Final Entry

I think that Civic Engagement was a better, and more fun class than many of my peers gave it credit for. My professor was really organized and engage in the class, making the experience fun and educational. The use of movies and real examples from previous classes helped me connect more to the material, and relate it to my life. I wish more professors would use movies because reading about the issues is one thing, but seeing them on screen with real people and something to connect to really makes a bigger impact. You get to also see the surroundings and immerse yourself into the stories, taking the visuals and sounds with you along with the story. The movies also put the ideas into a context in ways that books have a difficult time achieving while being more involved.

I thought the book was good for the first chapter or two but then proceeded to repeat itself for the next 10 chapters. It carries a great message and meaning with it but it goes nowhere with it which drives it to the ground to the point that I debated if I to continue to read the book or not. I think that the idea of self confidence, and continuing onwards though the way is not clear is something we can apply to many parts of our life but after a few chapters, I got the message and was ready for something new besides becoming willingly distracted by my cats.



I think that the one thing that could have improved my experience in this class was more class discussion. I think that this could have helped make the reading more applicable to our lives and situations, as well as explored new ideas behind the lessons. I think that by involving the class more, it could have helped us share our lives and stories with each other, like the point of the book, but more memorable, and personal because we would be putting a face and personality with the story. I think we could have gone into more modern applications of the books ideas through discussion so we would be learning from past people, present people, and then applying it to the contemporary setting through our projects.

The class project I think is a great idea because it give students an opportunity to become engaged in something they have watched and talked about but never gotten involved in. I think, however, that this should be separate from the service learning hours because in most of my classes and experiences, these are mostly service and little learning. This class, in conjunction with my music capstone class, gave me the opportunity to start a community horn choir which I had been wanting to do for the two years I have been in Florida but never had the time for. This gave me the opportunity to begin one of my dreams and share music with the community through something I am the most familiar with.

I think that this class can help my generation become more involved in the world, as this video we saw in class puts it.

Fourth Entry

I have heard a lot of good things about The Last Lecture but I have not had the time to watch it on my own. One of the themes he brought up was to never give up on your dreams, even the ones from childhood. This made me think of what my dreams were as a child and how far I’ve come with them.
The first one I remembered instantly was that I wanted to be an astronaut, flying the space shuttle into orbit around earth, walking around in space and then exploring the other planets of the solar system. I had my sights set on Saturn since it had cool rings. Now, I’m a sixth year music major in college with almost no prospects of space flight in the near future. I’m ok with this though, because even though it would be great to be shot into space, this is something I feel passionate about and I can’t imagine anything else I would rather be doing. I will have to settle for riding Mission Space at Epcot for now. 

Another dream I had was to own a pet. I had some fish growing up along with a poor toad I found for a short period but never anything as large or in my view, as awesome, as a cat or a dog. Everybody else’s pet did cool things like tricks, play with objects or show some sort of sign they cared for their owner. The most my fish did was eat, poop and occasionally not die. During college, my then fiancé and I moved into an apartment and during one trip to the pet store to get a fish, we ended up coming home with a kitten instead. I was ecstatic that I finally had an animal to care for and play with! I had an odd feeling of accomplishment with a kitten running around my apartment, trying to play with anything not nailed down. I had to hide it from some apartment administrators until we found enough money to pay a pet deposit though. Soon after this, we realized that our kitten must be bored at home since we were at school all day so my child dream doubled into two kittens. The first one developed a strong attachment for my wife and the second one I’m sure would love a couch cushion as much as any person.

My two cats.

Third Entry

 

I thought that this movie dealt greatly with some of the ideas of this course in memorable ways. The first idea that comes to me is the idea of ripple effects. One person, in this case an elementary student, performed three selfless acts to help other people and no expectation of a reward. The student fed and sheltered a homeless person. In turn, he helped a woman who was about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. This lady later helped a young man evade police capture after stealing a boom box from a store. He in turn helped the daughter of the man who gave the journalist a new car. All of this started from one small act of giving a person some food and shelter for the night, creating effects that nobody would have even dreamed of! This created a pyramid scheme of goodwill that created good in the lives of these people. This idea is important to people who are losing hope in their cause or energy to continue to stand up for what they believe in. It may seem hopeless at the time but further down the road, it is impossible to predict how those actions in the past will shape the next step of the future. It can gain new attention to the cause, giving it momentum or even in some cases support from outside of the community. The actions can even inspire somebody outside of the initial cause to take action and become engaged in something else they are passionate about, creating change and rippling out in new directions, having the same inspiring effects elsewhere.
The other theme is just simply thinking about more than yourself. It may not be a direct message, but I think that this movie showed that true progress that has impact must come from people who aren’t trying to make things better for just themselves. It has to be about helping, and improving the lives of the other people around them. I think that this is something that is slowly being lost in our generation. I can see how many people have deemed us “The Lost Generation”. We seem to only be concerned about the short term comforts such as who updated facebook five seconds ago. We have to have college classes, such as Colloquium, to teach students what lives in the nature around us because we never spent a lot of time outdoors as children, but rather indoors with our gaming systems. We need to change this and prove that we aren’t an embarrassment historians are going to have to explain one day.

