From the podium

One of the first things I got as a teacher that I thought was a perk was the fashioning and the delivery of a podium to my room. It took seven days for the Engineering department at my school (I call them that because the word maintenance just doesn't seem to cut it for these guys ^_^) to make the podium and about half a day to deliver it. When I received it, I welcomed it warmly; now I didn't have to lug around the textbook while I presented the lesson. I noticed one afternoon that the paint has started to rub off on its lower left corner. I realized that's where I rested my forearm while talking to my students. There you go, instant character!

I was thinking about that and how when at the Teachers' Lounge there was a discussion on student-centered learning. In the olden days, so the conversation goes, the teacher was the font of wisdom. If you wanted to learn it, you asked the teacher or the teacher gave it to you. If the teacher didn't know it, you didn't learn it. He or she had the book, the grades, the knowledge, and the students were there to receive. Now, with the advance of technology, it is the students who have the knowledge in the form of a massive, searchable font of data called the Internet. In some cases the student actually learns effectively from this source. It then has become the teacher's job to supervise this flow of knowledge and to make sure that the students are learning. Now, if you didn't know something, you looked it up--you didn't ask your teacher first.

I remember at first being a little let down by this train of thought. No longer were teachers the respected learning sources they were in the past. But as I walked Kmart today in search of a squeegee for my chalkboard, I realized that it doesn't have to be all bad news. First of all, if the teacher didn't know something, it would be easy for him or her to look it up, too! And what's more, we teachers would be more motivated to do so, improving the flow of communication between the teachers and students. More importantly, I realized that I didn't become a teacher so that I could act as a "font of wisdom". My job is not really about informing students... it's about making students realize the impact of their learning on their lives, and encouraging them to use what they've learned to make their lives better. That's actually more difficult. Most importantly, it dovetails nicely with what I've learned during the assessment and accountability conference. In this shifted paradigm, the teacher's task of assessing his or her students in making sure that learning is occurring is even more important! And since students cannot anymore be expected to have learned the same things in the same way, multiple perspectives assessment becomes more of a priority.

Teaching is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, yet every time I think about it, I feel that this was the positive change in the world I was meant to accomplish. And hopefully, next week, I can do it all with a cleaner chalkboard.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Led Zeppelin, "Over the Hills and Far Away". First heard as a ringtone on a now-defunct phone owned by a friend.

Seventeen syllables, No. 78

Buzzing near my ear--
I awake, see the mirror--
Same face, new haircut.

Septemberians bash

This is the first post I am typing from my newest computer, an MSI Wind U123 netbook that I got for myself on my birthday. I really thought that I would use my old laptop until I graduated, but the “k” key on it gave out on me a bit too early… ^_^ Is it just me, or does my new netbook just pounce on my old laptop in performance and price? I thought so until I realized that my old laptop is more than three and a half years old!

I am trying to throw a party for myself and all those who were born in the month of September. If this describes you and you are free this Friday, please call or text or email me so that I could give you directions or a map. The two hardest things to do for a party are:

• to get enough people to come
• to make enough provisions (food, drinks, etc.) for all those people

September seems to be a really popular month to be born. Well, amongst my friends, at least.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. You know you’re in Agana when you find yourself having to parallel-park. ^_^

Song in my head: Kings of Leon, “Use Somebody”. I don’t know for certain whether I already had this song in my head previously, but I wouldn’t care too much as it’s a pretty good song.

Day # 9131, or, The Time Traveler's Dilemma

Actually, it's already Day #9132... ^_^ But day 9131 turned out to be so eventful that I had no time to post over here! Anyway, perhaps the pictures will do the talking.

Today I watched The Time Traveler's Wife with my family, and I have to say that it is an interesting movie. My favorite part of the movie was anytime anyone said the words, "Everything's going to be all right" (or "OK" or any version thereof). Normally, when someone says this to someone else who is having a tough time, there is no way the first someone could really mean it. I mean, really mean it. Sure, I can tell it to someone close I've known for a long time and whose troubles I am well aware of, and even perhaps whose troubles I've encountered in my life in the past as well. But when it comes down to it, I have zero authority to say those words, because I myself do not know how things will turn out. In the movie, though, whenever someone said those words, that someone had some authority over the statement.

