In Through the Nose...

It's list time! People love reading columns with lists!

In the interest of playing nicely, I won't spoil the whole book for you, but here's a link to "Breath" by James Nestor. A dear family member recommended it to me. There's more good content to consider making choices with, but I'm giving you my discoveries when it comes to the first crucial task.

Repeatedly, Nestor implores us to breathe in through the nose with the mouth closed. I've been working on this for weeks. Here are a few things I've noticed:

1: My nose might be clearer than it has been. Perhaps the constant use of the nostrils is keeping the pathway clear as particles get ushered along. However, I can't isolate the breathing as the cause because I also started cutting back on allergy pills around the same time.

2: I'm, well, smelling things. Again, we can't be sure it's the change in breathing practices. But I often don't notice scents unless they're right in my face. It seems that the olfactory range has increased to a much larger radius.

3: I need less to drink, I think. I find this one the most surprising. I'm not surprised that I need to take in less water; that's intuitive since I'm not exhaling through the mouth hardly at all. So, it's not the fact that it's less necessary that's suprising. No, the strange thing is realizing how much liquid I have historically taken in. I'm still imbibing fluids out of a longtime tendency. But, like, dear Reader, you gotta understand I'm used to basically always sipping on something. Finding that that's less necessary might be changing my whole perception of what it means to sit still. What do you do when you don't need a drink to pass the time? Get a fidget spinner?

4: The right nostril is waking up. Now, this one is almost assuredly due to the improved breathing, even if we can't be certain of the cause of the more open airway. I simply struggled to breathe through my right nostril when this journey began; I have structural issues. But, over the last few days, I've found myself naturally, if with a slight airy noise, taking the invisible floating ambient chemicals in through the problem nostril.

5: Tingles. I have zero idea why I experience the following sensation, but when I breathe in fully through my nose and then exhale with a slightly fervent force, I seem to get a tingle in my toes, a little shot of possibly-improved circulation.

(Possible) 6. I do not know if anything has changed with my voice, so I may advise the Reader on this aspect if I, say, record myself singing and notice any changes.

Doing good things has unpredictable positive outcomes.

Acceptance

I have accepted a fulltime GED-teaching position at an adult education center. This was a difficult decision.

Dear Reader, I likely don't have to tell you how nuanced this decision was, the aspects it involved: the soul-searching (inasmuch as a "soul" may or may not be a real thing), the discernment, the contemplation of sacrifice. Still, in case you're curious, I shall say on.

I'm using my degrees???

I hold a dual bachelor's in fine arts in Speech (communication) and Music Performance. I hold a master's in Adult Learning & Leadership. I've toiled in the workforce for well north of a decade since my first college graduation, and this is the first time I'm working a fulltime job that will make use of the things I went to school for. Many have observed/asserted that humans grow accustomed to whatever condition they exist in, even if it's negative. I'm not sure if I have ever been at rest in such a state, but I've definitely been making my such-as-it-has-been "living" in jobs that couldn't use everything I was good at. I've held part-time and volunteer positions (tutoring, substituting, musical directing) that do make use of the college-knowledge, but it's never been a fulltime gig.

Why wasn't this a no-brainer?

Sacrifice.

The hours that my job asked me to pick up in order to be fulltime include (in addition to regularly teaching M-R mornings) are Monday and Wednesday evenings. I have no problem doing things I like to do in the evenings, even if it's a job; the problem is that working Monday evenings means sacrificing singing in the community chorus (which provides additional opportunities via connections) and, hardest of all, probably means sacrificing playing my baritone horn in the community wind ensemble. Playing in this summer band has been one of the greatest joys of my adult life. Granted, I still own the horn and can theoretically play it on my own or with gaggles of friends I might be able to rustle from time to time, but the ensemble experience may be gone from my life for a time. In an effort to not be too paranoid, there might be ways for me to still play in the concert. This is TBD.

Acceptance

In the end, I believe all decisions should be made with the head (logic, reason, & evidence) and the gut (instincts, intuition). The heart gets to make its appeal, but it does not get a vote. Fear of consequence is no good hindrance for making a decision that feels right. I discerned that the financial advantages of accepting the full-time job could allow me to create my own opportunities to do what I love to do. This move ain't gonna make me no rich man, but it's going to make life slightly easier. My gut tells me to bet on myself. Also, the joys of doing what I'm wired to do should offset the sadness of sacrifice.

My name is Michael Tate. I'm a fulltime teacher now.

First Full Week at New Job Starting - Much Excite!

This is just a quick note to let the world know about this feeling.

Partly because I'm in an extended tryout phase, I think this might be what it feels like to be a baseball free agent. I'm working out with a franchise that sure feels like a great fit. I'm excited to the point of near-tears. I am finally getting a shot to do make somewhat-of-a-living doing what I'm wired to do.

Here's how it went down.

I had gotten my substitute-teaching badge, and I knew that the Adult Ed Center existed. I have background in Adult Ed because I'm a barbershop chorus director, plus that was my master's at Kansas State University. So, when the HR rep at the AEC called to inquire about my interest to sub for them and asked about my background, she asked if I'd want to look at being a regular teacher there!

It's so strange to have a new entity say "we've gotten a good impression of you; we already know that we want you." Dear Reader, this does not feel real. Do good things actually happen in this miserable world? Even to lil' ol me?

New Job! First Day!

This new gig is apparently going to use every work skill I've ever acquired. Here's what I've learned in the early stages of my orientation process.

I am now a GED instructor-in-training at an Adult Education Center. One of the strangest phenomena? I'm actually using my degree for this job! Imagine that. A millenial. Working in their field of study. Who'dathunk it?

Skillset = Applied

A probably-not-exhaustive list

Disability services

Since 2013, I've been working in direct support for adults with developmental disabilities and/or on the autism spectrum. I've learned a lot about the minefield of ableism one must tiptoe through. Some of our students at the adult ed center are people who slipped through the cracks, perhaps for reasons of slight-to-major disabilities that went undetected.

Tutoring

I worked as a tutor at St. John's Military School for 7 years. I also have helped other community members on test prep. It's amazing all the holes one finds in people's academic ship that need to be caulked. And all signs say that's what we do in GED prep.

Teamwork

As a barbershop chorus director and member of the municipal band board, I participate in team meetings. Before being part of these organizations, I never knew that I could enjoy business meetings. When you care deeply about an organization's thrival, suddenly talking about logistics and learning monitoring becomes a joyful experience. At our adult ed center, it appears we basically have a turn-teaching mentality, and this means lots of communication and meetings.

Following guidelines

Working with folks with disabilities, one gets accustomed to filling out forms that are required by oversight boards to be done just-so. The adult ed center, similarly, answers to funding and oversight. Interestingly, I have found occasionally lacking in my fellow direct support workers skills that we teach for the GED. For example, when filling out incident reports, direct support workers are supposed to be just-the-facts-jack objective - opinion and feelings are largely irrelevant. I will probably be teaching this kind of writing to my GED students.

Memory recall

I have 19.something years of experience in the workforce. I've done cashiering, fast-food-ing, night-auditing, collegiate speech judging, vehicle delivery, leadership, and planning. Oh yeah... and athletics and sports fandom are my hobbies... and I have a master's degree in Adult Learning & Leadership. In relating to students and finding a pathway to successful instruction, I'm probably going to be mining every work experience I've ever had.

Maintain professional distance

This may prove to be the most challenging of all skills. While I will respect each individual I teach as an independent adult, I do tend to get attached to people fairly easily, especially if, y'know, they kinda need me/I can be useful to their life. Maintaining professional distance isn't easy to do when working with folks with disabilities because, in part, they tend to be so real and sincere. It's easy to be emotionally available to people who see you as a human just as you see them. My main coping mechanism for professional distance appears to be "keep moving; what's next on the agenda today?". In other words, I don't give myself time to dwell on any passing emotion from the day. There's music to play, books to read, comedic current-events videos to watch, and people to see. Just keep swimming.

