Archive for the 'Teaching' Category

Teh Broken Interwebs

Published
by
Paul Aitken
on May 11, 2007
in General, Teaching and Tech
. 0 Comments

My web host decided to upgrade their servers without telling anyone first and as a result I was without my primary email account for the last five days. Honestly, I had to start rerouting to people to my (gasp!) gmail account, an account that I was trying to hold in secret until the end of the world when the only things left are google services and everyone has been googlefied.  I never thought that I would be so agitated at having to go without my main email, I guess it just shows what an integral part of my daily communicative actions email has become.  To top it all off, there were some troubles with the class website for the class I am teaching this summer.  The Interwebs are conspiring against me.

In other news, I am once again back in Halifax teaching the history of popular music course “The Rock’n'Roll Era and Beyond”.  The first week of classes is almost over and, as I expected, it has already been so much fun.  I just get a huge kick out of teaching.  It also helps that I have the privelege of teaching this particular course, I have been living with this music all my life, the only real difference is I get to talk about it at length with an interested group of students (and get paid for it!).

Today was one of those amazing Halifax days where one wakes up in a literal fog.  I couldn’t see three feet out of my window, such was the thickness of the fog over the penninsula.  And then, as suddenly as it had come late last night, the fog disappeared and I could see straight out of window across to Dartmouth.

Some links to lift the fog off the web a little:

  • Claire works for cookthink now, and also has a good article up on blogcritics.
  • danah boyd keeps putting out amazing stuff on social networking.
  • It appears that Condoleeza Rice was, not surprisingly, involved in some pretty shady dealings with Chevron and Iraq.
  • Tony Blair is stepping down, Gordon Brown likely to repalce him.  I don’t know what to think - Bush’s lap-dog is gone, which is good, but Gordon Brown is a pretty scary character too, responsible for many of the “administrative” (er…surveillance) aspects of contemporary British daily life. I also hate the whole “Prime-minister in waiting” bullshit. What does it say about democracy when we start assuming who will lead a country, and when the mainstream media simply fuels the “inevitability” by focussing on this one potential leader?

Hello, and welcome to fugitive imagination

Published
by
Paul Aitken
on June 11, 2006
in General and Teaching
. 3 Comments

Well, I’ve finally done it, I have started a blog. I have high hopes indeed - my hope is that I actually write for it.

I admit, I’ve been a blog lurker for a few months now, mostly just seeing if there was anything that would inspire me to join the fun – those in the blogroll on the right are partially responsible for this inspiration, so really, don’t blame me…

So here’s what the blog will be all about…

  • The usual personal ranting, raving, and storytelling.
  • Perhaps it will prove useful for getting out my thoughts on my graduate thesis about the Internet, community, independent musicians, and music fan cultures.
  • Maybe a little politics – in the ranting and raving, probably more ranting.
  • The writing of many a manifesto I suspect, although manifestos are rather passé these days.

    • (we’ll check in a year or so to see how accurate my predictions are, deal?)

    So here’s the first little tidbit.

    I have, for the last week and half, been teaching an undergraduate course called “Popular Music Since 1960: The Rock’n’Roll Era and Beyond.” This, for many years, has been my dream job. It really is a privilege (one I’ve worked for, mind you) to get to spend each day teaching young minds about the history of this music that has defined my existence. There’s also nothing like knowing that you know things, and that you can pass them on to others.

    It was expressed to me once in an email: “Who goes to school to study pop music, when all you need are the recordings!?” I’ve heard similar opinions, many just in disbelief that one can have a job doing it, but just as many are thinly veiled criticisms which suggest that studying popular music (as a scholar, or just as an option for an undergraduate course) is somehow less important than say, math or science. Those who criticise in this manner are, I believe, suggesting that learning about culture is a pointless pursuit.

    Because really, that’s what teaching pop music, and studying it is all about – the study of cultures, and the society which fuels it. That’s what I try to impress on anyone who questions the point of having pop music courses. Indeed, in this course the students learn how the music of the last fifty years had influenced and been influenced by key social events. Events like the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, the Vietnam War (OK, Conflict), McCarthyism, and many others. They get to see the interrelations between the crucial changes of the twentieth century and movements in music like the explosion of Rock’n’Roll, Blues and Folk revivals, Motown, psychedelic rock, etc. The fact is, that a society and its cultural products are not mutually exclusive, and that the art produced by a society gives us as many clues to how it functions (and importantly, how it may better function) as its science.

    I’d be last person to dismiss sciences outright. I love technology, am fairly adept at mathematics. More importantly I acknowledge that however one must, we should be involved in learning about our world and our place in it. I see very little reason for sciences and humanities to be opposed. However, it seems that those who are a little less thoughtful about it are willing to dismiss the humanities in favour of the sciences, seeing in the former too much room for “error” and interpretation, and in the latter the “hard truth” of numbers. In fact it was just recently brought to my attention that a former high-school math teacher (not mine) that I know is just confounded as to what it is that I do, and what use it may have. A retired high-school teacher! It wasn’t just the pop music, but also the lack of the requirement of a teaching certificate to instruct at the university level. Now I figure that anyone who spent 30-plus years teaching in the school system would understand that it’s a different world in the post-secondary institution. Not a better world, not a harder world, just different. I’m fairly new at this, and have never taught high-school, so I won’t begin to itemise the differences. I had also figured someone with this lifelong experience in education would understand the importance of the humanities in the moulding of a young mind. Of course, I suspect the teacher knows all this, and is choosing, like many, to passive-aggressively question and criticise the use of studying culture – and that, to me, is a clear signal of why we should keep doing it.

    There it is, blog entry number one. OK, number two if you count my little tease from a month ago which Claire so rightly pointed out really wasn’t very nice at all…