Thoughts more scattered than usual follow.

I have to admit that I’m a bit (okay, more than a bit) shy about this blog sequence. There were magical, beautiful moments in this class. There were also very disappointing moments, and some of them were because of my failures. I’m haunted–probably too haunted–by the gap between my conception of a learning odyssey and what I’m actually able to encourage and live up to myself. I’ll be teaching this class again this term, and I’m going to try to do better, but my best chance is always to let my fascination with the subject carry everything else along with it. When I lose myself that way, I find myself. Or perhaps when I ride the fascination I am better at getting out of the way–my own, and the students’.

There’s such an alchemy about teaching and learning that I feel a strange mixture of eagerness, awe, and trepidation every time I start again. I think back over this particular class and memories crowd to the fore: the Beatles argument, the two days I felt compelled to devote to the Beach Boys, the day we listened to James Brown’s “Night Train” together as we finished up Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitments,” the day a student identified a call-and-response moment in a Led Zeppelin song that I thought I knew inside out and suddenly opened an entirely new vista before me (it was all I could do to avoid jumping up right then and there with a Peanuts-esque “That’s IT!”), the way so many of the third presentations suddenly gelled into the kind of deep, thoughtful, rigorous, playful work I’d been hoping for–and trying to encourage–all along. The best blog posts, one of them quoting the last line of “Glimpses” in a way that made me think something had really resonated. One of those posts finding a YouTube tribute to the “female Elvis” whose obituary I had mentioned in passing that day. (By the way, YouTube was the single greatest resource for our class all semester long. I was worried about how we’d be able to share the music. I needn’t have.)

There were times I thought we wouldn’t get there. The day it became apparent I may have messed up the book order and left “High Fidelity” off the list. The day I tried to explain my follow-your-nose approach to research and left one student bewildered, apparently beyond recall. The day I asked the seminarians why they weren’t more lively in the question-and-answer period that followed their classmates’ presentations, and they replied that they didn’t want to ask questions for fear of making their peers look ignorant or stupid. I felt something rip inside when I heard their answer that day. A couple of them were passive and couldn’t be bothered to be answerable with questions, but for most of them it was the absolute truth: they didn’t look at the Q&A as a time to go deeper with what their classmates had already showed they knew, or to bring in interesting connections, or generally to take the level of engagement and enthusiasm and inspiration up a notch or ten. No, they were worried about catching their classmates out. And this in a class with no tests at all–but that’s another story.

Then there was the day when it became clear that I’d have to tell them they should blog twice a week, when I had hoped that with this small group and a topic of some urgency to all of us music lovers, I could just step back and let the blogging commence. That was certainly true for a few of the students. One in particular became a champion blogger within a week and I learned a ton from reading her blog (and told her so, too). But for most, especially at first, the overriding question was “how much do you want us to do?” I didn’t resent the question, really, but it was disappointing to realize how much their focus was task-oriented rather than inquiry-oriented (a facile dichotomy but I’ll leave it to advance the argument, for now). I know they were puzzled that we would be doing all this reading but they’d not be tested on it. I figure some found this a good reason not to read, or not to read very carefully. I used to be well-known for my regular reading quizzes, and I think those quizzes did a great deal of good as a constant indicator of the level and kinds of detail I expected them to attend to as they prepared for class. Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped giving these quizzes, probably because I grew impatient with them or tired of talking about them. I felt, and feel, that the time could be better spent. But as my wife always and rightly reminds me, much of what I need to bring concerns modeling, stepping students through certain paces. I will again attempt to find a balance between structure and emergence in this instance as well.

Then there was my own struggle to keep up with my evaluations of their oral presentations. Even with a (good) rubric sheet and recordings and copious notes, I found it hard to get the marking done. My mistake was not to evaluate the presentations right away, while I could replay the presentations in my head from memory, using my recordings and notes as supplements. Here I can find my biggest improvements next term. More structure for me.

I did not revise the syllabus with the students, exactly, though I’ve been powerfully influenced by the idea ever since I heard Barbara Ganley speak about it at Faculty Academy last spring. My version was to make it clear to the class that my revisions responded to my sense of the way the class work was emerging. I wanted them to understand that I did not view the syllabus as a “contract.” I tried not to abuse my privilege in this respect, and I tried to earn their trust so that any changes I made would  be seen not as “gotchas,” but as support for our work. I also put the syllabus on a wiki and asked students put their own contributions, notes, presentation materials, and so forth on the wiki. In that sense, their work enlarged and augmented (and completed, really) the outline my initial syllabus represented. I’m going to try to ramp up all these aspects next term. I’m also going to try to weave in more powerful, frequent knowledge-networking, specifically work with del.icio.us and online music resources. But I’m wary of piling too much on, as there were moments of what-do-we-do-now silence out of which some powerful ideas emerged, particularly the final project. (I’ll need to blog about this final project separately.)