Instruction

This goes without saying so much that I'm including it at the end (inverted pyramid, donchaknow). To me, instruction means three main things: 1) care for the individual, 2) seek to inspire my love of the subject matter, 3) and humble stubornness - when there's something a student needs to learn, I just keep trying different methods until something clicks for them.

Conclusion

Thus, ergo, and so, it looks like this job is going to use every professional tool and memory I've ever acquired.

Harmony is for Everyone

Like a good amateur journalist, I'm giving you the most crucial thing first... This link.
This is one of the greatest barbershop quartets of all time.
"But, Michael, I thought barbershop quartets were men."
Not always, dear reader. In fact, often not.

Sandi Wright herself once graced me with the chance to sing the tag (what's a "tag"? see previous blog post, Harmonizing the World: The First Falling Pebbles) from this song. I cherish this memory!

Wherever you are on the gender spectrum, barbershop is for you.

But, I'll be frank; I didn't always enjoy women's quartets. My only saving grace is that my mind was open enough to receive new data to change my mind. Four years ago, I got to watch a master barbershop coach work with The Ladies. Beautiful sound. Fabulously cohesive group. They opened my eyes and my heart to women's barbershop. They even inspired me to write a tag specifically in a key for "women's" (in the loose sense of the word; gender is a spectrum, of course) voices. It's called "Bittersweetness". I should probably try to generate a Spanish version now, too, huh?

Why Do We Insist on Making Learning Music Hard? Episode One

Pick up a sheet of vocal music and tell someone to read it.
Now, try to explain why, in 2021, we aren't printing/displaying sheet music such that the frequency spaces between notes are more to-scale.
Seriously.
It's time.
We ask new singers and new musicians to overcome this pretty-glaring issue of inaccuracy.
"How far up do I go from a C to the note on the next line?", they might ask.
Well, it depends on the key", we say.
WHY???
Why can't we just pinch the lines in for the half-step distances? Surely, we have the technology to do this. The graph-that-is-the-staff should be to scale!
...
...
Now, the barbershopper in me also believes that it wouldn't kill us to do this for chords, too, but there are different schools of thought on whether you harmonize to the melody or to the key. So, for now, making the musical scale a more accurate graph, and thus more intuitive for learners, would be a nice start.

Harmonizing the World: the First Falling Pebbles

Like the first pebbles of the rock slide, I hope that my goal to harmonize the world can start with my little grad school project of generating Spanish lyrics for barbershop harmony "tags".
If you're familiar with some music terms (and even if you're not), a barbershop "tag" is a coda.
Within Barbershop culture, there is an entire sub-culture comprised strictly of learning and singing tags (there is also a social component).
It took me a couple of years to start to get why people loved tags. I'm going to save you the trouble.
Not an exhaustive list, but this will get you started:
It's almost akin to learning/singing the gist of the entire song. Efficiency!
Arrangers often put the coolest chords into the tags.
You can switch and sing multiple parts.
You get to practice little techniques you've been working on, and putting them into a semi-complete context.
As a teaching vehicle, tags allow a coach/director to provide many opportunities... Give singers chances to have their first taste of quarteting; show the learners that they can do all of the above; develop learning-by-ear skills... And so many more.

Having shown this, you can see part of why I think tags could be a great vehicle to bringing the spirit of harmony around the world: efficiency.

But, there are thousands of extant languages, so how can a barbershopper like me reach out to other people in the world? If I expect them to sing in U.S. English, they're likely to be less comfortable. So, we make versions of the tags in their language! :)

Enjoy the first pebbles!
~Michael

Comparative Education, Music-style

I think it'd be great to work for some organization that does comparative education research in music.
There would be so many benefits.
But, the way the job market is, I doubt there's anything available.
So, it falls to me to do the work here. At the least, it'll be fun and I'll learn things.
And it'd give me some samples to send to companies in case they need someone.

Coaching Wisdom in the Trenches

The two paramount priorities of education should be kindess and inspiration.

We can talk all day about teaching methods and their efficacy (and there are gobs of good ones), but those are supplements.

I enjoy an advanced discussion as much as the next nerd, but, when it comes to coaching, I like being in the trenches.

In my tutoring experience, I have loved the challenge of trying to change people's minds about subjects I love.

Think about your field. If you love it, you want more people to love it. Of course you do. So, we should teach to clone our love. We should love the learners. Everything else flows from these two principles. We want the learners to stay connected to our subjets long after they have ceased accepting our services. It does less good to focus primarily on the immediate. Our goal is to maximize their potential, and, as we all know, that means delayed payoff sometimes.

For example, I've been studying music formally since 2003 and I feel like I am only just now beginning to round out. My music teachers best accomplished the payoff of avoiding harm. This is to say that I feel like I might have learned more if I had been more motivated to practice. Still, my teachers never made me feel like I wasn't good enough ... that I couldn't learn. Hence, to this day, I keep getting incrementally better. Michael Tate is a near-master's graduate in Adult Learning and Leadership. He directs a men's barbershop harmony chorus.

Audiocasting - Confusion in Motion

I love rock music in most of its forms, but I'm gonna be frank.
I don't even know what some of the songs are about.
There was even a time where songwriters literally wouldn't tell you what the song's message was. I have listened to interviews from songwriters like Don McLean. He was asked what "American Pie" was about.
And he won't give a straight answer.
I always enjoyed "Talk Shows on Mute" by Incubus, and I feel like, in listening to it, now, I have a bit more of a sense. I certainly hadn't read "1984" yet when I first heard this song. So, mabye it's a context thing. Maybe you have to have more pop culture knowledge to get the song.

Contrast "Talk Shows on Mute" with this super-sweet Foo Fighters song, "Best of You":
No ambiguity there.
King & Cox (2011) recommend that podcasts can be used to dive deeper into more difficult content, but Brookfield (Brookfield, 2015, p.25) notes that traditional college-age students can feel like their learning journies are making them "leave their own identities in the past." This might seem like a tenuous link to the songs and the texts. However, selection bias acknowledged, I'm a big fan of challenging the learners I work with.

In my own experience as a musician, I have an involuntary negative reaction to being coached on thing I already know.
The negative reaction is mostly against myself... Why didn't you do what you already know to do so that the coach/director could tell you something new? So, I tend to watch what they do, find the part that isn't working, and challenge them to overcome what is preventing their success. Like the college students that Brookfield describes, I have a way of challenging people to be more than they thought.
I think that I, as King & Cox (2011) mention is the case with faculty, am definitely in the camp of facilitators who feel far better about their skills of communicating face-to-face.
Key pro of podcasting
Listening to Catt's podcast, I felt struck that a real advantage of podcasts is the human interest. I will say, quite bluntly, that I often find myself disinterested with late-night talk show guests; I just want to see the monologue of the comedian, laugh, and move on with my life. But, perhaps with education podcasts, my mind can be opened by learning from people who aren't in the "rich and famous" demographic. So, for my chorus, I think I need to make more effort to reach out to my friends in the barbershop world to bring them in to our Zoom meetings like I have thought about doing to add interest.

Cons? Maybe "cautions" is a better word

As an artistic coach, entertainer, and speech judge, I try to keep my mind as open as I can to people's ideas; my way is likely not the best way for that particular presenter or ensemble, and for my chorus, I certainly can't think of everything.

But, I think what needs to be considered for integrating audio into a classroom setting is caution. It comes down to patience, and I have my own definition for patience:

Patience is the wisdom of understanding timing.

The biggest caution is choosing the right time to share your exciting content. In my podcast from the past course module week, my uncle describes how he loves being creative in putting his powerpoint podcasts together. I think anyone who loves their subject is going to love creating a work of deliberate instruction, but just because we have made it doesn't mean that we can use it right away. I believe the professional educators refer to this as "sequencing."


A question for you, dear reader:
Anybody else get frustrated writing a post like this by thinking that you're falling short of saying enough? There are so many angles to this discussion. I find that the longer I go into this program, the more I feel like saying because I know more angles to look at topics.

But, especially with text content, brevity is key. You just kinda have to take an athlete's mindset and say, "well, I put my heart into it and did what I did within the time I had. I will have to accept feeling like I failed in some way."