Before I went into the movie, I thought the main conflict within it was going to be a series of tensions between wanting to tell the truth and wanting to reassure the other. But it didn't turn out quite that way at all. What was especially interesting was that the first time in the movie we hear the words "Everything's going to be all right" it comes from the (future) wife, the non-time-traveler. She speaks the truth, of course, because she has already met the time-traveler, but the one she met was older (and obviously wiser and doing better for himself).

One of the humanizing realizations of the movie occurs when you realize that the time-traveler is not much better off than we are--although he can see his future, he can do nothing to change it. But this also is part of the rules of the literary game, because everyone--wisely--sooner or later catches on to this fact really quickly and turn their energies towards the small things that make each other's lives more... what's the word? Livable.

The movie ends up having a different kind of tension--the characters end up in a balancing act where they try to prepare each other for the many eventualities of life. In this environment, "Everything's going to be all right" ends up being true, no matter who says it. And, paradoxically, because of this moral of consoling each other in the small things, the movie ends up teaching us that it's OK to say those words to someone who is going through a tough time, even though you have absolutely no idea how things will actually turn out--as long as you are willing to be part of the solution.

It must be nice to hear from someone who actually knows that "everything's going to be all right." Even if that someone knows he or she is lying.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Broken Social Circle, "Love Will Tear Us Apart". This is a cover of a Joy Division song that was the wedding reception formal dance in the movie. Sounds imo.

Deadline

Now that it's August, it's crunch time for my projects. I gave myself until the end of this month to finish my summer projects. If I don't finish any of them, I'll shelve them till I graduate.

A few weeks ago, my order for Euclid's Elements arrived, and I went to work trying out the constructions for myself. It's very enlightening to see the way Euclid worded certain things. One of the biggest realizations I had was that Euclid's text is not as rigorous as I first expected.

When I read Proposition 4 in Book I, for example, he says that if the three sides of one triangle are the same length as the three sides on another triangle, then the two triangles are equal. Now that sounds a lot like the SSS Postulate, doesn't it? But the SSS Postulate is a postulate, not a theorem to be proved. So I looked at how Euclid proved his proposition, and surprise! he says something to the effect of, "Well, look at them! If you lined them up they'd match up."

So with this in mind I continue to try out the propositions, thinking, "So hey, we've gotten better at this stuff over time." What's stopping me from doing the same?

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Jamie Foxx feat. T-Pain, "Blame It".

Liberation

What were you doing on Liberation Day? This is what I did.

Song in my head: Tchaikovsky, "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy". If you're going to YouTube, don't miss the trip-hop, dance, and electronic covers of this song. ^_^

Liberation

First of all, Happy Liberation Day, everyone.

The word "liberation" has so many meanings today. For starters, on Guam they say that on 21 July they were liberated from Japanese control and placed back into American control. (I know, right? You ask them this time.) Also, this year being the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon, we as a people were given a break from all the Cold War fear and had cause to be hopeful after all. We as human beings (maybe) stopped looking furtively at each other and became free to all look up together.

Well, I wasn't yet alive back in 1969. So it is with relish that I'm tuning in to We Choose the Moon to hear the audio exchanged between Houston and the Spacecraft. It makes me feel as if I were tuning in to a piece of much older electronic equipment to hear voices coming from more than 200,000 miles away. I'm planning on staying up to get to the tape where Neil Armstrong says, "That's one small step...", then I intend to go out to that section of Marine Corps Drive in Hagat'na to check out (and maybe photograph) the floats and the camps. Will it rain? Nobody knows, man, and that's what makes it exciting.

A random thought came to me as I was driving around today. Has it ever occurred to anyone out there who is a literary type that our preoccupation for aliens starting in the 20th Century could have been a message of hope? What I mean is, if people had to turn to beings from other planets to get aliens, does that mean that we ran out of humans to alienate? That maybe the "Otherness" of every human out there just ran out, and we were ready to see every human being as part of our in-group?

