Paul B. Weinstein
This article appeared in The Teaching Professor, Nov., 1999
This article is about mindset—about how we approach our work.It’s about a source we can tap for inspiration and how to integrate it into our philosophy of teaching.
The model I have in mind for today’s Teaching Professor is jazz—that eminently adaptable music that is the soundtrack of a century and has embodied the great American image of the hipster.Academics may not claim comparable cachet but we can adapt some of the techniques and ideas of jazz to our own turf.
Think for a moment on the characteristics of the jazz musician:command of the means of expression, sophisticated and highly individualistic technique, respect for the traditions of the art form, dedication to its perpetuation, and eagerness to express new ideas.These are, with very little interpolation,desirable qualities for the successful classroom professor.
To bring the jazz mindset to your teaching gig, play these notes:
•Improvisation
Improvisation is the soul of jazz as it should be at the core of teaching.Preparation completed and plan in hand, the Teaching Professor is ready to deliver, but equally ready to receive students in discussion, to pursue intriguing lines of inquiry, and to extemporize.Putting it succinctly, to jam.It’s during these moments when we’re exploring ideas, when students propose intriguing questions and suggest possibilities, that we experience those moments of crystalline clarity when a new insight coalesces and a fresh synthesis emerges.Jazz critic Sidney Finkelstein notes parallel development in the musical art:
A great hot solo is generally worked up from performance to performance, using the same material.…When the player arrives at a creation that satisfies him, he remembers it and repeats it.…[T]he spirit of the occasion, the contagion of the performance, makes them all sound fresh and new.(111)
Write those epiphanies down after class while they’re still fresh, and throw them into the mix next time around.
•Experimentation
Jazz requires constant invention.It adapts to social shifts and new technologies, striving always to provide through art the equilibrium we need when the pace of change is dizzying and often disruptive.This newsletter chronicles the creative imagination of teachers endlessly seeking some new thing, some better way.“When you improvise,” observes composer Aaron Copland, “it is axiomatic that you take risks and can’t foretell results”(quoted in Ostransky, 82-3).Not everything works, but the effort is the thing.
•Hooks
Musicians weave into their number riffs and choruses that insinuate themselves into the listener’s consciousness and provide an anchor for experimentation.Classroom hooks can be props, anecdotes, and even sketches (AKA shtick) that grab the students’ attention. Concepts hang on classroom hooks.Students will remember that oddball moment, and will retain by association the material that it illustrated.
•Bombs
Jazz drummers drop “bombs,” accents that propel the ensemble and inspire the soloist. The instructor varies the rhythm of the class with the unexpected witticism, carefully set up, woven without warning into the flow of the class.Students quickly notice that if they want to share the fun they’ll have to pay careful attention.The unexpected note will corral the wandering consciousness.
•Attitude
Actor Dudley Moore, a talented pianist, writes of jazz great Errol Garner,
He may sort of know what he’s going to play to a greater or lesser degree from a vocabulary that expands gently and continuously.But—we are always delighted with the freshness and the originality of approach, a desire to communicate.…Passion… that’s what he had… passion.And that’s what all great artists have.A sprinkling of the demonic, a yearning for the tender, and a straight line to joy. (924)
It’s hardly necessary to embellish or translate for the Teaching Professor.If you’re reading this newsletter, you’ve got the same interest and enthusiasm that keeps the jazz musician at the music with the attitude that makes discipline a vehicle of possibility, expression, and delight.
•The
Nugget
The jazz musician is often portrayed as the lonely innovator, the existential hero, a Zen force.The college professor often feels an island, a voice of reason to a societythat puts astounding effort towards pursuit of the trivial, the destructive, the irrational.Amid the cacophony in which students and professors all live, we work every term and every class to recruit our transitory audience to join us in our continuous effort to mine nuggets of truth.We pull them out, dust them off, display them and hope that the students will see the beauty and clarity of rationality and order, analysis and thought.And as the great singer Mel Tormé relates, there are those moments when, “Once in a while… that strange silver chord that goes between me and the audience grows taut and it’s—well, exhilarating”(Crowther & Pinfold, 59).
References
Crowther, Bruce, & Mike Pinfold.Singing Jazz:The Singers and Their Styles.San Francisco:Miller Freeman Books, 1997.
Finkelstein, Sidney.Jazz:A People’s Music.New York:Da Capo Press, 1975.
Moore, Dudley.“Easy to Love.” In Reading Jazz, ed. Robert Gottlieb, 921-924.New York:Pantheon, 1996.
Ostransky, Leon.The Anatomy of Jazz.Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 1960.