I reflect on the pro and caution that I have shared, and I think... man, I still don't know. The longer into this program I go, the more I think I feel that knowledge isn't even a real thing. I think I'm just becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, with stating what I see and what I feel. After that, whatever happens happens. I think that the goal of using in courses asynchronous audio like podcasts should be to live in that nebulous space between the strange, uncertain world of "Talk Shows on Mute" and the super-blunt, emotional rawness of "Best of You".

I hope that some of that makes sense.
I confess my brain is fried from picking up extra shifts the last few days ands trying to squeeze this in.
I may read this tomorrow morning, horrified at my own ambiguity.

References:

Brookfield, S.D. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

King, K. & Cox, T. (2011). The professor’s guide to taming technology. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing

When High Self-efficacy and Technical Difficulties Collide

Rest in piece, classmate
A frustrating story

The podcast

First, though, you're here for the podcast!
The Quotable Dr. Mallet

This is my uncle, a research scientist and instructor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center.
He's a real character!


The Self-efficacy & Technical Difficulties Collision

After spending most of my Sunday finishing my responsibility share for my group Wiki project (I considered my role to be spit-shining to make everything look and read professionally), I turned my attention to clipping and editing my podcast.
I interviewed Dr. Mallet over a week ago. I have learned that I am generally either a work-ahead or work last-minute kinda human, so this story is, you could say, on brand for Michael Tate.


I was asked to cover an overnight shift at work (the job typically has some downtime), and so I arrived, got settled, and began working at clipping out the pieces of the interview that I wanted to use.

You see, I was a copy editor, and editor-in-chief, of my college newspaper.
I grew up with computers and the internet. I generally believe that I can execute what I need to on the internet.

But, sometimes, computers and the the internet laugh at you.
Because... capitalism? Obsolesence?
Here's what happened.
First, I got caught up clipping out "uh"s and "um"s. I should have just scanned the file for the pieces that I wanted to include and then tidied up.
But, I spent too long on that part. "No big deal. It's just a simple YouTube upload. I've done this thing before, and it'll be a small file.
So, I stop editing (for my non-classmates, we had a midnight deadline) in order to get the podcast linked to my blog in time.
I go to export the audio project file as an .mp3 so that I can attach it to a simple movie file with some simple image to display.
A comedy of errors ensues.

1. Audacity doesn't have the encoder I need to export as an .mp3.
2. "No matter; I've done this before. I'll just download it really quickly. Small file, super simple."
3. Audacity online: "You can't download the encoder cuz the license has expired. We just include it in new versions of Audacity."
4. More from audacity online: "Your Mac OS is too old for the new version of Audacity."
5. Me: "Ok, fine. I'll just export it as another file type."
6. (exports as .ogg)
7. Tries to upload the .ogg to YouTube. File type not supported. Hey, it was worth a shot.
8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 with .wav file. Also fail.
9. Alright, let's turn this into a simple movie.
10. Mac App Store: "You can have a free movie editor, but it only lets you make 5-minute films for free." (Assignment is, of course, 10 minute max length. This is Michael Tate we're talking about, so my clip is 9:58. Again, on brand to squeeze in under the requirement.)
Also App Store: "You can't have this free App cuz your OS is too old."
FINE. I'll fire up my Windows laptop.
Wait. Where's "Movie Maker"? There is another program now? Ok. I'll try it.
It's now past midnight, and I'm losing points from my grade, but this is about getting the project done and in, more than anything. So, I keep trying.
Open app, try to start using it. App shuts itself down.
Try again. And again. And again. Shutdown, shutdown, shutdown.

Sometimes in life, you just have to laugh, or you'll cry.
FINE, I'll try this on my phone. File uploaded to the Cloud, check. Display image uploaded to Cloud, check. Download files to phone, check.
...
...
The movie creator app I installed on my phone won't find the cover image file. The app doesn't seem to respond to anything I do.
I try a Google Chrome movie-maker extension, but can't make heads or tails of it. At a loss, I go to bed, wondering how I'm going to get this assignment in.

I go for a run after work to clear my head (yes, I did get some sleep), and I think, "why don't I just use a file converter or web-based movie maker? Or ask my great friend Devin, professional photog/videographer if he has any software recommendations. I try this. I tell him this tale of woe. Simultaneously, we begin typing messages that get at the ultimate solution. He offers to slap the file together for me just as I was typing a message to ask if he could. I send him the files.
A couple hours later, he has completed the task and sends me the link so that I can download my file. After I get done delivering a vehicle and make it to my next job, I sit down at this computer and upload the file. Devin being Devin, he spruces up the image so that it doesn't look like a 1990s 5th-grader working on Windows 95's "Paint" program made it (I actually used Paint 3D!). I totally get the impulse. If someone puts text copy in my metaphorical hands, I'm GOING to want to make it nice and shiny. (see: group Wiki project. It's what I do.)
So, there you have it. My high self-efficacy self had to ask for help because every direction I turned had a roadblock.
Methinks I may have to break down and buy a professional computer that serves all my needs.
Thanks for reading! Hope that you enjoy listening to my unlce, if you haven't already!
~Michael

Central Kansas Chapter - Morphing to a Web 2.0 World

Hello, friends and cohorts in the new world order of Web 2.0!
Don't you just love those little epiphanies?

Who among us hasn't been frustrated searching for information in an email? I've spent unnecessary amounts of time searching for information in emails that I sent!
Maddening.
After I discerned last week that wikis are like digital dry-erase boards (upon further reflection, they could also be seen to double as announcement boards), I called the president of my chapter (the organizational umbrella over the chorus) and asked him if I could present a proposal to the board that the chapter move to using a wiki instead of email communication. More on that later. You're here to see my plan!

(1) Initiating the "Central Kansas Chapter Hub" Wiki

(2) Target audience - My chorus members

(3) Learning/Training objectives - West & West (2009) advise using Bloom-Taxonomy-type words. (Bloom, 1956; Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
A. Posting Text:
After successfully logging in, the chorus members will compose a question on either the "FAQ", "questions for the board", or "questions for the musical director" tab.
B.Editing Text from others. The chorus members will critique errors on an error-filled draft (West & West, 2009) by changing the text from errors made by the director intentionally and posting to the "edits made" tab what they did.
C.The chorus members will post a hyperlink to something they dig on the chapter wiki page. Note: members will be invited to post a time-specific youtube link and/or a zoom meeting link.
D. Posting image, Week 1. The chorus members will post a picture of a map to their church to the chapter wiki page.
E. Posting image, Week 2. The chorus members will post sheet music sample of a tag to the chapter wiki page. Note: could include partial screen shot, downloaded image, etc. This will take some instruction.
F. The chorus members will demonstrate ability to see past editions of the page, scroll through the tabs
G. The chorus members will copy & paste something of interest to them from the wiki into an email, social media timeline, or social media message.
H. The chorus members will insert a video of a barbershop/general a cappella song they love to the chapter wiki page.

(4) Rationale for the use of wiki;
A. Advantages over email. - so. much. time. saved.
No searching for contacts. No finding old emails to reattach documents. With some guidance to members, current news will always be on top. Simple "CTRL + F" lets you find what you're looking for.
B. Advantages over corporatized social media.
Far more freedom for members. Everyone in chapter can get to the info even without being a member of FB, Twitter, etc. No inconvenient ads.
C. Controls for disadvantages. West & West (2009) remind us that wikis don't have to be out-of-control spaces. If we set it to where only people with login credentials can view and/or edit the page, we will have relatively the same amount of security as email.

(5) Details on how wiki is used;
I see the prospect of a chapter wiki site as nearly limitless to what it can do for us. Many choruses use sophisticated software like Groupanizer. Many sub-organizations have long chains of emails, like extreme quartetting rallies, when we are coordinating our events.
I intend to use our chapter wiki for the following purposes: upcoming gig logistics - song list, attire, time to report, etc.; important announcements; meeting agendas; business meeting minutes. We could have a private wiki page and a public wiki page that functions as our chorus website.