OK, just thinking out loud. Feel free to shoot this down... ^_^ But thanks for reading, at any rate.

Song in my head: The Pussycat Dolls, "I Hate This Part (Right Here)".

All right, now don't bother me. I'm trying to hear what Buzz is saying.

Skill set

The other day, I was waiting in line at a fast-food restaurant. When it came time for me to order, an attendant with the "drive-thru" headset on told me, "Kindly hold, I will be right with you." I was in no hurry, so it did not bother me.

What she did in the following minute and a half was so incredible that even now I can't believe I saw it all. She proceeded to take three orders through the drive-thru headset, two of them one after the other, and the other she inherited from another person at the console who had to leave. I knew she was listening to the headset because of the distant look in her eyes, yet the rest of her danced across that greasy foodservice-grade floor with such effortlessness it was as if she had the whole thing choreographed. Her hands knew instinctively where everything was: the handles and knobs to the hot surfaces of the trays, the point-of-sale console, the debit card device where she had to swipe for two payments, and the boxes. Before I even realized, she handed off three finished packages to two different places: two to two different attendanta who were tasked with giving it to someone who had parked, and the other two out the window. The amazing thing was she remembered the appearance of both cars, and which order belonged to which car.

After this mystifying performance, she went back to the counter and smiled. "How may I help you?" I couldn't help it; before I placed my order I said, "First of all, that was amazing." ^_^

She demonstrated something that I already knew for a long time: Everyone has a skill set--some certain number of things that a person is good at. The attendant from the other day is not likely to know how to play the piano. But her manner at the service floor of that restaurant is something I could never hope to duplicate, even if I had been working there a full year. Why? Perhaps I am just a naturally slow person, who wouldn't be able to handle something like that. In fact, if I worked there, I predict I would be stuck out back at the kitchen, cooking. Or maybe not even that; I'd probably be washing utensils and loading the stockroom.

One of my professors laments that he does not have enough time in his life to study everything he was interested in. After having reflected on that notion for a while, I can now say that I agree.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Rascal Flatts, "Here Comes Goodbye".

Why I like this song, No. 2

Today on "Why I like this song" I thought I'd write about a song that to my knowledge wasn't released as a single (and therefore probably never made it to radio anywhere). This kind of song is fascinating because most of the time record executives have a big say on what becomes a single from an album. The fact that this song was not a single meant that either the composer or the executives or both decided that it would not be fit for radio. Let's do Jason Mraz, "Beautiful Mess".

At least on Guam, the only singles I heard from We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things were an updated "I'm Yours" (which I already discussed earlier, though not on Why I like this song) and "Lucky" with Colbie Caillat. So when I heard "Beautiful Mess" I was pleasantly surprised.

Jason Mraz has a (late 90's style) rap- or hip-hop-like cadence to his written lyrics; this is characterized by the meter or rhythm of his words varying almost every line. This song is no different, demonstrating a meter that fits the words, instead of words fitting a meter:

Although you're biased, I love your advice
Your comebacks are quick and probably have to do with your insecurities
There's no shame in being crazy depending on how you take these
Words they're paraphrasing, this relationship we're staging

If you tried fitting these words in the second verse to the actual cadence he sings, it would probably look something like this:

          Al - though        you're    biased,       I  love      your   advice
          Your comebacks are quick and probably have to do with your   insecurities
There's no     shame     in  be -  ing crazy          depending on how you take these
               Words they're       paraphrasing, this relationship we're   staging

It's a proper--if highly irregular--meter, because the stresses are in the right places.

But what really makes this song for me is the first part of the chorus:

Well, it
kind of hurts when the
kind of words you write
kind of turn them-
selves into knives

He repeats the word "kind" three times as the beginning of the middle three lines, all with a stabbing quality to them, singing them in high G-sharps and an F-sharp for the last one, harmonizing with the E, G#m, and F#m in the guitar. It's like he is reacting to being stabbed repeatedly with a sharp knife slowly going into him. Whenever I hear this part of the song it makes my eyes well up, because the words, melody, and chords work together towards an effect that translates to the listener as "puti korason," Chamorro for heartache. And who said sound-pictures are dead? ^_^

The whole song itself is actually very easy to play; four-chorders out there would be delighted in its basic progression: E G#m F#m A -> B, and repeat. The "beautiful mess" chords are just "A / B /" then repeat. Incidentally, it felt as if a quarter to a third of the songs in the rest of the album used the same chord progression (albeit in different keys). The creativity is injected in how the song shapes itself around the words he wants to say.

