How to Train Your Pet Chimera

This post originated from my desire to learn 88 words from the vocab builder of my Kindle.

If you have a Kindle (I call it my "Kihnd-ee" and have superglued googly eyes above the amazon arrow) I highly recommend this feature. All you have to do is keep your finger on a word you don't know and it'll give you the definition! I've often caught myself NOT clicking on a word because I felt like I should know what it means and felt badly about it.

After recognizing this negative self-talk for the bully it was-I decided not only would I look up the words as they occurred, but at some undetermined point of my life I would actually learn them.

One of these words is "Chimera." I pronounce it kEYE-Meh.-Ruh -feel free to learn the right way and don't bother trying to explain it to me in true IPA form.

In Greek mythology the chimera is the head of a Lioness (think Nala) the body of a goat and a serpent's tail (for me, rattle snake). ALSO IT BREATHES FIRE.

It represents "a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve."
(source: google? it's the first result in a gray box and you can't see the actual origin although I suspect it's the Oxford dictionary)

YIKES. Definitely something I needed a word for these days. Am I experiencing/a/some/many Chimeras right now?

The same day I was pondering this definition I was also in the midst of trying to get my grad life together.  I was trying to maintain professional countenance (duh another kindle word) despite logistical setbacks (apartment woes+schoolaucracy=financial inferno). I'd had some naive moments already and was trying to stave off further peccadillos by reading selected works from my profs (abstracts only, duh. JK.).

In this initial research I recognized a horrific mistake; I'd accidentally registered for something in psychopharmacology or neuroscience. CAN YOU IMAGINE THE ADD/DROP PROCESS NOW? THE FEES? THE PAPERWORK? MORE SIGNATURE SCAVENGING?! I'M NOT GOING TO PASS THIS UNLESS I GET CREDIT AS A TEST SUBJECT.

Then I realized it was okay, a happy case of 2 researchers with the same last name at the same University. JKJK HAHA NO NEED TO PANIC

My interest was piqued when I scrolled to Self-kindness when facing stress: The role of self-compassion, goal regulation, and support in college students’ well-being by Neeley et. all (am I doing this right?)

In this study, the researchers were looking to build upon an existing study involving goal-redirection and happiness. In other words people who were able to re-direct their goals were happier. 

Example 1: You are going after the fine specimen from your kickball rec league. Oh how you adore their physique, sense of humor, how they squat devotedly during plays at shortstop...

Oh snap! They are taken?! :( 

...but their friend in left field is single and suddenly you realize they are seriously rocking that scrimmage pinnie. 
PLEASE TAKE THIS MOMENT TO APPRECIATE THE INTENTIONAL OMISSION OF GENDER PRONOUNS TO ENHANCE AUDIENCE RELATE-ABILITY.

My first reaction in this reading was, "Is science telling me to lower my standards for happiness? Are you inferring I want a pet hamster and not a chimera? This is malarkey."



Example 2: You are going after the fine specimen from your kickball rec league. 

Oh how you adore their physique, sense of humor, how they squat at shortstop...

Oh snap! They are taken?! :( 

THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS TO ME! Ugh, I think I'll wait in the friend-zone until their partner inevitably blows it! I am so undesirable I don't know how my shadow even hangs around. That's it, I'm going to eat that whole cheese block when I get home.

Goal Disengagement-When you do not replace a tantalizing morsel with something else. (FYI cheese block was not a re-direction...mmmm, cheese.)

Make sense? We are generally better off with goal-redirection, granted it's hard to remember this is an option in the heat of the moment.

Also, perceived availability of help and services to undergrads staves off unnecessary melt-downs.

Just knowing you have a trampoline under you as you walk a tightrope makes you perform with more success than the image of the grand canyon.

Other Talking Points/Review: Be nice to yourself even when nobody else can hear you (practice positive self-talk), ask for help (seek a trampoline), remember everyone else goes through this bologna (acceptance of the human condition), avoid catastrophizing, (although not explicitly recommended) MEDITATE, and seek alternates (goal-reorientation).

TL,DR: If you have a "pet chimera" this study recommends you either re-purpose it/genetically modify it or perhaps set it free.


Someone once told me that YAHOO stands for: You Always Have Other Options

YAHOO!

Office Hours

It's the first week of school and I already know I am full of too many ideas.

Probably too many to subject onto some poor professor(s).

Also too many to keep inside.

This blog is intended to quench my thirst for the possibly non-academic things I want to ask my teachers (or say at them while they scream on the inside for office hours to be over, or the "Dean to call"-"Sorry, very urgent, must go now.") I will also be forthcoming about what happens when my own ego gets in the way.

I am so excited for homework! I am wrestling with a deep-seeded (seated?) desire to impress my colleagues and professors with caustic wit and further discuss everything I half-assed browsed in bulletproof musician, regurgitate the dregs on what's left in my Madsen and Madsen memory bank and fully brag on what I accomplished in my last teaching position.