(6) Suggested wiki-related learning activities/practices/schedules;
Do the collective-encyclopedia thing (West & West, 2009). Invite members to post their tips that they've learned over the years.

(7) Wiki Activity Evaluation (rubric, grading criteria, etc.).
After each week, musical director (that's me!) will send out an email complimenting all of the attempts made. The goal is motivation and transitioning to an easier system, not really giving grades.

Something pretty personally revolutionary happened for me with this post.
In the aforementioned call, I gave the president a general summary of the potential advantages that using a wiki would have for us. He was very polite, and sounded interested to hear my proposal. His openness excited me even further, and, you guys, I wrote the rough draft for this post days ago. Yes, I've added sources and more details, but hey. Turns out I can use my editorial tendencies to still find ways to be creative even if I feel like I might be painting myself into a corner by starting a post before doing the readings. Turns out, it's possible to harmoniously rough-draft (verb) and then read the content to make it better.
Who knew??
Thanks for reading!
~Michael

(8) References

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.

Bloom, B. S. (Ed.). (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educa- tion goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green.

West, J. & West, M. (2009). Using Wikis for online collaboration: The power of the read-write
web. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Wikis: Digital Grease boards

Welcome back, everyone and anyone.

Background and Philosophy

In a super-sweet book on personal connections in the digital age by Nancy K. Baym, called Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Dr. Baym argues for social constructivism, that social media platforms such as Facebook, last.fm, and Twitter are what we humans make them. (Baym, 2015). Wikis, when used by groups, become a de facto social media site, though it's a bit hazy because the wiki platform itself may not be where the intra-group discussion takes place. Still, constructivism fits collaborative learning with wikis.

Colleges, in a sense, have always been built around the social aspect of learning. Despite the classic image of the pontificating instructor, a secondary glance reminds us that universities have always been built around coming together, around discussion, around community. We might think that collaboration is new, but have you ever heard of "study groups"? Ever heard of the famous arguments among members of academia? Ever noticed how community-ist people get about their college alma mater, to the point where some people won't even date a person who attended the rival school?
Though I have not yet come across any research articles refuting or supporting this claim, I will say that it seems to me, 'lil ol' me, that pop culture perceives college as a guru-on-a-hill situation because that's easy to dramatize in entertainment media and because, well, if you study something long enough, you like talking about it, so there undoubtedly have been course instructors who droned on endlessly.

So, now that you've had some adieu, I shall go no further with it.

Grease Board Drama

Wikis are a tool. Most of us have seen media where the scholars in question write long equations on grease boards. In an episode of "The Big Bang Theory", Leslie, a tangential rival of Sheldon's, changes an equation on his dry-erase board at home. Sheldon, being Sheldon, is furious despite the fact that she "fixed the problem [he] was having." This calls to mind a chief fear that new Wiki-worker-onners have... they're afraid that they'll screw up someone else's work. (West & West, 2009). However, this trepidation aside, generally allayed by the fact that wikis allow you to see prior versions and revert if necessary (I am a data point to confirm the fear-to-allayance progression, by the way... Had it with my first wiki in the "Characteristics of the Adult Learner" class).
So, to make this ranking of pros and cons fun, drawing on my personal experience with wikis as a user, and taking a speculative stab at how I feel about the prospect of using them as a chorus director and/or future college course facilitator, here we go on features of Wikis. I don't want to just call these traits strictly pros or cons because, as in the anecdote above, a perception of goodness or badness may just be based on selective endpoints. This is to say, I might think it's bad today, but time might change my mind. Further, the lens of learner and facilitator is very different.

So, in this scaling, my value is on longterm retention for the learner and enjoyment factor for, and this is key, my personal guess at how I will/would feel about this trait of using wikis as an instructor. Note the very strong difference in these factors. Put bluntly, I'm using wikis to facilitate learning, how much sacrifice of personal enjoyment would I be making to use Wiki? The student learning is the reason for the job, so that comes first, but one does want to like the gig.

If a trait gets a positive score, it's a net pro, and vice versa.

Wiki traits -

Clarity of Grading Expectations in a Collaborative Project: 0. The whole prospect of grading shared content is murky for the learner and the instructor, but K-State facilitators Dr. Collins and Dr. Kang navigated it nicely. We were asked how much our group members contributed, and this helped determine the overall grade. However, I'll be blunt. It's nice to get a good grade, and I deeply appreciate the instructor's feedback, but if I contribute to the group with my whole heart and get a B instead of an A, it just means I have more room to grow. Part of learning is learning how to work.

Creativity Flexibility: +4. It's been super-fun-times making wikis. I think, as an instructor, I'd really like to see more than text and pictures. Makes memes, write jokes, tell how the learning affects you personally. I think I'd have a hard time getting students to come out of their shell.

Appearance of Wikis: -2. Similar to printed books without pictures, ya gotta spruce these things up, and you gotta organize them well. It's hard when you're worried about showing that you've learned something to also put the audience first, treating the whole project like a presentation for communication rather than simple show-and-tell. Being frank, on the whole, I think we students could be better in making our wikis visually appealing.

Learning Retention: +3. It's been about 6 months since I did my first wiki. The strongest thing I remember is how much fun it was to work with my cohorts. All 3 ladies were so nice and supportive. For my one-person wiki for Curriculum Design, I think the learning was very strong. Having to process the info is super key. I think out loud/as I write, so it's very good for me. I remember a fair bit learning about Gilligan and her work. I remember really zoning in to do my part, reading primary sources and such, to hold up my part of the project.

Ease of use: +3. I actually find Wikis challenging. But, I came to grad school to be challenged. As a leader and facilitator, it appears to me that emotionally-charged situations stay in the mind better; this is part of why music is such a great way to teach.

Overall, then, as you see, I give Wikis a +10. They are not the be-all-end-all of online and collaborative learning, but they are a nice tool to use. I plan to seek ways to incorporate using Wiki into my chorus... Which, as you see hinted at in the meme above, should be a high-road transfer (Foley & Kaiser, 2013) for my guys in the sense that they are used to collaborative learning, even if doing so digitally might be new. I will work to show them the advantages, while mitigating the disadvantages, of the internet's grease-board.
References:
Baym, N. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed). Malden, MA: Polity
Foley, J. & Kaiser, A. (2013). Learning transfer and its intentionality in adult and continuing education. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 137. 5-15.
West, J. & West, M. (2009). Using Wikis for online collaboration: The power of the read-write Web. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Quick Tips

 

Just wanted to say thanks to all of those who were so kind and supportive with their comments on my blog post. You all were so nice, in fact, that I felt I wanted to share the few things I know that make my life a whole lot easier.
I was thinking, "geez, I don't know that much about what I'm doing; if these folks like what I'm doing, maybe they'd like doing it, too. I'd better tell them how, in case they want to join in the fun."
What I'm saying is, please don't take me for a know-it-all. I do the things listed below and they make my life easier, and I want yours to be easy, too, and maybe not everyone knows these things.

While I am not an expert (you're basically about to read everything I know), I wanted to share a few keyboarding tips that help me get around the internet and type in my blog without having to take my hands off the keyboard; I find it makes things more efficient once you get used to them. If you're in html mode, you can do the following things:

Italics: just type < i > (without the spaces) before your text and < / i > (same thing. no spaces to make the "tag" work) after it. It's very important to do the second step... otherwise everything in your post after it will be in italics. These days, blogger lets you know when you've forgotten to "close your tag". This means that you didn't type the < / i >< b >
Bold: < b > before your text and < / b > after it. Same story about closing the tag.
Underline: < u > and < / u >
Start a new line of text: just type < b r >. You don't have to close this one.


If you're in compose mode, you should be able to just hit ctrl and i or command and i... b for bold, u for underline.


General internet keyboard shortcuts.

Back shortcut: If you want to go back to the previous page, you can hit ALT and the left arrow key on a windows PC or Command and back arrow on a Mac. Do the same thing but with the right arrow key to go forward to the page you went back from. Find in page: this one makes discussion board searching and syllabus searching very fast if you know what you're looking for. Just hit CTRL and F in Windows or Command and F on a Mac.

