Filed under: Memoir-ish
In my experience, I’ve found that nothing quite challenges your resolve or tests your abilities in a given field quite like your second job. What I mean by that is when you find yourself in a new position or even a new profession, your first job will always have certain connotations surrounding it; it’s your starter job, the one where you learn more than you actively contribute to the whole, the one where you spend more time finding your feet than walking. Usually your employer is aware of this (which is what makes it so tricky for people to change fields since most employers do not want 70% of an employee I suppose) but I’d wager that 8 times out of 10 it ends up panning out. At least it did for me.
Your second job in the field though, you better have your head screwed on straight, your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed because THAT one hired you BECAUSE of your work at job #1 and they assume (rightfully so) that all the adjustment into your role was dealt with already. You have to be present, you have to be on the ball and you have to (at least appear to) know what the hell it is you’re doing. Remember in the first paragraph I mentioned a summer arts program for teens at a prominent university in the Boston area? This is my second summer there and, in fact, they were job #2.
Recommended by two of their staff members that I happened to work with during my first year in school, after a little bit of missed and rerouted connections, I ended up moving into my first ever dorm room in June 2010 (the position also included a residential staff portion that required me to live in the dorms with the kids as a resident advisor of sorts). This program was founded by the same man that founded my high school and many of the precepts and policies reflected what I already knew from my many years at school, so the transition into this new setting wasn’t as jarring as I expected it to be.
The jarring part was my class, or I should say my Arts Lab (the word “class” is frowned upon around these parts, and for good reason). Unlike at school, where I had a framework and some mandates as to what I had to accomplish with the kids, the program gave me a largely clean slate. Based on my history as an artist, they essentially gave me carte blanche to create a curriculum that combined Jewish and secular artistic study and lead to the kids creating a final thesis product demonstrating a connection between the two categories I just mentioned. My super ego dulled the impact of the task again, but a bit of fear and trepidation managed to creep through, especially after I decided to focus NOT on film but on my second love, sound, for this class. Looking at audio production as a whole and alternative ways of making and structuring sound, I threw together a nine session curriculum that combined audio production essentials, bible study (specifically the personal favorite story of Lot and his wife) and a healthy dose of music appreciation. If that sounds a little scattered, that’s absolutely because it was. I had faith in what I had thrown together, but all that faith did NOT guarantee that it would actually WORK.
And oh, were there setbacks. You see, students at summer jewish arts camp have so very little interest in anything resembling school. This set me on a path of great resistance from the get-go, and pretty much eliminated ideas like “starting on time” and “thinking assignments”. I realized that during the year, while students tended to enjoy my class and the work we did, they had the added impetus of institutional pressure forcing them to succeed (or at least try to). That summer, there were no grades, no institutional pressure and no realistic consequence if they did not get anything done except for ME looking bad. I was taming a new lion, and all I had were my wits, my experience and my music collection to make it lie down and roll over.
Or so I thought.
I had one more crucial weapon in my arsenal: the kids themselves. Or rather, their innate curiosity and willingness to hear someone out that they deemed legitimate. If I had gotten up there and thrown the “class” word around or gave them extra assignments or penalized them for this, that and the other thing, I would have lost them entirely. Besides, none of those things was the point. This program was guided by an idea that combined exploration and personal discovery was paramount in the education it provided, so by projecting myself as someone with knowledge that wanted to share said knowledge and framed it in a way that I felt a connection to (music and sound), these kids saw something they themselves could connect with, and thus I tricked them into learning something. The kids that rewrote the story of Lot into a modern day tale set in Tijuana wherein Lot’s wife is shot in the head by drug lords rather than turned into a pillar of salt by the power of our Lord was creative adaptation and active modernization. The kids that wrote and performed a hip-hop song about their connections to Judaism was cross-cultural analysis and augmentation, all things that had been present on my initial pitch for the class. By boiling down these ideas into the bare essential elements and presenting them in a way that was familiar and welcoming, I defined education in a way I never thought it COULD be defined, let alone by me.
However, there was one singular moment that summer that I go back to when I doubt my abilities as an educator. There was a girl in my Arts Lab that desperately wanted to record a piano piece to accompany a beautiful set of lyrics she had written with her partner. To say the least, the recording process ran into problems. Trying to get a completely live cut of this song was just not possible for this girl, she kept psyching herself out and over-analyzing everything about her style until she herself felt inadequate to perform the song SHE WROTE. She was breaking down in a really obvious way, even with the entire room empty except for her, the piano and me running the laptop. Despite never having to deal with a situation like this before, I almost instinctively sat down with her on the bench and said “Look, I know this is hard. My first recording session was unbearable and even now I’m not the biggest fan of them, but NO ONE in the entire world can play this song better than you can. And that’s a fact.”
What followed was an (almost) perfect (but good enough) take of the song, enough to throw the track together and present it. It was also around that point that the noted tremble in my voice when I said things like “I’m a teacher” disappeared. However, the fulfillment and confirmation did not end there. Sometimes life sends you messages that you are on the right track and sometimes it beats you over the head with them. In this case, watching me teach ended up becoming a major catalyst for what would evolve into a relationship with the girl I plan to marry. Results = undeniable.
I had my heading now, and I had the proof that I could get where I was going. The next step would be charting my voyage, but that would not come until later.
End Part 3
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