Is it imo? Every time I hear it I become more convinced that it is. The "relationship" being staged is far from perfect, but for the speaker, the fact that he is still hurt by her verbal blades proves to him that there is still something beautiful and worth continuing:

And through
timeless words and
priceless pictures we'll
fly like birds
not of this Earth.
And
tides they turn and
hearts disfigure but
that's no concern when we're
wounded together.

Thanks for reading.

Why I like this song, No. 1

I don't know whether this is going to be a regular feature of my blog (let alone whether it will ever be repeated ^_^) but tonight after hearing the recording of Cueshe, "Back to Me", I suddenly stumbled upon the reason I liked this song. (Incidentally, I did post a comment on the video that is an outline of what I am going to say here, but I found that "the margin could not contain the proof", as it were.)

There is a certain feeling I get whenever I listen to it or play it. I cannot think of a single word to describe it, but it's somewhere between loneliness and an almost insane hopefulness and yearning.

Most of the drama between these two emotions is illustrated in the contrast between the song's lyrics and the type of music accompanying it. It begins with a four-note motif that alternates between Esus2 and E, which appears to be setting up the song to be a love song--in effect, a love that is ongoing. This creates tension with the words first sung over it:

        C#m A                 E
Sometimes I feel like I'm all alone
Wondering of what have I done wrong.
      C#m A            F#m     B
Maybe I'm just missing you all along
          F#m           B
When will you be coming home
    N.C.    E
    back to me?

(Chords are solely my interpretation.) Oh, so the love was lost. Well, this is weird, because we have already been cued in to thinking about ongoing, current love by the opening motif.

Also, the verse chords resolve to E major (as can be seen in the fragment above) but are mainly the minor chords (C#m and F#m being the main chords in this section). But when we get to the chorus, this happens:

        E        C#m            F#m   B
Can you feel me, see me falling away?
Did you hear me? I'm calling out your name.
           F#m            B
'Cause I'm barely hanging on
      F#m              B
Baby, you need to come home
    N.C.    [Intro]
    back to me.

We get an explosive E major, coupled with the almost screamed words "Can you FEEL me? See me falling away!" The effect is jarring because we finally realize what kind of a song this is--she isn't coming back, but she still "need[s] to come home / Back to me." Then the intro comes back in, washing it all away with that hopeful strain of E's and Esus2's.

So the story that unfolds for me is this: The speaker here is at the brink of despair of ever seeing his loved one again, having just realized that he does love her after all. But kind of figuring they'll never be together again, his yearning to see her again inexplicably increases. Maybe, as in fiction, the improbable should happen and they will end up together again. But as time passes, that hope not only becomes more distant, but also more fantastic, insisting that the speaker keep dreaming against reality.

I began to really like this song when I realized that the feeling portrayed to me in it is very similar to what it felt like a few weeks after my first breakup.

Is it imo? Yes, because the despair is real but the unreal (and even unrealistic) hope is even stronger.

Thanks for reading. Maybe for these posts I can hold off on "Song in my head". What do you think? ^_^

Sucker

Every so often the question comes up and is asked of me: How come you didn't leave Guam for college? The answer is a bit more complex than "Because it would've been cheaper here than anywhere else I would've liked to study."

When I talked to people back in high school and the conversation turned to what the plans for college were. Almost invariably they were to move away somewhere else to study. When I asked why, the replies were varied, but they were along the lines of:

• UOG might not stay accredited.
• There are too many problems here.
• I'm sick of being on this rock.
  
• I wanted to experience life without my parents for a while.

My opinion only, of course, but I suspect that reason #4 could be a hidden agenda backing up the other three.