"Look at me, I'm so effervescent and charming!" *Sparkles emit from a dazzling smile, and you'll also notice my winged eye-liner is absolutely precise.*

I love learning, but it is admittedly pathetic to yearn to eat up everyone's time with desperate attempts to be insightful.

During this syllabus week, I have a mobile of check pluses and red pen marks with the triple-underlined word, Yes!!! orbiting and packets of finished extra credit assignments fluttering about, and airplanes buzzing around my brain taking a polly pocket-sized-me to conferences to present. Obviously I didn't pay for my private jet to the Mid-West clinic (where I'm a keynote speaker) because the University is sending me FO' FREE by sheer fact that I am so extraordinary. On the plane, I am giving the final touches to my article, to be published by all of the best research journals.

This is translation for, "OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE TO EVERYTHING I THOUGHT I KNEW ABOUT MYSELF."

Thank you Pinterest for bringing me the following idiom, "Confidence is quiet, insecurities are loud."

With this, another imaginary self with a large burlap bag jumps onto the desk next to me and tries to stuff all of the flying papers, red pen marks and airplanes away before anyone sees the ostentatious display.

Yesterday, my advisor gave an amazing talk through his VERY FAMOUS PODCAST oh my gosh, so cool. Hopefully you can tell by this ambiguous advertising that there is no way I could have known as a new transplant to new town and University that I should on some level be obligated to attend such an event.

Back up to a few hours before: I do not have Friday obligations (YET) and decided to "explore what the city has to offer" as recommended to me by the very same Dr. Duke...

This brought me to Barton Springs for the first time, where I performed a very nice cannonball into a natural pool.

SO, as I stood freshly tanned and water-logged in my kitchen, I receive a text that roughly tells me that my mentor will appear on stage in 15 minutes.

Uh, yeah? Didn't you see it on the website? 

I drove like a maniac to the nearest conservative parking space (not too close where I would encounter other frantic parkers, but where I knew I could cut through campus in 4 minutes), rear-end parked like a B0$$, took my heels off and sprinted through the campus, and plopped down just as applause ramped up and lights came down.

I caught myself nodding furiously through the whole talk on sustainability, as if this approval contributed anything to stage discussion or its flow.

Early on, the concept of "go-brain" is mentioned, where we become isolated on our one fixation, be it food or sex (this article just became provocative). We ignore everything else until that need is met and then snap out of a stupor and wake up to our real surroundings.

I've been working on meditation for 5 months, which I believe tries to curb this impulse. I'm not very good, but that is another blog.

Question 1: Please explain go-brain as it relates to the exercise of meditation!

Question 2: Have you read Taleb's Antifragile? What do you think about his take on retroactively fitting/justifying a story to an event after it has occurred?

Question 3: Do you have go-brain? What gives you go-brain? How do you stop it?

OKAY so today...I am working on homework for a research methods class. We are tracking what we do with our time in large blocks. Perhaps this will be shared later.

We are reading Dr. Duke's Senior Research Award Acceptance Speech-published in the Journal of Research in Music Education in 2010. His topic is "What if Research Was Interesting?"

He discusses the strength of his mentorship with Clifford Madsen (I sheepishly recall upon graduating, I may have exchanged a pink-covered version of this text with a classmate for recreational beverages). In my mind's eye, the scowls of my most beloved professors peer over my shoulder disparagingly.

The article delves into the application of science in Music Education and I flash to the point this week where I looked at the scholarships available in the National Science Foundation and sulked; feeling there was no way I would qualify without contorting myself/passions/studies in some unnatural way.

Question 4: Where is my link between music and science? Am I a scientist?


           "Many people, after learning about some recent research result, ask So what? But So what? is               a flip, and wrong, question to ask. The more penetrating question is What does this explain?"

             (Duke, 2010)

Now my head is on fire because the motto and crest of Upright Citizens Brigade is obscuring all words on the screen.

I believe translates to, "If this unusual thing is true, what else is?"

To me, I'm thinking of "Yes, and..." an improvisational comedy rule, where you never refuse an offering from your partner, rather you always build upon their idea to help something develop and grow.

WHAT OTHER BEAUTIFUL LESSONS ARE EMBRACING EACH OTHER OVER TIME AND DIMENSION!?


Dr. Duke discusses a novice teacher's development from a dry lesson sequence and adjusting her sails to become more naturally inquisitive and activity-based. Using human curiosity as a vehicle instead of a textbook format.

I'm thinking: I LOVE DOING THIS! I DO THIS ALREADY, OH MAN I MUST BE A REALLY GREAT TEACHER, WOW! <---Hi, ego-let me get my burlap sack.