 They will have fun trying to explain this anyways.

Second Entry

I have decided that for the class project, my wife and I should start a community horn ensemble. I have wanted to start a community horn ensemble since I moved to Florida 2 years ago. I played in one while I lived in Iowa and I always thought it was under appreciated. I enjoyed it so much that later, through the McNair Scholar Program, I wrote about the entire history of our ensemble. With this, I gave presentations at numerous research conferences and learned that this ensemble was in fact the oldest, continually running ensemble like this in the entire state! Later, I took general knowledge about horn choirs across the United States and published an article about it through the International Horn Society:

http://www.hornsociety.org/en/horn-call/online-articles/409-horn-choir-history

I think that a community ensemble like this can help reconnect community members to music. I hear many people who miss playing music, reminiscing about high school or college band. An ensemble like this creates a unique environment where people who previously did not know each other get to create something as unique and intimate as music, while encompassing almost every skill level. To help make this more tied to the community rather than the university, we are going to hold it on Sunday afternoons when more community people are free. We are also going to try to hold it off of campus, bringing the ensemble into the community rather than isolated on campus. Holding this off of campus will also bring it physically closer to the community members we are trying to reach, making it easier and less of a time restriction because of travel distances. It will be in Bonita Springs or south Fort Myers where a majority of the prospective members are located as well as interested college students. Including college students I think will help because then people can learn from each other and it will not be a situation where the blind are leading the blind. I hope to find more community members when I send an announcement through our regional district of the International Horn Society, also giving the ensemble some free advertising.
The music for this type of ensemble is also diverse so everybody has a chance to be exposed to something new, as well as something more familiar. An example of this is an arrangement of Wagner’s introduction to Die Meistersinger and some hunting fanfares from around 1750. Both are quality pieces and to some extent educational, but more importantly they are substantial works and fun to play. I think that the key to making this a community event, bringing many people together to preserve music in our community, it must be enjoyable and stress free rather than perceived as something for people who already are professional musicians. I think that through community projects, people will realize that creating music is not something reserved for a select few, but rather something to be valued and accessible to everybody! Here's a short video of Bobby McFerrin demonstrating how music comes naturally to us with a group of scientists who are not considered “musically trained”.


World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Here is a completely different example of how people can have fun with music. You have to love the "drum solos".

First Entry

As I prepare for my auditions into graduate programs and worry about my future, this book in an odd way has emboldened me. For the rest of this month, I am auditioning for graduate schools every weekend. The stress that comes with this is immense. I can't help but feel the pressures that this will determine the next step of my life, and some of the future credentials that I will be judged by. I want to be a college professor in music as my end career goal and though it's not official, there do seem to be biases towards people from certain universities in hiring practices. Somebody from Julliard will get second look rather than somebody from Illinois because of this perception rather than focusing solely on their accomplishment, previous work and ideas for the future. Too often, this perception blinds people and poor choices are made. I have learned from experience that having good names attached to you does not ever necessarily mean you are an effective teacher.

To try to simplify a complex experience, in music, we have private instruction on our instruments with an instructor. At our previous school, we stood up as a studio and became engaged in our education when we realized that the new professor that was hired was not a good fit for many reasons including undermining our education and actions that were borderline unethical. We came together as a studio and became engaged in our education, bringing our concerns to the proper administrators in the music department. Unfortunately, we were largely ignored and told that we need to give her time. The administrators then met with the professor and told her about our meeting. Though none of us were directly named, it must have been obvious who brought concerns like this to the administrators when you only teach a single class. Lessons got much worse as she took this out on us in our lessons and our final grades. The studio members though, similar to the stories in Soul of a Citizen, did not give up and met with the administrators 3 semesters in a row but each time with the same result. 90% of the students transferred schools, myself included, because when we voiced our ideas, it ended up hurting our academic progress and absolutely no change occurred. This, unfortunately was my first experience with standing up for something I believed in and becoming engaged with something I felt passionate about. I have not done this since.

The writings in Soul of a Citizen have relieved some of this stress by assuring me that you can never see the next step clearly. You can never see how things will turn out and in the end, in ways you can never foresee, they will work out. I think that the story about Martin Luther King Junior really made this point. You always hear about the victories of our great heros but at the same time, behind all of this is a normal person who has the same doubts that the rest of us has. I had no idea that often did not know the next step he would take, and instead let the next step present itself as the unpredictable ripples of his actions created change and put things into motion.

Past the first chapter or two of this book, I feel that I could stop reading it and still get the same message that he is trying to convey. I feel that he gets too repetitive, telling essentially the same story but sometimes with different names and locations. I understand the idea of really trying to drive a point home and make sure it is understood but I think that he instead drives it into the ground.