Speak up!

I'm usually the silent one

It was something that confronted me while working in a school last year, when I was reminded that I had a duty to actively engage in establishing acceptable behaviour among students.

That aspect of becoming a teacher and being a nagging voice isn't comfortable for me, but I am learning to fit that role as well as being a better ally.

The first piece

 

Composition assignment

One of the things about having kids is recognising patterns everywhere

 

I see aspects of myself and also how they vary. So it's been interesting working with my second son on the same musical assignment that my first son had a few years ago.

Both boys asked for keyboards to write on, then observed the performance of moving from one chord to another could be challenging. It's at this point that I reiterate how a great product like Suzuki's Omnichord addresses this for non-performing musicians. Nah, they say while visibly recoiling, let me try programming beats in Ableton Live.

After happily programming beats for a while, they lose interest and time passes until the deadline is drawing closer. I draw their attention to how time-consuming it is to pick drum samples after programming one loop, then they realise how the Omnichord exports half a dozen parts as soon as you press a button.

It's at this point that the experience of supporting their songwriting diverges, as my first son took a whimsical "what if it were Bossanova" idea toward improvising a melody. Meanwhile, this week my youngest took a couple of lessons toward writing a song.

We looked at the photo and I told him to plot an intro, a verse, a chorus, a middle-eight and a double chorus before concluding. After a couple of attempts he recorded a full take playing an arrangement from start to finish, with a bit where he got lost adding a build-up.

A day went past and he picked instruments from Ableton Live, as well as exploring the MIDI functions.

The night before the assignment is due and he returns to the project, agreeing that it needs something. We consider improvising a vocal that can be turned to MIDI and made into a solo instrument.

Then I mention my idea that it could be a protest song pointing out the problems with his high school's toilets. My second son has been listening to Bob Dylan and considers the idea, how would it go? I wrote some lyrics weeks earlier based on the Dr John song he likes.

My son had his phone out and starts drafting ideas, which are tested against the existing arrangement to identify lengths for verses and lyrics. After singing it through one time, we record it and mix the result.

Wulf in paperback

I've been reading my way through a few books by Andrea Wulf 

So it was a thrill to find she'd signed this copy.

Tone up

You're not like the others

Everyone has their own perspective and sharing it is a gift.

On a residency another artist told me that it'd taken a therapist to explain to their significant other how important having a creative practise was for their sanity. 

As a result they moved to part-time work and are now winning prizes for innovative art.

Looking at Facebook

I keep pondering the semiotics of the images when I visit Facebook

The collage of stock library-looking photos have obviously been carefully selected to reflect values.

Having been through the process while working on marketing documents for institutions, I feel that I have an understanding of some of those decisions.

There are a disproportionate number of people of colour, above the statistical average, which signifies diversity.

The heart and smiley icons are significant symbols within the Facebook ecosystem, but here signify passions and humour -- rather than the angry-looking emoji that also plays a role in these responses.

Significantly for a platform that has been shown to promote negative emotions to drive engagement for advertisers, the site promotes itself as a happy place for friendship.

It seems ironic given how much of the newsfeed is now occupied by pages we didn't choose to follow.

The timestamp is where the darker aspects of Facebook's surveillance are acknowledged, but it is as much something that users engage in as we can see when our messages are seen by recipients as well as getting a sense of what they're doing and with whom.

Of all the roles that Facebook now plays in users' lives, it's the image of the knotted blue rope that prompted my reflection.

Why would a twisted thread be significant enough to go on the homepage of Facebook's website?

It looks sorta like a germ photographed under an electron microscope!

Yet the connotation must be that we are tied together through the website.

Although, now that I think about it, maybe I am the germ within their clean user-interface and attempting to infect your experience with some skepticism.

Facebook has been central within our societies and the suppression of journalism in favour of knee-jerk emotions and rage-baiting shows how dangerous it continues to be for democracies.

Journalism used to be known as the fourth pillar of democracy and we're still getting a sense of how communities can operate without a sense of the facts that profession would establish and interrogate.

So the deeper significance of the knot is that we're tied together by a US-based corporation as it dismantles democracies.

Lessons

Semester begins again next week and I'll be sent to practice teaching in a school during May

Yesterday I noticed the uni had given me three days to complete the checklist, which seemed strange since that deadline is ahead of the course starting and many students wouldn't be looking at emails yet.

One of the items on that list was information on the clothing that would be appropriate for a student attending a school, which surprised me to learn that denim is discouraged.

Most teachers I see dress in a smart casual way, except for special days like excursions when I feel prudish for pondering whether their pants aren't underwear. 

I have mixed feelings about teachers wearing tights or those skimpy things which resemble bike shorts, probably due to feeling that I would be cancelled if I wore them. 

Please wash your hands