Get your exact search terms: just in case you weren't as lucky as I was to be taught this in middle school... put quotation marks around something in a google search if you want those precise words and in that order. The quotes basically turn phrases into single words.For example, if you are looking up song lyrics, you could get a lot of random results if you just typed the words do you want me sugar lyrics in the search box. But if you type "do you want me", any results you get will have those words in that order.


I'm having great fun working with everyone! See you on the disc... I mean, blog posts.

~Michael B. Tate

P.S. If you're on a site like Facebook or Twitter that doesn't let you customize the text, use all caps for bold/to shout at people (pretty generally known... again, forgive me if you already know this) and surround with asterisks the text you want to emphasize. E.g. If I want to write "I really need to get this reading assignment done!" on Twitter, I will write "I *really* need to get this reading assignment done!"

Of whittling and waxing willy-nilly... blogging and discussion board posting for the scholar

To anyone who's viewed my blog before, thank you for your patronage. 

To my cohorts at K-State Global in our Integrating Tech class, thank you for your quasi-compulsory patronage.

    Our fearless leader, Dr. Kang, asks us if blogging is the same as discussion board activity, and what the pros and cons are to blogging for us as adult learners. 

Are Blog Posts Like Discussion Board Posts?

    I can straight-up answer this question with personal experience. I've had social media blogging handles for nigh 15 years, and I've written a handful of blog posts to boot.

    For me, discussion-board activities for school are professional enterprises. I write mostly formally. A blog post, however, is entertainment writing. A segue in formal writing is along the lines of "Therefore", "first", "getting back to the question". A segue here might be a one-liner or a pun. I tend to play with words in a blog post; I do it less in a discussion board post for school. In my master's program so far, I have found that whittling my writing down is more challenging than giving, shall we say, a book report. 

    Grad school writing is like being told to go collect the best sticks in the forest and then whittle them into whatever you want to. Then, we all put our heads together and decide how we can make other people's whittling a little bit better, simply praise the job, or say, "hey, those 3 sticks you whittled look great; I'd really like to see 2 more right now."

    MacPhail makes the case, using her (first name Theresa; probable pronoun there) experience that assigning creative projects personalizable by the individual - in lieu of formal papers - leads to smarter arguments. In my case, that's for others to judge. I have my ego, so I always think I have a good point. I do agree that posting publicly makes me more likely to try to shape my image, but, really, we do that without Web 2.0, anyway (Baym, 2015).

    Ok, but what about ye olde academic literature? Two studies, one quantitative and one mixed (qual and quant together like Marvel's Defenders, teaming up despite not always liking each other), paint a picture that students can perceive blogs as increasing their self-efficacy in their learning. One of these was a small-sample-size study of African American students, largely non-traditional, who liked communal learning (Kuo, Y.-C., Belland, B. R., & Kuo, Y.-T., 2017). Another got a fairly large sample of UK and US students and asked them a nice, rounded sample of anchored questions. (Garcia, E., Moizer, J., Wilkins, S. & Haddoud, M.Y., 2019). 

    In the afore-cited really cool book called "Personal Connections in the Digital Age", Baym (2015) argues that people have the power to shape technology because we have needs. Put plainly, technology is a tool that we use how we need to, and how tech is perceived comes after. I agree with her. When I generate a discussion board post, I need to be word things professionally and formally in the most parsimonious way possible. In a blog post, I feel the need to add a little flair, a little more me. This is not to argue that there is not creativity in parsimony. There absolutely is, as anyone who's tried to distill 5 hours of reading into 500 words on a Wednesday night after working the first 3 days of the week can attest. The creativity of a discussion board post is, in my case, in the selection and ordering of content; with a blog post, I am also molding and discovering a personalized writing style. 

Blogging as Coursework: Good and Bad Stuff

The Good Stuff

    

    Blogs encourage expressive freedom. (See: my hodgepodge verbosity in all its... glory?) (MacPhail, 2019).

    Personalizing your project might make you try harder. (MacPhail, 2019)

    Blogs make you feel super cool cuz "look what I can do!" (Me, not in a formal paper, just now)

    People are watching you, and you want to craft that image (Baym, 2015), so you make it count

The Bad Stuff

    Frankly, who knows? I have a hard time being very impressed with a study that shows how Web 2.0 usage might have links to our belief in how well we can learn. It makes sense to have a quantitative study keep its internal validity by asking survey respondents how they feel blogging helps them. Garcia and friends (2017) do this very well and in great detail. But, c'mon. Dunning-Kruger, people. Just because we feel like we can and are "doing it" doesn't mean we're really getting the content.

    Still, if upon further study, Kuo et al's results can be generalized to people of all skin tones/ethnicities (and did anybody else catch if they said how they determined who was African American? I would think it would be via self-identification, but I might have missed where it was said), feeling like you're having a better learning experience due to communal involvement might keep you in the game. If you keep throwing darts in the dark, you're bound to hit the target eventually, amirite? Let me be clear, dear reader: I'm not saying that you aren't learning better by blogging. What I am saying is, rather self-interestedly, I'm largely in this Master's program for me, and I know I am prone to overconfidence. I don't know if I'm learning better by blogging. I can't do this alone, so I need y'all to call me out if I'm off base.

    So, like a lolcat, I'm begging, "I can haz comments, pleaz?"

References:

Baym, N. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed). Malden, MA: Polity 

Garcia, E., Moizer, J., Wilkins, S. & Haddoud, M.Y. (2019). Student learning in higher education through blogging in the classroom. Computers & Education, 136(1), 61-74. Retrieved from: https://www-sciencedirect-com.er.lib.k-state.edu/science/article/pii/S0360131519300776

Kuo, Y.-C., Belland, B. R., & Kuo, Y.-T. (2017). Learning through blogging: students’ perspectives in collaborative blog-enhanced learning communities. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 20(2), 37–50. Retrieved from: http://search.ebscohost.com.er.lib.k-state.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=122353858&site=ehost-live

MacPhail, T. (2019, April 9). Tell me a smart story: On podcasts, videos, and websites as writing assignments. Retrieved from: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/2183-tell-me-a-smart-story-on-podcasts-videos-and-websites-as-writing-assignments?cid=VTEVPMSED1

Dream Theater Share-a-thon, Day 20: "A Fortune in Lies"

"A Fortune in Lies", Track 1 on "When Dream and Day Unite"(1989)

Length - 5:15
Tempo - swift
Intro - "thump, thump, thump" sound the drums, and away we go
Texture - dual melody feel in non-vocal instruments, keyboard ambiance on verses, vocals declamatory
Features - soaring vocals, groovy guitar

************************

Dream Theater formed at Berklee in 1985. The original three members were John Petrucci (guitar) and John Myung (bass), friends from Long Island, and Mike Portnoy (percussion) whom the Johns heard in a practice room and said, "we gotta get that guy". (Something along those lines).

"When Dream and Day Unite" lineup:
The Johns
Portnoy
Kevin Moore - keyboard
Charlie Dominici - Vocals

Lyrics to "A Fortune in Lies":

I can remember when,
In the unity of our five-day sessions
Not even once did we hear the siren song
What kind of imagination
Asleep in some lyrical coma
Who's vain futile memory
Could have been so wrong?

You can make a fortune in lies
You can keep a giant alive
You can ride the red
Until everybody smiles

A trifling euphoria
Was such an untimely religion
Maybe your life can explain
The reason for my indecision
Here is a poor man
The heart of this monster creation
He said we both will be heroes
And I was led into temptation

You can make a fortune in lies
You can keep a giant alive
You can ride the red
Until everybody smiles

Can you show me your gold and your silver?
A hero in frozen water

"For the first time in a long time
Everything was right in my world
And then I woke up"

Now you've made a fortune in lies
And you kept a giant alive
You rode the red
You rode the red

********************************

SPOILERS AND SUBJECTIVITY BELOW: YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THIS AFTER LISTENING

Words to describe this song: York Peppermint Patty with a glass of very cold milk

How to enjoy this song: Go somewhere where you can move like a dork without anyone judging you (I'm currently at the gym, so I'm kinda-sorta following my advice), and tap your feet along and move your torso around. You get more out of this one if you move with it. They hadn't quite found their sound yet, though it does sound good. Their biggest strength with this song is the songwriting. So, pay close attention to that and groove with it.