But I turned my attention to Reason #2: there are too many problems on Guam. I was fortunate enough to have already have some rudimentary understanding of how the world worked by the time our family moved here, and I realized that the problems were indeed numerous. The schools are crowded and the children are being left behind, the local government seems more inclined to keep paying their employees than actually fixing the problems, crime is not addressed correctly, and almost every attempted "solution" to any of these problems has been a band-aid fix instead of a systemic realignment of priorities that would have been much better.

In my opinion, however, the last thing to do would be to leave. Each person who leaves is one less problem-solver or complainer that would be left here. In fact, the very reasons we would like to leave are the very reasons we shouldn't. I felt that I could have a hand in the solution of some of these problems we are facing, and that's why I ended up staying.

So here we are, almost 8 years later, and it's true that I have slacked off quite considerably from my once lofty goal. But the goal still stands. Once I graduate I will become the math teacher my high school teachers and college professors all blame for the lack of mathematics aptitude in Guam school children. And in some unseen small part, I will make a difference.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "Far Away".

They don't write music like this anymore

Lately I have been doing a lot of cruising on YouTube in order to listen to songs that I may want to cover with the Imaginary Friends. Almost invariably, when I get to a video that features music from more than twenty years ago (mostly 70s classic rock or 80s R&B or something similar), and I read the comments, I read the same line over and over again:

"They don't write music like this anymore."

Now, I've seen this line hundreds of times, both online and in the real world, and I may have even said this a couple of times in different occasions, but tonight, as I read it being said about Champaign, "Try Again", I felt a small but insistent irritation in the back of my head.

For some reason, the fact that I had the most excellent jam session with my bandmates just this past Saturday night where we played and sang the music of our decades (the nineties and this side of the millennium) kind of gave me a different skew on the above line when I read it tonight. When that particular poster said in the text comments, "...they don't write music like this anymore," (correct grammar and punctuation mine), he or she is implying that the music that was conceived of after that time frame intrinsically has less literary or otherwise musical merit.

Now, I know that's not true, because had it been true, we would not have sung any of those songs we sang on our hang-out. Why would we enjoy singing a musically inferior song?

Second, upon more reflection, I realized that the statement is patently true. Of course they don't write music like this anymore. There are now many more artists than there ever were when "Try Again" came out, thanks to the Web, mostly. Now, that makes the probability of hearing a "bad" song much larger than it was decades ago, but it also increases the probability of you hearing a song (or artist) that is much closer to your tastes. That's because older bands and artists couldn't burrow into a niche; they had to appeal to more people in order to succeed as musical acts.

Anyway, in the end, the annoyance passed, because I pictured a time thirty years from now, and we check out YouTube (or a future descendant program thereof) of, say, Usher, "Love in This Club", and I pictured myself leaving a comment, "They don't write music like this anymore." ^_^

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: John Mayer, "Sucker".

Heard it in a song

Tonight I finished writing a song that was in my head all week. When I realized that this was the case, I turned my car radio back on. You see, during the time that I am composing or writing a song I try not to listen to the radio or any kind of music so that I can hear the music in my head a bit more clearly.

Anyway, that got me thinking about all the things I did and the decisions I made based on what certain songs said. When I started to get really close to someone we'll call Prairie Dawn for now, that was when that song by Jason Mraz, "I'm Yours", was gaining traction in the radio. (This was the version that had a more stripped down, percussion-less arrangement and not the one in We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things.) One of the lines in that song went

I won't hesitate, no more, no more
It cannot wait, I'm sure
There's no need to complicate, our time is short
This is our fate, I'm yours.

I credit these lines for inspiring (if not dictating) my course of action towards P.D., which of course led me to going to the Philippines with her and two of our other friends and the subsequent birth of imo.

Has anyone else had the experience where some lines of a song inspired a decision or some subsequent behavior? Now it may turn out that I'm the only one susceptible to this, and that this is a non-question and should be dropped. I'd be fine with that. But if it happened more often, why does it happen at all?

As I reflected on it, it dawned on me that song lyrics gain power through the order in their composition. (See my previous post for more about order.) Maybe we're more likely to believe song lyrics because song lyrics are usually orderly in some way, and since the universe is also orderly, maybe an orderly song lyric closely describes the workings of the universe. And what, pray tell, makes song lyrics orderly? Well, rhyme, rhythm, the notes you sing those words on, any number or combination of those things.

