze into the little boxes of my sculpture so I never forget.

I say all this not because I want you to know how brave I am or how well I can take money out of an ATM machine in a foreign country. I say this because it has become more and more clear to me that we live in a culture of fear and taking a step out of our country, our comfort zones, our language, our circles, our expected "career paths" is a radical counter-action to fear. It is an attempt at love and imagination. When I think about my unplanned trip to Mexico with no return ticket, the word trust keeps coming up...and imagination. I couldn't have done this trip without imagination. I joked with others, "Am I crazy for doing this?" because intense use of your imagination feels unsound, unreasonable. It was unreasonable because I didn't need reason; I needed imagination. And curiosity. And trust. There was no reason to trust the taxi driver who made the sign of the cross and kissed his hand before accelerating wildly out of the airport and into the tangle of Mexico City. There was no reason to trust the chef on the street and follow him home on the subway. (Okay, that was a little crazy.) There was no reason to trust my naive, Anglo-brain, riding into the mountains without proper footwear and not nearly enough Dramamine. There was no reason to trust that my backpack stowed under the bus would be there in the morning. There was no reason that I should jump out of a boat in the ocean, a mile off shore with a turtle and a man I met on the beach. (I did trust the advice of a few Dutch people about which building to stamp my passport at the Guatemalan border. Now that was reasonable.) To leave the familiar and to move somewhere by yourself requires imagination...which is why I think artists are always traveling. We tend to imagine another way and another world. It's a feminist act as well. When men or women go outside of our usual network, our usually defenses, I believe we're actually respecting our hardy individual strengths and trusting our intuitive feminist selves.
So many people have asked me, "Weren't you scared traveling alone?" They usually are referencing sensational crime stories they hear on the news or have distorted notions of foreigners as all being dangerous criminals preying on young American women. I also think what they're really saying is "I'm afraid of doing that myself." I try to respond: Life is just as scary when you stay in one place, in one confined box, and don't use your imagination. Or I make a less eloquent response exaggerating the crime rates in Rogers Park. Whatever you take away from this, turtles and Dutch people are awesome and Rogers Park is a perfectly fine place to live.

Like Water for Chocolate, Like Exactly.

Mural on the exterior of a Zapatista school.

How do I sum up a 4 month trip to Latin America and what it's like to be back? Maybe it's like Water for Chocolate, Like Exactly.

 I had some of the best chocolate while traveling in Mexico but I will take Chicago tap water any day over all the chocolate in the world. "What's it like to be back?", I'm asked. I just stammer: "Water, I like water. I drink water here, lots of water...man, it's all about water...the American bathroom experience is an incredible privilege. Water, water everywhere."
I felt the polar extremes of traveling (and incidentally, life) in these past few months. When you're traveling:

-You're either on top of the world (or a mountain) or you want to hide under a bed as far away from the world as possible.
-You either want to use all your new vocabulary words or don't want to say a word.
-You want to know everything about the people around you or want to run away...or at least blend into the crowd and disappear. 
-You can feel terribly lonely or you can desperately crave time to yourself again or both at the same time.
-You can have the best meal of all time and the worst meal of all time.
-You can not think of home for days, swallowed up by another world, or wish you were around anything familiar. Anything...like peanut butter...like that one sweater you didn't pack, or that one friend you couldn't fit in your bag either...or someone who really understands your jokes.
-You can see it all or see absolutely nothing in a damp noisy hostel, sick with Montezuma.
-You can see the kindest most generous side of people or the sickest and coldest side of humanity.
-You can have the best night's sleep looking out at stars in the jungle or you could sleep in an upright bus seat for 18 hours fearing to open your eyes because the Argentinian orthodontist sitting next to you will take it as permission to start talking to you again.
-You could wake up in Guatemala with half your face swollen or...you could not.
-You can feel like an old lady wishing the 20 year old Australians would take the party elsewhere or you could feel 3 years old and not know how to ask for toilet paper.
-You can attend a Mexican wedding on the beach one week, be in a Zapatista community in the mountains of Chiapas the next, and days later be in the Cancun airport tipping with American dollars for a Caesar salad.
 - You can feel completely independent and liberated or you can feel tied down and dependent on strangers and guide books.
Here is some excerpts of writing from my last days in Mexico:
"..After 15+ hours in the autobus from San Cristobal to Chetumal, I finally made it to the town, near the Belize border at 2am.  During the bus ride, I took lifesaving Dramamine for motion sickness and contemplated the stars and palm trees lit by the moon out the window. In my Dramamine-induced state, I tried etching into my mind the grand thoughts and poetic moments that can only happen on a bus in the middle of Mexico doped up on Dramamine. But like my eyeglasses and my sun hat, the transcendent thoughts disappeared into the abyss. I would have gotten too sick trying to write it down on those roads..."