AH! Drop the sack! *Clouds in the sky begin to part*

Dr. Duke imparts knowledge to those of us at the beginning of the journey (how appropriate)

"Read, read, read. Read the best work you can get your hands on. And today it is possible to get your hands on just about anything online without even getting dressed. (Back in my day, we had to walk to a library. Imagine.) There’s simply no excuse for reading mediocre work. You don’t have to. There’s superb work at your fingertips. Read great science, read great history, read great literature, read great news reportage. Immerse yourself in intellectual excellence every day. This isn’t to say that you can’t or shouldn’t partake of the delightful pablum you recognize as unrigorous. I enjoy a good Keith Olbermann screed and a David Sedaris essay and a Mariah Carey song from time to time. But do that stuff all the time and it’ll make you stupid. Write, write, write. Writing is hard. And if my experience is an indication, it will always be hard. The trick, if you can call it a trick, is to come to enjoy the difficulty of it. One of my favorite pithy quotes about writing I learned from my friend and former colleague at Texas, John Trimble, who wrote what I think is the best book about how to write that’s ever been written (Trimble, 2000). The quote is from the great sports writer Walter W. “Red” Smith, who said, “Writing is easy. All you do is sit in front of a typewriter keyboard until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”"

Please excuse the absence of proper citation, as I don't know how to do it yet

There are remarks on writing as reflection, and I am both happy that I write this blog post, and I'm also haunted by the words of a former boss. 

"Be careful when you put something in writing, it lives a whole 'nother life..."

AHH IS THIS THING A MISTAKE?!

Then I'm soothed by this:

There is a fascinating phenomenon related to human creativity that was first reported by Simonton in 1977. Now known as the equal-odds rule, it states that in scholarly and artistic endeavors “quality correlates positively with quantity, so that creativity becomes a linear statistical function of productivity” (Simonton, 1996, p. 235; see also Simonton, 1999). Simonton observed this phenomenon after exhaustive analyses of artistic productivity and published research in a range of academic disciplines. In other words, across the span of an individual’s career and among different individuals in a given discipline, the number of important works tends to be proportional to the total number of works produced. It would be understandable for us to imagine that the writers and scholars we’ve heard of, precisely because they’ve produced important works, are very smart and creative and thus produce only important works. In fact, Simonton has found, they also produce more works, and the ratio of the number of important works to total works is relatively constant across their careers. It’s not that productive scholars who are making meaningful contributions are sitting around thinking hard and then cranking out important paper after important paper. That’s almost never the case. Instead, productive scholars are producing lots of work, much of it forgettable, but some of it quite lovely. The function of producing all this work seems clear: Each time you conduct an experiment or write an essay or conduct a survey or document historical precedents and you show it to people, you get feedback, some of it wonderful and glowing, some of it (if you’re lucky) incisively critical. And that ongoing stream of feedback shapes your thinking and your writing and your planning. It helps you become a better scholar.  (Duke, 2010)

Dr. Duke discusses statistics and how it's not an end-all/be-all on research. To which words from the first day of high school AP Stats bubble up, "There are lies, damn dirty lies, and statistics."

Next comes the advice to talk to all types of people about your work and receive feedback, both positive and negative. Followed by the importance of research buddies.

Then, to grow thicker skin. Should I be taking B12 for this?

"Hang out with kind, smart, interesting, interested people. I’m very explicit about that list of adjectives, and the people you hang out with should each be aptly described by all four."

:)

"Go to Professional Meetings" Yes please.

"Write research that will be read with interest by people outside of music education." 

Challenge gladly accepted

Finally, this post ends with the following quote.

"Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s oldest daughter and quite a character, who said, “First you’re young, then you’re middle-aged, then you’re wonderful.”"

I take a moment now to thank my professors for the anticipatory setting of a pitcher for my very thirsty mind, and having some sage advice ready for me at the starting line.

Judith Anne Jellison's article is next and I feel guilty knowing that I've eaten a hot dog at her house before consciously knowing the greatness of her contributions.

My heart opens up and bleeds on this one; it considers the state of elementary music education and where it is(n't) going. I've ridden this rollercoaster and I feel I've done everything in my power to positively contribute to this void. 

All ideas of airplanes and papers drop dead from the air and I remember the classroom piano and all 450 people I left behind. I think of colorful carpet squares and little hugs at the knees and sixth grade boys losing themselves in practice and the warm round resonance of the donated bass drum and the richness of wooden Orff Bass xylophones. Images of 6 inch square neon scarves all bundled up and subsequently released to make tiny explosions of color while we outline the form of Camille Saint-Saens. Buckets and rhythm sticks. The joy of having a student come up with a solution/suggestion better than what I'd planned. 

I pray for the person I chose to continue my work; that I have left behind a sustainable blueprint behind so that she may find happiness, satisfaction and joy in her hopefully long tenure after me. I wonder why I thought I belonged anywhere else.