Stream-of-consciousness thoughts as I listen to "A Fortune in Lies": The main guitar uses an effect (for the uninitiated, this is a technical, non-metaphorical term) that sounds to me like the openness and clarity that you get when you blow air across the top of a bottle, that sorta hooty sound. I love it. It's evident to me that John Petrucci is something special. Just the cleanliness with which he played right from the get-go on this album, their first LP. (We will get to the early-days demos later. ;) ) Charlie Dominici is very professional and hits everything that he is supposed to hit. There are some times later in the album where he doesn't nail what he's supposed to do, but he does hit it. He sounds, more or less, like an excellent regular at Friday night karaoke. He's pretty good, but you wouldn't necessarily write home about him. I enjoy him, and for me, with 16 years of practice using my falsetto (shout-out to my high school choir director for prompting us boys to use it), it's easy to sing along. Let me be clear, I'm not claiming that I'm better; I just feel confident in singing all of the notes. Charlie was a serviceable vocalist for DT to record their first LP with.


Thank you for reading, and enjoy!
Michael

*************************************
What is the "Dream Theater Share-a-thon"?

I will be posting a link to a song/piece by my favorite band, Dream Theater, hopefully every day until we have successfully enjoyed every original song that they have recorded in-studio. There are many good reasons to do this, but you can probably guess most of the ones that I'm thinking.

No adieu.
We're just gonna do it.

I'm going to try to help you know what to expect a little bit without influencing the way that you experience the song. I want you to have the chance to enjoy the music on your own without any spoilers, just as I did.

I will also tell you that some of the things that Dream Theater does may be quite different than much of the music that you have listened to before. Sometimes it may be so new that it makes you a bit uneasy or just doesn't connect to you at all. If that happens, I encourage you to listen to it a few times, perhaps in different ways... once in the background while you do dishes, once with your eyes closed and your full attention, once hanging upside down like a bat. You get the idea.

You may even want to come back to it later for another listen.

I believe that, if you go on this journey with me, you will find more than a few songs that you enjoy. My mom saw Dream Theater live in K.C. and really enjoyed them, and she usually listens to NPR which I don't think gets to rock and roll that much. Dream Theater truly has something for everyone. Not everything they do may be your thing, but some of it may change your life for the better the way that it did mine.

****************************

~In loving memory of Tim~

Dream Theater Share-a-thon, Day 19: "Out of Reach"

"Out of Reach", Track 8 on "Distance Over Time"(2019)

Length - 4:04
Tempo - slightly slow walk
Intro - classical grand piano sound
Texture - gentle layering
Features - piano, soulful guitar solo, yearning vocal sound

************************

Dream Theater formed at Berklee in 1985. The original three members were John Petrucci (guitar) and John Myung (bass), friends from Long Island, and Mike Portnoy (percussion) whom the Johns heard in a practice room and said, "we gotta get that guy". (Something along those lines).

""Distance Over Time" lineup:
Petrucci - guitars
Myung - bass
Jordan Rudess - keyboards
James LaBrie - Vocals
Mike Mangini - drums

Lyrics for "Out of Reach":

There's something about this girl
Some kind of magic
I swear she cast a spell on me
Not the first time
Might be the last
Can't let this moment slip away

Try to find the words
None sit right with me
Air of confidence
But I can barely breathe

She's without a care
Electrified and held there
A thousand volts igniting me
Her waves crash over me
Far below, out of reach
The undertow, my reverie

Sadness in her smile
Love, it's been a while
Near but far away
She chases it each day
A promise to come back
All the while still waiting
Seems it lost its way

Out of reach
Just too hard to reach
You're letting your life slip away
Out of reach
Yeah, it's hard to reach
There's another day
Although you're hurting and afraid
You're stronger than yesterday

********************************

SPOILERS AND SUBJECTIVITY BELOW: YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THIS AFTER LISTENING
Words to describe this song: supportive, cathartic, therapeutic

Imbibery tip: Dark room. Headphones. Gently and slightly firmly press your hands against your temples, your fingers into your scalp. If you're like me, you may feel things you've been holding in trying to get out through your pores. It's up to you whether you let them. This is another one of those Dream Theater songs that doesn't come and get you (a contrast to the weekend edition). This song may be the medicine man, and he's not doing house calls today.

Stream-of-consciousness thoughts as I listen to "Out of Reach":
This song is a walk outside in overcast jacket weather. It's close to this dog's expression.
Funny story, James LaBrie recorded a song called "Slightly Out of Reach" for one of his solo albums. (Which I have only heard becomes someone leaked his solo album right about the time that DT's album "Octavarium" came out. And there are several songs on there that I just love to wail away with.) Mike Mangini played the drums on that album, too, about a half-decade before he joined Dream Theater. Anyway, "Slightly Out of Reach" has a somewhat similar feel. It has a long guitar section that is to live for.

Something cool about this song is that it makes you wait and wait for the chorus which also serves as the climax. This is one of the shortest songs DT has ever recorded. My lovely music-degree education wants me to call this song "through-composed". It may not be through-composed in the strictest sense as there are tiny pieces that repeat (the intro kinda comes back at the close like Harry's first snitch), but it's pretty darn close. This song balances nicely a feeling of being complete with leaving you wanting juuuust a bit more. But, it's 2019 and we have recordings and easy scrolling through a song, so if you want to sing the chorus again, just slide back in the song or repeat the whole dang thing. Magic!

I haven't decided for sure as I've only listened to this song about 20 times (no irony intended), but I feel like this song pretty nearly describes my relationship with traveling, especially when there are places you're not allowed to go because they are on private property. The picture below is some super cool-looking rocks that I wanted to ascend. But there is a fence. They called me, but I could not answer.

I include this next image for scale.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy!
Michael

*************************************
What is the "Dream Theater Share-a-thon"?

I will be posting a link to a song/piece by my favorite band, Dream Theater, hopefully every day until we have successfully enjoyed every original song that they have recorded in-studio. There are many good reasons to do this, but you can probably guess most of the ones that I'm thinking.

No adieu.
We're just gonna do it.

I'm going to try to help you know what to expect a little bit without influencing the way that you experience the song. I want you to have the chance to enjoy the music on your own without any spoilers, just as I did.

I will also tell you that some of the things that Dream Theater does may be quite different than much of the music that you have listened to before. Sometimes it may be so new that it makes you a bit uneasy or just doesn't connect to you at all. If that happens, I encourage you to listen to it a few times, perhaps in different ways... once in the background while you do dishes, once with your eyes closed and your full attention, once hanging upside down like a bat. You get the idea.

You may even want to come back to it later for another listen.

I believe that, if you go on this journey with me, you will find more than a few songs that you enjoy. My mom saw Dream Theater live in K.C. and really enjoyed them, and she usually listens to NPR which I don't think gets to rock and roll that much. Dream Theater truly has something for everyone. Not everything they do may be your thing, but some of it may change your life for the better the way that it did mine.

****************************

~In loving memory of Tim~

Dream Theater Share-a-thon, Day 18: "In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 2"

"In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 2", Track 8 on "Systematic Chaos"(2007)

Note: This song stands on its own, but you might find your listening experience enhanced if you go back and listen to yesterday's song, "In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 1"

Length - 16:39
Tempo - walk with heavy footsteps
Intro - keyboard ambiance
Texture - polyrhythmia, unison ensemble vocalizing, some doubling of guitar and voice
Features - soaring vocals; quick, almost spoken-word vocals; eerie keyboard work; bass notes take control

************************

Dream Theater formed at Berklee in 1985. The original three members were John Petrucci (guitar) and John Myung (bass), friends from Long Island, and Mike Portnoy (percussion) whom the Johns heard in a practice room and said, "we gotta get that guy". (Something along those lines).

