I'm not sure what's happened to the idea of being a student, but it has changed - and not for the better.
I'm teaching a class on counterpoint right now. I love it. I think the concepts central to writing good counterpoint are the foundation for all of music. After all, harmonic practice and voice-leading are both derived (to some extent) from counterpoint. The handling of dissonance and consonance have been the foremost issues of harmonic practice for the last 600 years and those are precisely the issues that the practice of counterpoint tackles. Why, then, would a music student, someone ostensibly forging a path to a career in music, not leap at the opportunity to unravel these secrets? I don't know. Maybe they just don't get it yet. That's fine - I would be happy if even a minimal effort were shown. Things are much bleaker still:
I assigned a paper a number of weeks ago about the last movement of the Jupiter Symphony (Mozart, k. 551 for the uninitiated). It's a beautiful finale to the symphony, weaving in passages of elegantly crafted imitative counterpoint and building to a coda (the movement is in sonata form) that is a fugue. GENIUS! But that's old-hat from Mozart. The concepts of synthesis and evolution in the context of sonata form that imitative counterpoint makes possible are, as is the best of Mozart, transcendent. I asked my students to write about the use of counterpoint in this movement - how/when is it used? to what effect? How does it change the musical outlook, having more than a homophonic or melody-and-accompaniment structure available? On the first try I got back play-by-plays of the music - not remotely analytical or insightful.
I inquired as to why that was. Apparently at the institution where I work - a major university - the music history department has not taught them how to write a research paper in a proper academic style (like not in the first person, no colloquialisms, etc.) and with citations (APA style, you know, the kind the big kids use). Shock. Horror.
I gave them a primer on paper-writing, having to actually inform them that quoting Wikipedia is NOT acceptable in ANY paper. I gave them a week and a half to rewrite these 3-page papers. Pretty generous, I thought.
Then came day of reckoning. They were to come to class, papers in hand. I, of course, got a handful of emails telling me about printer trouble and that the paper was attached. OK, I can handle printing the paper, no problem. But, there was one particularly egregious condition over which I am still fuming: I have 20 students in this class. 10 were in class. I received 12 papers total without so much as a note from the remaining 8.
Quite apart from being inconsiderate and disrespectful to me and their classmates, I fail to see how the lack of personal and professional responsibility has been allowed to grow unchecked, like an intellectual cancer, in the lives of these students. Sure, we all slack off, hand things in late occasionally with sob-story emails that we spent more time crafting than the assignment, but never have I seen the likes of trying to justify non-engagement.
This country, for all of its prosperity and freedom, has engendered a false sense of entitlement in the adults(?) currently enrolled at the undergraduate level. They act as if they are to be presented with information, like college is just an extension of the required education system, brimming with knowledge to be spoon-fed to them. They live a multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank intellectual existence. Pretty bleak. Where does it come from?
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This past summer I worked for Say Yes to Education in Syracuse. They are an organization designed to get elementary and highschool kids excited about learning, about the power and confidence that having a well-developed mind brings. Kind of...
After two weeks of highfalutin workshops on educational theory and lesson-plan making 'counselors' were sent to teach groups of 20-odd 1st-4th graders at a time twice a day for five weeks. The implementation of these workshops as a teaching aid and lesson-plans as an organizational (and evaluative) tool was little more than sketchy at best, but that's for another time. Things really fell to pieces when the district's policies came into play. Rule-following was of paramount importance, trumping even the most basic of common-sense considerations. For the adults, I mean.
I think during the course of those five weeks this past summer I generated something on the order of 5,000 pages of media (copies included). I filled out almost every form in duplicate, somtimes up to quadruplicate. This was all because the system for gaining permission from parents was set in stone; unquestionable. For instance, every child was required to have a medical emergency card with parents' names, telephone numbers, doctors' information, etc. Great idea! Cards were sent home with the kids on day one for them to bring back filled-out before the first field trip. We were still sorting these things out before the final day's field trip because the method of return, the (rightly) unreliable kids, was an asinine means to gain essential information.
At one point during the summer I noticed that all of this information already existed in two other places: First, each child, necessarily being enrolled in the district, had one of these cards already on file in the main office (but it was yellow, not purple - obviously unusable). Second, this information existed on the application that each parent filled out before the child could be enrolled in the summer camp. I said to my boss, "Why can't we just use the information we already have so that we can get to the other work (like getting supplies that never materialized) that NEEDS to be done for these kids to have effective learning experiences?"
"Because it's policy." was the retort.
Probably "That's stupid." was an inappropriate response, but lo and behold it escaped my lips and I met with the candor that inspired in quick time. But in all seriousness, because the other office workers and I could not spend time coordinating the pressing material issues, because we were sidelined trying to adhere to a literal policy whose goals could be met without literally having that stupid purple card in hand, we could not effectively manage and develop the support that the classes needed. How difficult would it have been to create a master binder with copies of all this information? It may have taken 2 maybe 3 hours. There were DAYS spent on making phone calls, creating duplicate cards to fill out, etc.
Policy, dogma, adherence without understanding. These are the plagues of the educational system and, sadly, they seem to be trickling through to the students' methods of learning. They don't want to know concept, they want to know answers. They want to pass tests (regents, anyone?) and they want to get good grades. They don't want to be handed information as if it is a currency to be handed back in exchange for a grade.
Why are we bartering with information? Has the idea of being intellectually engaged become so abhorrent in our society that we refuse to even teach how to do it anymore? Are we so scared of wanting to be elite?
"Oh, you're some kind of intellectual elitist." I've heard many written-off in this way because they choose to value thought and argument. They choose to want to learn, to be curious and they expect the same from others. They expect society to engage at a level that takes up its problems and works towards progress, not merely tread water as vigorously as possible in the name of simulating action. What's so bad about aspiring to elitism anyway? Everyone wants to be at the top of their particular game. Everyone wants to be the best. To appreciate that and engender a competitive and critical (not malicious) attitude in people seems to be the way that we might think together instead of against one another. If elitism is the attitude that advocates an "elite" ideal as a primary force in a given society, what's so bad about that? Let's aim high!
Until then, more frustration with laziness.
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