Could it be that I broke my leg ice skating with a girl and brought to mind a new musical genre simply because of the words to a good Jason Mraz song? That'd be life imitating art, wouldn't it?

And who said that was wrong, anyway?

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "If Everyone Cared".

P.S. Here's another instance of life imitating art. I was driving Sexualspam around one night, when he suddenly called my attention to a scene playing out in front of a house whose corner we were rounding. In the moonlight, he saw some young punk and a girl, and the punk jumped over the gate, unlocked it, and let the girl in.

He jubilantly growled, "I just saw 'Hands Down' with my own two eyes!":

The streets were wet, and the gate was locked
So i jumped in and let you in
And you stood at your door with your hands on my waist
And you kissed me like you meant it

Random thoughts I got while walk-jogging last night

I realized last night that Emily Dickinson is one of my heroes. She is one of those people who desired to create something new, and did so by using the things that were available to them. She took the cadence of church hymns (reportedly the stuff she loved to sing) and just the right words and made them express her unique worldview. The result is very much like a small but curiously strong mint; they look dainty and nonthreatening, that is until you put them in your mouth.

Do I also hope to achieve something like this? I don't know. Perhaps it is all about taking island music and making it express my emo side. But as it has become apparent that imo is much more than emo dressed up in island music. It's as if the "island" is influencing the "emo" part, changing it into a substantially different worldview. To complicate things, I now don't believe as strongly as before that we created imo. Maybe we just discovered it.

But I don't know for sure. Having thrown away my empty water bottle into a nearby trashcan, I decide to pick up my feet once again and start jogging.

Song in my head: Francis Magalona, "Kaleidoscope World".

Pink castles

I can't believe that it's been three years since the Imaginary Friends last performed on a stage. That number has to be upped somehow. At any rate, things are looking good and I am hoping that this time around will be an improvement. The stuff sounded good in practice.

For those who'd like to get an earful or two of imo, head on over to the grounds at the University of Guam for Charter Day (March 10) between 13:30 and 14:30. You'll see the Imaginary Friends there.

Off to sleep again.

Song in my head: Jennifer Lopez, "Do It Well".

Running man

It was weird to see the Sun sink so low so quickly during a recent walk-jog I had. One minute, I was raising my head to see it, but then I looked down on my mobile phone. When I looked back up the ocean had almost swallowed it whole.

So technically, half my walk-jog was in the evening. ^_^

Song in my head: Simon Collins, "Unconditional". Now doesn't this guy sound like someone familiar? Why would that be...? ^_^

Shorn

I had a haircut today at that place people get a haircut when they're short on change but high on patience (and a nose that is difficult to offend). I've had my hair cut there almost exclusively this year, simply because I like the illusion that I am saving money, and also because it's close to the Plantation.

When I take a haircut, I make it a point to smile at myself in the mirror at least once in a while. I want to try on the emerging hair with the expression I would like to wear the most often. The stylist did not seem to notice, so I guess it was all right.

Then I had a thought: I'm gonna need a haircut again in a few months. I think that realization caught me because the stylist today was the same person who cut my hair the last time. And I think I was even wearing the same shirt. Why should I cut my hair? If it's going to grow back anyway, why even fight it? Stuff like growing hair... that's like entropy, man, nay, like the "kipple" in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. What's the use?

Of course, when I walked out of the double doors, the late afternoon wind ran between the strands of my now adequately-thinned hair and over my scalp. That's a feeling I haven't had in, well, a month.

So that's why.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Lenny Kravitz, "Are You Gonna Go My Way".

Day # 8766

Here's to 8766 more. ^_^

Song in my head: Jazmine Sullivan, "I Need You Bad". Too bad it is not in my range. ^_^

Seventeen syllables, No. 68

I smell the droplets
Threatening to rain down like
The words to new songs.

Seventeen syllables, No. 61

Your facemask balloons
As you laugh—I forget the
Metal in my mouth.