"Systematic Chaos" lineup:
Petrucci - guitars, backing vocals
Myung - bass
Portnoy - drums, percussion, backing vocals
Jordan Rudess - keyboard, continuum
James LaBrie - lead vocals

Lyrics of "In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 2":

Welcome tired pilgrim
Into the circle
We have been waiting

Everyone's gathered
for your arrival
All the believers

Angels fall
all for you
heretic
Demon heart
bleed for us

I've been waiting for you,
Weary preacher man
You have been expected
Now we can begin
Let this hollowed Day of Judgment reign

I have known you father
And your sacred quest
Blessed soldier fighting
You shall never rest
I have known you but do you know me?

Angels fall
all for you
heretic
Demon heart
bleed for us

(My soul is yours Dark Master, I will fight for you)

Dark Master within, I will fight for you
Dark Master of sin, now my soul is yours
Dark Master, my guide, I will die for you
Dark Master inside

I cannot see his face
But I could feel his spite
A presence from the dead
Abandoned by the light
This shadow will consume him
from within

This power that I sense
The rage behind those eyes
Is just a shrouded ghost
A spirit sealed inside
The body and the soul both threats
For they are one

Angels fall
all for you
heretic
Demon heart
bleed for us

(My soul is yours Dark Master, I will fight for you)

Dark Master within, I will fight for you
Dark Master of sin, now my soul is yours
Dark Master, my guide, I will die for you
Dark Master inside
Dark Master, amen, I belong to you
Dark Master within

Heil! Heil! Heil! Heil!
Heil! Heil! Heil! Heil!

[IV. The Slaughter of The Damned]

Don't
Bother trying to find them
They will be coming to you
Fight,
Fight and destroy until you can't take anymore

Slay
Spill the blood of the rebels
They are the children of hell
Flesh,
Of the undead
Stopping at nothing to kill

Sin,
Caught in a moment of weakness
Committed the greatest of all
Sold,
Half of my soul
And now it's too late for you

I judge us
my eyes see
I judge and I am just
For I speak of the beast
That lives in all of us

Unwelcome ones
your time has come

Lord,
You are my god and my shepherd
Nothing more shall I want
Walk,
Through the abyss
Into the shadow of death

Fear,
There is no evil to fear now
For I know you are with me
My,
Cup overflows
With my enemy's blood

I,
Decay in the house of the lord
Forever, amen
Death,
Will follow me
All the days of my life

I judge us
my eyes see
I judge and I am just
For I speak of the beast
That lives in all of us
Unwelcome ones
your time has come

Servants of the fallen
Fight to pave the way
For their savior's calling
On this wicked day

Through a veil of madness
With a vicious play
One man rises up
Standing in their way

It's time for your reckoning

[V. The Reckoning ]

[Instrumental]

[VI. Salvation]

My soul grows weaker
He knows and he waits
He watches over me
Standing at the infernal gates
In the hour of darkness
The moment I feared has passed
The moment I lost my faith
Promising salvation
My soul is my own now
I do not fight for you
Dark Master


********************************

SPOILERS AND SUBJECTIVITY BELOW: YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THIS AFTER LISTENING
Words to describe this song:epic, eerie, purposeful

Stream-of-consciousness thoughts as I listen to "In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 2":
I wrote the following for part 1, and it still applies, so for those who missed it yesterday (what's wrong with you??):
Ok, folks, allow me to talk about heavy metal, if you will. Consider the following analogy: bluegrass is to radio country as heavy metal is to mainstream rock. Who discerned that analogy? Me.

Here's the deal. Everyone is passionate about music (ok, I knew one guy once who didn't care much about music, and that was weird. He was all, "I guess I listen to the music on my video games" and I was baffled... Like, he didn't listen to anything.), and some folks aren't that expressive of their passion. You learn how passionate they are about things by watching what they choose to do. But when you meet a fan of a genre of music with "extensive layering and emphasis on every instrument having a strong presence in the music" (bonding characteristics of heavy metal, bluegrass, symphonic music, barbershop harmony, much Irish folk music, etc.), it seems to bring out that "I will fight you if you say this music isn't amazing" feeling in its fans. I, for one, feel called to put up the horns for all of the types of music in parentheses above when they are executed well. Sometimes, a listener might not like a particular sound that a band uses in a heavy metal song, but beauty, 'tis said, is in the eye of the beholder.

If you listen carefully to what heavy metal musicians are doing, perhaps you'll learn to feel the beauty the way diehard fans do.

"In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 1" (and indeed most of the album that it's from) is a heavy metal song. Dream Theater doesn't normally play music that I would deem "sexy", but this one kinda comes close. It's got a rawness to it, a "there's dark stuff out there, folks, and buckle up, cuz we're gonna tell you about it" attitude. From the first riff, it's almost like John Petrucci says, "attack!" and then the other guys go, "good plan, bro. Look out, world."

Much DT music seems to me fast, chill music that says, "we're playing music with all the love and care in us, take it or leave it". This song ain't that, y'all.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy!
~Michael

*************************************
What is the "Dream Theater Share-a-thon"?

I will be posting a link to a song/piece by my favorite band, Dream Theater, hopefully every day until we have successfully enjoyed every original song that they have recorded in-studio. There are many good reasons to do this, but you can probably guess most of the ones that I'm thinking.

No adieu.
We're just gonna do it.

I'm going to try to help you know what to expect a little bit without influencing the way that you experience the song. I want you to have the chance to enjoy the music on your own without any spoilers, just as I did.

I will also tell you that some of the things that Dream Theater does may be quite different than much of the music that you have listened to before. Sometimes it may be so new that it makes you a bit uneasy or just doesn't connect to you at all. If that happens, I encourage you to listen to it a few times, perhaps in different ways... once in the background while you do dishes, once with your eyes closed and your full attention, once hanging upside down like a bat. You get the idea.

You may even want to come back to it later for another listen.

I believe that, if you go on this journey with me, you will find more than a few songs that you enjoy. My mom saw Dream Theater live in K.C. and really enjoyed them, and she usually listens to NPR which I don't think gets to rock and roll that much. Dream Theater truly has something for everyone. Not everything they do may be your thing, but some of it may change your life for the better the way that it did mine.

****************************

~In loving memory of Tim~

Dream Theater Share-a-thon, Day 17: "In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 1"

"In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 1", Track 1 on "Systematic Chaos"(2007)

Length - 9:01
Tempo - quick
Intro - guitar riff
Texture - polyrhythmia, some harmonizing (so homorhythmia as a piece of the layering)
Features - grindy harmonizing, smooth yet grindy soloing, clean and firm vocals

************************

Dream Theater formed at Berklee in 1985. The original three members were John Petrucci (guitar) and John Myung (bass), friends from Long Island, and Mike Portnoy (percussion) whom the Johns heard in a practice room and said, "we gotta get that guy". (Something along those lines).

"Systematic Chaos" lineup:
Petrucci - guitars, backing vocals
Myung - bass
Portnoy - drums, percussion, backing vocals
Jordan Rudess - keyboard, continuum
James LaBrie - lead vocals

Lyrics of "In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 1":

[I Prelude]

[Instrumental]

[II Resurrection]
I saw a white light
Shining there before me
And walking to it
I waited for the end
A final vision
Promising salvation
A resurrection
For a fallen man

Do you still wait for your God
And the symbol of your faith?

I can free you from this Hell and misery
You should never be ashamed my son
I can give you power beyond anything
Trust me you will be the chosen one

I was forgotten
A body scorned and broken
My soul rejected
Tainted by his blood

Beyond redemption
A sinner not worth saving
Forever taken
From the one I loved

Do I still wait for my God
And a symbol of my faith?

I can lead you down the path and back to life
All I ask is that you worship me
I can help you seek revenge and save yourself
Give you life for all eternity

Servants of the fallen
Fight to pave the way
For their saviour's calling
Of this wicked day

Through a veil of madness
With a vicious blade
One man rises up
Standing in their way

Redemption
Redemption for humanity

********************************

SPOILERS AND SUBJECTIVITY BELOW: YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THIS AFTER LISTENING
Words to describe this song:uh, metal. cool, groovy metal

Stream-of-consciousness thoughts as I listen to "In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 1":
Ok, folks, allow me to talk about heavy metal, if you will. Consider the following analogy: bluegrass is to radio country as heavy metal is to mainstream rock. Who discerned that analogy? Me.