I marked their oral presentations. I also evaluated their blog participation, their class meeting participation, and their class commitment generally. That evaluation was influenced by the self-evaluations I asked them to write at the end of term. I asked them to evaluate their own work on the final project, as well as their group members’ work (they had organized themselves, at my suggestion, into various task forces to construct the website). These self-evaluations also influenced my marks for their final projects. I explained to them that this was a chance for them to impress me not only with the quality of their argument but also, and primarily, with the quality of their reflection: its candor, expressiveness, and depth.

Most of all, though, I wanted for us all to listen with better ears. My strategy each day was to get us gripped, either by something I brought to the table or by a sudden insight or even a chance remark from one of the students, either in the class or in a blog post. And “gripped” here means not just fascination in the moment, though it certainly means that, too. In its larger sense, “gripped” means unable to let ideas alone, unable to keep from trying out an insight. If they could see that popular music could reward such scrutiny, they might be able to transfer that sense to other areas of their education, their lives. I can sum up my deepest joys in two ways: when students would point out a connection or a resonance I hadn’t expected or understood, and when students would say they found themselves listening to their songs more carefully and with greater interest than they had before, as they considered whether each song was rock, soul, or progressive. Sonic Youth, Backstreet Boys, Janis Joplin, the Kinks. Whatever. The students who gave the most to the class showed me, by the end, that they could stretch from Peter Guralnick’s patient, thorough, deeply committed Sweet Soul Music to the sparkling insights and arid bitterness of James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin to the rush and verve and swing and kerrang of Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop. They could see, or begin to see, how these writers, and these musicians, were themselves gripped.

I feel pained by the disappointments, especially the ones I contributed to, but as I think about the best of what the class produced, I start to feel elated, too, by where we found ourselves going. I aimed to bring the class powerful readings, a sense of history (and historical disputes), and a varied palette of songs from the 1950’s to the present. I wanted them to understand that sophistication can increase commitment and joy, as well as a healthy (and sometimes corrosive) skepticism. We played records for each other, and thought about everything from the technological pseudo-folk-song of Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” (Miller’s analysis here is brilliant) to boy bands, Britpop, and John Cage. We could take the measure of a season of astonishing cultural fermentation–and enjoy the blushful Hippocrene as well.

Perhaps the most startling moment of all came after the class was over, when a student in my freshman seminar commented on my Theme Parks and Sandboxes blog post. It was as if something I had been saying over and over, all semester long, had suddenly connected. Both he and I wish it had connected earlier. Yet I suspect that for this class, as for many, the deepest connections will occur in its wake, and that even if I had asked them to read my blog all semester long (that’s always seemed a little presumptuous to me, but maybe it shouldn’t) and had written that particular post at midterm, the ripeness that is all would not yet have come–to them or to me.

What’s lovely about blogging, of course, is that the connections endure, and the ripeness may always yet come.

Much left I would like to write about. I’d like to say more about each of the students. I made a study of them during the course, and thought hard about how to reach each of them, and how ready they were to be reached. I’d like to write about the first incarnation of this course, when I taught it in the summer of 2003 as part of the Advanced Studies in England summer program. I’d like to think through the freshman Writing Workshop I taught for many years in the late 90’s and early 00’s, often with my colleague  and partner-in-crime Bill Kemp, that we called “Stranded.” Since everything I did in Rock/Soul/Progressive last fall was in some ways influenced or inflected by everyone I was talking to, everything I was reading, and everything I was watching or listening to, I really should have a contributors acknowledgement page with a hundred or more names on it. I can’t end, however, without citing an essay that has long haunted me with its vision of an authentic self meeting the authentic otherness of the world, including all those other selves: Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature.”

I think that some part of me believes that careful attention to popular music can open more doors of perception than one usually finds in a course of study, but that may be largely the product of my own passion for rock-and-roll.

I see the students’ faces now, sitting around that table in Combs 348. I hear their voices, think about the apparent silences that their subsequent blog posts proved were not at all quiet, mull over the detachment they slowly overcame by the end of the semester. I think about the student who clarified a Blur song for me. The student who seemed so resistant yet wrote some of the most candid blogs. The student who shared with us how it felt to go home for the Thanksgiving holiday, and who thereby demonstrated the community we had begun to experience together.

I wish them well. I am grateful to them and hope that what I have learned will do justice to the work we did.