Friday, September 19, 2008
Jack and Rai and us
Jack & Rai Live @ Timbre Music Festival, 24th September 2008, 830pm! get your tickets @ www.gatecrash.com.sg or any Timbre Outlets! http://www.jackandrai.com
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
professional obligations
My brother in the army calls me up from IMH today and tells me about the exciting life he is leading escorting his mentally unstable and sedated charge around.
"That's the social worker's life", I say - the life I am not leading.
But half the lesson, my student spends talking about her parents' impending divorce, and later I discuss suicide methods with the angsty teen who heard his schoolmate jumped and hinted that he might follow suit.
Then the urgent almost incoherent call that goes "Help Help" when I am on the bus packed with foreign workers and trying to find a pocket of air to reply "What time and where?". Someone taking her O Level music exam next Thursday just lost her partner cellist to his own exam, and needed a replacement to play the Double Concerto.
It's only the first movement of the work, but still. 9 days to perform it at a passable standard is looking very impossible.
(Desperate times call for a Great God. I bet He feels exploited all the time, but I can't help it. Who else qualifies as an multi-purpose charger and zhng-er?.)
"That's the social worker's life", I say - the life I am not leading.
But half the lesson, my student spends talking about her parents' impending divorce, and later I discuss suicide methods with the angsty teen who heard his schoolmate jumped and hinted that he might follow suit.
Then the urgent almost incoherent call that goes "Help Help" when I am on the bus packed with foreign workers and trying to find a pocket of air to reply "What time and where?". Someone taking her O Level music exam next Thursday just lost her partner cellist to his own exam, and needed a replacement to play the Double Concerto.
It's only the first movement of the work, but still. 9 days to perform it at a passable standard is looking very impossible.
(Desperate times call for a Great God. I bet He feels exploited all the time, but I can't help it. Who else qualifies as an multi-purpose charger and zhng-er?.)
Sunday, September 14, 2008
epic-phany
In one of those chats I have with my students between lessons, or when they are packing/unpacking their cellos, they sometimes volunteer information on what they want to be when they grow up.
(They say "I want to be a vet/pilot/etc when I grow up", equating their adult identity with their occupation)
And I realised that what I am doing now never featured in my childhood ambitions (that ranged from being a police officer to an actor to I can't remember). The prospect of teaching music (i.e. piano) was anathema (at least until I was 16)because my parents seemed to think it was a tasty carrot to wave to make sure I finished my last piano exam. At that time it seemed a lame reason to continue playing the piano, but I did anyway, for unknown reasons.
"So suddenly you started playing the cello and suddenly you ended up teaching cello?" asked an unnamed interviewer in a skeptical voice.
Yes, suddenly, and strangely, it felt like the right thing to do.
Like studying social work. And for the longest of times, I wondered why I was studying it, and now having graduated and being an errant, non-practicing self-labelled black sheep of the social work fold unlike my noble classmates, almost every new person I meet ask "Why did you study that anyway?"
It allows you to see beyond the person, to place the person in context of the environment; the values imbue you with an identity you might not naturally assume, what with the valuing each person, the unconditional acceptance etc. The person-to-person interaction occurs in the context of so many colliding forces, people, and events.
"You surely can teach without having spent four years studying social work?!"
Probably. But teaching Here feels liks so much more than teaching. Students here are almost like clients, they are motivated to varying degrees, have their emotional baggage, their family problems, their gender identity struggles, relationship drama, are rather resistant to change, some have severe learning disabilities, others have been labelled the symptomatic child since forever. And unlike school teachers with the luxury of the distance of a classroom and a syllabus that desperately needs finishing, I get 30 minutes of cello teaching embedded in a web of issues that need to be at least addressed before the student is willing to play anything.
Local students tend to be more able to focus on the task at hand; these expat children are mostly verbose, spilling over with words and emotions that are dying to be expressed. Some of them take it out on their cello. There is this annoying sense of obligation to do something, to connect with, instead of sacking the student that has been dumped by a string of other teachers, and labelled 'worst student ever'.
And suddenly, she started playing, and it was the most amazing feeling ever.
(They say "I want to be a vet/pilot/etc when I grow up", equating their adult identity with their occupation)
And I realised that what I am doing now never featured in my childhood ambitions (that ranged from being a police officer to an actor to I can't remember). The prospect of teaching music (i.e. piano) was anathema (at least until I was 16)because my parents seemed to think it was a tasty carrot to wave to make sure I finished my last piano exam. At that time it seemed a lame reason to continue playing the piano, but I did anyway, for unknown reasons.