Here's the deal. Everyone is passionate about music (ok, I knew one guy once who didn't care much about music, and that was weird. He was all, "I guess I listen to the music on my video games" and I was baffled... Like, he didn't listen to anything.), and some folks aren't that expressive of their passion. You learn how passionate they are about things by watching what they choose to do. But when you meet a fan of a genre of music with "extensive layering and emphasis on every instrument having a strong presence in the music" (bonding characteristics of heavy metal, bluegrass, symphonic music, barbershop harmony, much Irish folk music, etc.), it seems to bring out that "I will fight you if you say this music isn't amazing" feeling in its fans. I, for one, feel called to put up the horns for all of the types of music in parentheses above when they are executed well. Sometimes, a listener might not like a particular sound that a band uses in a heavy metal song, but beauty, 'tis said, is in the eye of the beholder.

If you listen carefully to what heavy metal musicians are doing, perhaps you'll learn to feel the beauty the way diehard fans do.

"In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 1" (and indeed most of the album that it's from) is a heavy metal song. Dream Theater doesn't normally play music that I would deem "sexy", but this one kinda comes close. It's got a rawness to it, a "there's dark stuff out there, folks, and buckle up, cuz we're gonna tell you about it" attitude. From the first riff, it's almost like John Petrucci says, "attack!" and then the other guys go, "good plan, bro. Look out, world."

Much DT music seems to me fast, chill music that says, "we're playing music with all the love and care in us, take it or leave it". This song ain't that, y'all.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy!
~Michael

*************************************
What is the "Dream Theater Share-a-thon"?

I will be posting a link to a song/piece by my favorite band, Dream Theater, hopefully every day until we have successfully enjoyed every original song that they have recorded in-studio. There are many good reasons to do this, but you can probably guess most of the ones that I'm thinking.

No adieu.
We're just gonna do it.

I'm going to try to help you know what to expect a little bit without influencing the way that you experience the song. I want you to have the chance to enjoy the music on your own without any spoilers, just as I did.

I will also tell you that some of the things that Dream Theater does may be quite different than much of the music that you have listened to before. Sometimes it may be so new that it makes you a bit uneasy or just doesn't connect to you at all. If that happens, I encourage you to listen to it a few times, perhaps in different ways... once in the background while you do dishes, once with your eyes closed and your full attention, once hanging upside down like a bat. You get the idea.

You may even want to come back to it later for another listen.

I believe that, if you go on this journey with me, you will find more than a few songs that you enjoy. My mom saw Dream Theater live in K.C. and really enjoyed them, and she usually listens to NPR which I don't think gets to rock and roll that much. Dream Theater truly has something for everyone. Not everything they do may be your thing, but some of it may change your life for the better the way that it did mine.

****************************

~In loving memory of Tim~

Dream Theater Share-a-thon, Day 16: "Bridges in the Sky"

"Bridges in the Sky", Track 5 on "A Dramatic Turn of Events"(2011)

Length - 11:02
Tempo - Quick, then fast with held-note fill-in
Intro - sound sampling, pitched and un-pitched percussion
Texture - layers. sometimes it's like the other (non-vocal) instruments are playing variations on the vocal line
Features - full pitch range guitar and keyboard soloing, keyboard magic, subtle backing vocals

************************

Dream Theater formed at Berklee in 1985. The original three members were John Petrucci (guitar) and John Myung (bass), friends from Long Island, and Mike Portnoy (percussion) whom the Johns heard in a practice room and said, "we gotta get that guy". (Something along those lines).

"A Dramatic Turn of Events" lineup:
Petrucci - guitar, backing vocals
Myung - bass
Portnoy - percussion
Jordan Rudess - keyboards, continuum, Morphwiz iPad app
James LaBrie - Vocals

Lyrics for "Bridges in the Sky":

Blackness awakens
Visions come alive
Seeing through darkness
With borrowed eyes

Death survivor
Take me higher
Reunite my soul

Whisperer of truth
I trust in you
To make me whole

Sun
Come shine my way
May healing waters bury all my pain

Wind
Carry me home
The fabric of reality is tearing apart
The piece of me that died
Will return
To live again

Feeling myself slip away
Suddenly dreaming awake
Hidden memories
Flooding back

I will not grow in the light
Until I pass through the darkest caverns of my heart

Dance with fire
Spirit guide erase the world outside

Messenger of truth
I trust in you
Transform me now

Sun
Come shine my way
May healing waters bury all my pain

Wind
Carry me home
The fabric of reality is tearing apart
The piece of me that died
Will return
To live again

And at last the time has come
To unite again as one

To the power of the Earth I'm calling
Crossing bridges in the sky
On a journey to renew my life
Shaman take my hand

Sun
Come shine my way
May healing waters bury all my pain

Wind
Carry me home
The fabric of reality is tearing apart
The piece of me that died
Will return
To live again

And at last the time has come
To unite again as one
To the power of the Earth I'm calling
Crossing bridges in the sky
On a journey to renew my life
Shaman take my hand

********************************

SPOILERS AND SUBJECTIVITY BELOW: YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THIS AFTER LISTENING

How to listen: Get your supper ready, (if you can, we're not classist here) be sure that you have a good sound system or good headphones, get ready to smile and feel something, and plan to listen several times in row. You'll very likely love the song from the first listen, but you're gonna wanna take it in a couple more times. Think of yourself as a sports fan that's going to want to see a replay again and again. I am so pumped to share it with you! It's like a roller coaster that has you wanting to shout "again! again!" like a little kid. P.S. This song is better louder.

Words to describe this song:groovy, grindy, cool, artsy, powerful

Stream-of-consciousness thoughts as I listen to "Bridges in the Sky":
Full disclosure: "Bridges in the Sky is in my DT top 20. I absolutely love this work. It's masterful. This song is very sing-along-able. It's dramatic, powerful, and never gets old. There are so many layers, and I can listen to this song in many different moods and feel like it's just what I need at that moment. With all the stuff going on with the instruments, you can zone in on whatever you want and get something different. There are attacking heavy-metal moments, but they don't drag it out, so the average listener can get just the right amount of metal imbibery before new stuff comes in.
My older sister is a trained aerial, modern, and ballet dancer, for the last couple of years branching out into circus work. (Shameless plug: She's an outreach movement artist in the Tulsa, OK metro with a group called "Between the Lines Movement Project". Click this text to go see their Facebook page. Let's just say I have attended a fair number of recitals in my time. More than any other Dream Theater song, I have wanted to see this one choreographed into a modern dance recital. I'm hoping that she reads this. ;) )

Thank you for reading, and enjoy!
Michael

*************************************
What is the "Dream Theater Share-a-thon"?

I will be posting a link to a song/piece by my favorite band, Dream Theater, hopefully every day until we have successfully enjoyed every original song that they have recorded in-studio. There are many good reasons to do this, but you can probably guess most of the ones that I'm thinking.

No adieu.
We're just gonna do it.

I'm going to try to help you know what to expect a little bit without influencing the way that you experience the song. I want you to have the chance to enjoy the music on your own without any spoilers, just as I did.

I will also tell you that some of the things that Dream Theater does may be quite different than much of the music that you have listened to before. Sometimes it may be so new that it makes you a bit uneasy or just doesn't connect to you at all. If that happens, I encourage you to listen to it a few times, perhaps in different ways... once in the background while you do dishes, once with your eyes closed and your full attention, once hanging upside down like a bat. You get the idea.

You may even want to come back to it later for another listen.

I believe that, if you go on this journey with me, you will find more than a few songs that you enjoy. My mom saw Dream Theater live in K.C. and really enjoyed them, and she usually listens to NPR which I don't think gets to rock and roll that much. Dream Theater truly has something for everyone. Not everything they do may be your thing, but some of it may change your life for the better the way that it did mine.

****************************

~In loving memory of Tim~