Attention, Compliance, and the Rest of Us

John's response to my last post :

Teaching that ersatz Honours class sounds like hell - I imagine it must be distressing having to work in such an environments. Are those student reactions the kinds of thing they say out loud, or more what you infer they think?

Re: silence in preference to overstimulation - I see this as really compatible with what Warren Mansell is talking about towards the end here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZe9D8u4di0 ... part of his point is that our systems' quest for novelty is unstoppable, but that quest is often better served by directing it to different perspectives on what's already going on in our minds, or on the subtler elements of what's there in our environment. This is what I appreciated in your music list, and in the Mahler book...not a bunch of new music to absorb, but a chance to read or write about/hear in a different way what's already there in my memory or collection.

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I first tried to write a sort of short reply.  Then it grew.  Then I sent it off.  Then I realized that it was substantial enough to be a post... With some light edits.

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I don't want to give the wrong impression, I am on good terms with nearly all of that class nearly every day.  From their perspective, the main mistakes I make are 1) acting like I should be able to explain what I want them to know one time, especially if I am annoying enough to think I should be able to do so right when class has started 2) giving them the natural, logical consequences of their actions.

So something like that handout is working around the fact that I am not able to lecture. No, no kid said any of those things to me. And I even won over two kids that I would not have put in the seven whom I am trying to teach—one on the edge of the "video game meme" category, the other on the edge of the mopey-to-indulge-yourself category. The latter took good notes partly because I handed her headphones so she could listen to music while working (technically a violation of our district policy against using learning devices for any fun whatsoever—okay, technically a violation of the district’s extension of the state law against “cell phones” from bell-to-bell—but I am a bit of a rebel, after all).

So, like 9 kids are somewhere close to the level of content they deserve.

And then later on in the hour I was able to say, "note check. Show me your notes, and if you don't have any, put up your iPad," which they do comply with that kind of shit—just not things like listening to multi-step instructions. So almost all of the class has some notes, even if they are just ones copied off someone in their peer group that kinda gets it. Those kids aren't worse off than they would be otherwise.

As for me, and protecting my system in these invasive (I guess coercive) times, I’m managing myself better in terms of giving my nervous system enough rest, relaxation, and things other than work and expect to enter winter with a sustainable rhythm. Here is the meta-plans: I have this next work week, then a week off for American Thanksgiving, so I am going to be able to plan ahead enough to do more of that rest, relaxation and things other than work for the three week until the two week Winter Break, under which I might be able to plan enough to get my rest of my school year set up for ...  the virtuous cycle I listed.

Keep in mind I don't have much of any time with a feed now...  It just so happens that the real world is informed by people who ARE on feeds, so you get a lot of second-hand feed brain.

History Lessons

Imagine you are an 8th grader in a so-called Honors class at an urban school that has seen much better days (the wealthy are now two towns over in their flight from the hey-day of your district and eyeing ways to make their colonies in some previously rural areas even further out.  Schools will need to be built.  Teachers will need to commute). 

You don't know any of this, of course, because you don't know anything about how the adult world works... Also, all but seven of you fall into three broad camps 1) girls want to mope around and then self-medicate with gossip or K-pop bullshit or 2) boys who are possessed by their gamer memes (or perhaps memes downwind of gamer means; I don't give a shit) and will talk across the room at any point with argument about how your "friends" are trash at either basketball or a video game...  (again, I don't give a shit about the specifics; I just wish you'd shut the fuck up) and 3) those who won't work now, but will try to cheat later.  (Don't get me wrong -- the other two groups often do that too.  This group just does it quietly).

You probably care about your grade.  This is honors, after all.  But you have no idea how to show anyone basic decency, let alone respect. You're going to whine down the road and then do whatever bare minimum the teacher lays out for you.

Your teacher, who is clearly often very angry with the class, gives you the following... on paper... 

Why can't it be on google slides?  Why is all of it full sentences?... Why the FUCK is it in full paragraphs? This asshole really wants me to takes notes over this? 

And here's what that bastard hands you. He claims he wrote it himself.  I bet he just printed out something from ChatGPT.

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1800-1850 Background. 

"IS THIS ON THE TEST?" Yes, any of the ideas from this document can end up on the test. 

Now, the test will be open note -- but no ipads nor can you have this out... But while you are reading this, you can underline things, make highlights, that kind of thing: just make sure you transfer the important information to notes on a separate sheet of paper. 