"So suddenly you started playing the cello and suddenly you ended up teaching cello?" asked an unnamed interviewer in a skeptical voice.
Yes, suddenly, and strangely, it felt like the right thing to do.
Like studying social work. And for the longest of times, I wondered why I was studying it, and now having graduated and being an errant, non-practicing self-labelled black sheep of the social work fold unlike my noble classmates, almost every new person I meet ask "Why did you study that anyway?"
It allows you to see beyond the person, to place the person in context of the environment; the values imbue you with an identity you might not naturally assume, what with the valuing each person, the unconditional acceptance etc. The person-to-person interaction occurs in the context of so many colliding forces, people, and events.
"You surely can teach without having spent four years studying social work?!"
Probably. But teaching Here feels liks so much more than teaching. Students here are almost like clients, they are motivated to varying degrees, have their emotional baggage, their family problems, their gender identity struggles, relationship drama, are rather resistant to change, some have severe learning disabilities, others have been labelled the symptomatic child since forever. And unlike school teachers with the luxury of the distance of a classroom and a syllabus that desperately needs finishing, I get 30 minutes of cello teaching embedded in a web of issues that need to be at least addressed before the student is willing to play anything.
Local students tend to be more able to focus on the task at hand; these expat children are mostly verbose, spilling over with words and emotions that are dying to be expressed. Some of them take it out on their cello. There is this annoying sense of obligation to do something, to connect with, instead of sacking the student that has been dumped by a string of other teachers, and labelled 'worst student ever'.
And suddenly, she started playing, and it was the most amazing feeling ever.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
the life.
Today I taught for one hour and went home to bum around, watch gossip girl, and I'm starting to think I could get used to this life. It's been quite good, so good in fact it feels like if I'm going to rave about it I might jinx it and it might be lost forever.
It's not always this relaxing, (now I have to make a qualifier in case I incur the wrath or jealousy or envy of those hard at work). There are the 16 hour days when everything happens together like teaching and rehearsing and gigging and researching. But on days like today when the rain has come and gone, and the sky is nice and cloudy, and the cello is well and sitting in a corner, that I conveniently forget about those days that, come to think about it, thankfully, do not bunch themselves up many weeks in row.
The students this term are great. There are the strange ones, like one who cowers behind the cello, or the other who oscillates between mopey-ness and otherworldly effervescence. Then there are the cool ones, the wristband-wearing curly haired Indian tennis player who speaks in naturally occuring psuedo rap, the goofy looking German who frowns when he plays but plays with all the flair of a gushy Italian, the spunky American diver who gushes about having practiced half of the studies book. .
This is my third year, and it seems almost surreal that two years have come and gone at KoolBlueSkool, but I can understand why some of the others have been here forever and are still going. It's exciting to see how the students progress, and they have so many stories, it feels like if I sit and listen they can go on forever about one thing or another.
My mum has been going on about how this job doesn't give medical benefits or CPF or whatever, but I wouldn't trade this much fun for the grind.
It's not always this relaxing, (now I have to make a qualifier in case I incur the wrath or jealousy or envy of those hard at work). There are the 16 hour days when everything happens together like teaching and rehearsing and gigging and researching. But on days like today when the rain has come and gone, and the sky is nice and cloudy, and the cello is well and sitting in a corner, that I conveniently forget about those days that, come to think about it, thankfully, do not bunch themselves up many weeks in row.
The students this term are great. There are the strange ones, like one who cowers behind the cello, or the other who oscillates between mopey-ness and otherworldly effervescence. Then there are the cool ones, the wristband-wearing curly haired Indian tennis player who speaks in naturally occuring psuedo rap, the goofy looking German who frowns when he plays but plays with all the flair of a gushy Italian, the spunky American diver who gushes about having practiced half of the studies book. .
This is my third year, and it seems almost surreal that two years have come and gone at KoolBlueSkool, but I can understand why some of the others have been here forever and are still going. It's exciting to see how the students progress, and they have so many stories, it feels like if I sit and listen they can go on forever about one thing or another.
My mum has been going on about how this job doesn't give medical benefits or CPF or whatever, but I wouldn't trade this much fun for the grind.
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