Bus survival pose with mustard yellow hoodie.

"I ate practically nothing except leftover lime-flavored peanuts, corn nuts, and Mexican cookies the whole ride...mostly because of the lack of meat-less options at the bus stops. A few hours in, the bus got some sort of rock or debris stuck in the back wheel. We didn't move for hours while it was repaired, since we were hours from any other bus to pick us up. I didn't bother to look at the time. I just stared at the moon or closed my eyes. At some points, military officials shined flashlights in our eyes while marching down the bus aisle with guns strapped to their chests. I think this happened a couple times at various checkpoints. Things blur..."
"...I got to Chetumal so late, I assumed I would not see my friend I was planning to meet. As I usually do when I get to a foreign town without a plan, I ran into some Dutch travellers. I shared a cab with the family going to a nice hotel. By nice, I mean the bed had bed sheets! The hotel where my friend was staying the next night was either not accepting guests at that hour or did not have any vacancies. I just understood “no, you can’t now” in the receptionist’s Spanish. My blasted Spanish. I’m not sure I’d do better in English at that hour though. I went to the other hotel with the Dutch family and I paid for a rather expensive room. It was easy to rationalize the expense considering that in the week before I had been living for nothing while sleeping in a cinema...I crashed immediately in my new fancy room with a mini fridge and hair dryer and television I would never use. I had not had anything to eat. Sometimes sleeping is easier than finding food..." 
"...the next morning I got a hold of my friend using the correct string of mysterious numbers to make a Skype connection to a Mexican cell phone. I walked around the block to her hotel room. Exhausted but happy to see a familiar face, we walked towards the water, to see the Atlantic side of things, later the duty free zone at the Belizan border, and then I was off to an overnight bus again to catch a morning flight out of Cancun..."
My last exhausting days of the trip made my arrival in Chicago that much sweeter.
The first person I talked to in the United States was, of course, a customs agent. Our conversation went something like this:

Customs Agent: [Looking incredulously at my list of countries I've visited] What were you doing in Guatemala?
Me: [Envisioning insects biting my face] Umm, beh, uhhh, well, traveling?
-Customs: [Furling his brow] So how long were you in Mexico?
-Me: Since September.
-Customs: [Furling brow more dramatically] What were you doing?
Me: [Private panic about what I've been doing with my life.] Well, just, uh, studying Spanish.
Customs: [Eyebrows relax] Oh, you're a student. So what brings you here today?
Me: Well, I have a connecting flight to Chicago. I'm going home.
Customs: Yeah, but why today?
Me: [Existential crisis...yes, why am I back today? Why not next week or tomorrow?] Well, umm, I have to work now.
Customs: [Eyebrows start furling again] but you said you were a student.
Me: Well, I was but now I have to work. I'm finished being a student. And it's time to work.

This is a google image for "furled brow" but also resembles the customs agent.

Customs: [Stares incredulously again for a long moment with my passport and looks tired] Welcome home.

So here I am at home. My Chicago accent is back in full force and people laugh at my jokes again. And yes, it's definitely time to work...and visit friends...and absentmindedly eavesdrop on Spanish conversations in the grocery store...and eat peanut butter...and take hot showers...and listen to Pandora...and drink large glasses of sweet, delicious Chicago tap water.