 

In retrospect, I wish I had assigned the time period a little differently, maybe starting in 1789, and if I am going to go that far, I could just as well have started in 1776, with our American Revolution. 

Because, if you think about it, it's kind of weird to start talking about history anywhere other than the earliest records we have, as anything you say has something that came before it. But when it comes to 1800 there are three broad patterns that were revolutionizing the West -- here meaning Europe and the United States -- that make this a pretty good place to start... It just happens that capturing 20 or 30 more years would help us trace how these developments started a little better. 

We can see all three of these patterns as revolutions of sorts. To give each of these a name we will call them 1. The Industrial Revolution 2. The Emotional Revolution 3. Political Revolutions. 

I. The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution began in England. Broadly speaking, two new things happened:

1. Machines of greater precision were developed and, for the first time, could be mass-produced.

 

2. Portable and concentrated energy—especially coal powering steam engines—was harnessed, providing more power and freeing industry from dependence on areas with strong wind or flowing water. (For example, the Dutch windmills were used for industry, but they weren't as powerful or as portable as what England came up with in the Industrial Revolution). 

In time, the Industrial Revolution would change nearly every aspect of human life, and would do so for the entire world. Around 1800, however, the changes were mostly happening in England. 

The railroads would start to move goods and people at a faster speed than had ever occurred in history up to that point. Cars, i.e. automobiles, would only happen about a hundred years later. 

More people would end up living in cities, though those early conditions in cities were crowded, polluted, and gave terrible working conditions for the vast majority of people. To follow this trend -- what is called urbanization-- it would be about a hundred years until the majority of people in the United States lived in cities. And following the trend even further, the United Nations estimated that around 2008 is when the majority of human beings on earth lived in cities. 

In other words, all through history up until approximately NOW more people have lived in the country than in the city... And the trends that started all of this began with the Industrial Revolution in England. 

II. The Emotional Revolution (Revolutions?). 

To introduce this revolution, I am going to go back in time to Shakespeare for a moment. In "Romeo and Juliet," the reason why Juliet feels like she has to escape is because her father is telling her that she has to marry someone she doesn't want to (in fact, by then she had already married Romeo in secret... but that's another story for another time). In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," likewise, a character named Hermia is trying to run away because her father told her to marry someone she doesn't want to marry. In fact, the notion of the father being able to arrange who their daughter will marry shows up in the plot of 10 of Shakespeare's plays, a little over a fourth of the plays. 

Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616, about 200 years before the time period we are researching (and, of course, we in turn live about 200 years after the time that we are researching). The key point here is that marriage used to be decided by families, particularly fathers, not the people choosing to get married. (The people getting married could be asked for their input, but they were not the ones to decide). 

And it was only around 1800 that this notion of "let the couple decide" was solidified as a social ideal in the West. With that said, the book my daughter is named after, Pride and Prejudice, which was published in 1813, has a character who believes Mr. Darcy should have to marry her daughter because of an agreement she had made with his mom... when Darcy and the girl in question were infants.

So not only is Pride and Prejudice a timeless love story because of how it is told, it is a great document showing the emotional revolution (or revolutions). It was a revolution towards individuality in taste and away from community, duty, and following authority. 

The emotional revolution is often called the "Romantic Revolution," and I really wish it wasn't, but that is the term you will see in textbooks, so I feel obligated to share it. 

Why do I not like the term "Romantic" for this shift in sensibilities? 

1. The word romance now means things like dating and kissing and such, so using the term a different way just causes unnecessary confusion.  

2. The writers we have assigned as "Romantic" represent several different movements, and many would not have liked to have been grouped together. 

3. While the Germans had a movement called Romantic (actually Romantik/Romantisch in German), the English did not use that term to refer to a movement; it was only afterwards that these diverse authors all got called by the same label. 

III. Political Revolutions.

I am going to leave the politics mostly to your history classes, both present and future, but the combination of the American Revolution and the French Revolution (started in 1789) left intellectuals with the notion that ideas could be used to transform societies, which is not what people thought during the Roman Empire, during the Medieval times that followed, or even during much of the early Renaissance.

 

This is why it is incorrect to say Shakespeare had "progressive" ideas; during Shakespeare's time it wasn't thought that society could progress. Instead, it was more of a matter of having good or bad monarchs, or failing that, different ways the problem of human sin could be dealt with. 

It is more accurate to say that Shakespeare was able to imagine a great deal of different perspectives, and was able to write scenarios where characters found creative ways to make their own lives better, even if that meant bending or breaking rules. But there is no notion of social reform in Shakespeare. Keep in mind that around the time Shakespeare first came to London (as Shakespeare grew up in a country town) we have historical records of the heads of Catholics cut off and put on display on the roads as a warning to those who would have the wrong beliefs.  And be aware that Shakespeare's older relatives had been Catholic before such a thing became illegal. In other words, Shakespeare did not live in a free society.  

When our "Founding Fathers" wrote the Constitution (1787), they were operating under the belief that you could design a society from scratch. And when the French Revolution occurred in 1789, their changes were even more drastic. By 1800, the chaos had led to Napoleon, a soldier who had guided the French forces to some key victories, to becoming a military dictator. While this began to plant the seeds of doubt in the success and stability of political revolutions, the fact remained that it was clear that society could be changed, even redesigned. And many of the writers we are looking at believed that in this era of experimentation with society itself art could also reshape the world.

And it was in this context that Percy Shelley, the poet and husband of Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein) would write: 

"poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

 

To him, poets had a power to shape society's values, morals and thoughts through their art, and that in turn would change the world.

Catching Up, Tying Together

 John wrote some reflections on the music suggested to me, and I will leave those comments as an appendix. 

A slogan of the language-learning blog AJATT (All Japanese All the Time) was -- and I just verified still is -- "You don't learn a language, you get used to it."  And it is that kind of learning through familiarity, a kind of growing into a domain, that listening to a new album allows me. So I am glad that I used machine logic and strategic planning to give myself this thing to enjoy.  To remind, the game plan for happiness is to be stupid, selfish and healthy.  I think inverting all three and avoiding the extreme of that inverse is what is more accurate: don't be too smart (disembodied/"in your head"), don't get so unhealthy that all you think of is your ailments, and don't be so selfless that you lose yourself, which I am very prone to do.  And did again while I was in survival mode with this job. The albums as interests are about taking something that mine.

But to be honest, many a time the real problem is that I am overstimulated, so music isn't always the solution. I often need silence (let's just keep linking to old pieces).

The more important intervention is the hypergraphia [ibid]. When I have sunk into depression, it is going back to the power of jotting down what is positive -- mostly on the physical and sensual levels -- and doing so in a contextless fashion, that improves my mood.

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Enter John:

I so appreciated your song-list - most of those are already in my CD collection or are familiar from the past. Probably not a minute I have spent listening to Radiohead in my life has been wasted. I don't currently have Revolver - one of many that I had on the now defunct Minidisc for many years - but one episode of Mad Men I saw recently ends with Tomorrow Never Knows, sounding great on my stereo, and the episode really emphasises what a break it was from the past: I Wanna Hold Your Hand era was fresh, but the Mad Men characters manage to find something from decades before that was similar. But Tomorrow Never Knows was a whole new planet. It's hard to remember The Beatles and The Beach Boys were once neck and neck rivals - Revolver was the album that blasted The Beatles permanently ahead.

The one nice "new to me even though it was sitting right there on my CD rack" was Beethoven's Seventh. I don't know why, because I love the 3rd, 5th, particularly 6th, and 9th...but there's something forbidding about finding one's way into a new one. I think it's all the numbers. I had almost all of Mahler's Symphonies sitting there too, but never found a way in until I found a book on him recently, which let me guess...I should just start with the fourth.

 

Beethoven's Seventh though....to me is so *danceable*, but it would have to be social dancing. I know this music was never for dancing, always concerts, but still. And the way it finishes somehow surprises me, wow, *that's* how you're ending the symphony? Contemporaries thought the whole thing madness. (And at first performance Mahler's 4th was booed after each movement....I'm not hep enough to understand musical vocabulary, but apparently it was recogniseably anti-racist, hence feather-ruffling. To me it's just fun, apart from the slow movement which had me crying).

 

Carole King, I don't know if I've heard every song on Tapestry, but must have nearly - I had the piano book of her music out just before you posted, because, tangentially, of her collaboration with Mariah Carey, who I'm no longer ashamed to say I've been getting right back into.....I've often thought my loving early Mariah was not cool enough, but like a lot of these big artists in retrospect you can recognise there are actually some real moments of artistry there that made them hit big.