May 6, 2011
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1 Did a week just run past me?
2 Wow.
3 I looked on my kitchen counter and saw the Merc News’ Eye, and thought to myself, “That’s last week’s.” Uh…no?
4 This truly felt like the fastest week of the year to me. I think a part of me feels that I still need to teach my students more things, and that the year feels like it is ending too early. When have I ever said THAT???
5 I have been running full bore all week, trying to make every single day count. It is occurring to me that these five periods have become entire worlds for my students. Each class has created its own identity, and because we use a lot of groupwork and group activities, they have bonded with their own groups, each group in turn bonding with the rest of the class.
6 So it’s interesting watching them interacting, hugging, and acting goofy and all. Midway through LAST semester they would climb all over each other to take pictures and to laugh.
7 I always think that a class bonding together serves to create lifelong friends and awesome memories.
8 I remember sometimes when Ponch and I would sit around goofing on a great rehearsal how I would often turn to him and say, “Mr. Ponticelli sir, we are in the business of creating memories!” He would always respond with, “Mr. Harrington sir, you are absolutely right!” or words to that effect.
9 I still see it that way. Yesterday I introduced my classes to five awesome songs by Simon and Garfunkel. I gave all of them, including my sheltered class, the songs The Sound of Silence, Scarborough Fair, Cloudy, America, and The 59th St. Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).
10 Scarborough Fair on paper WITH lyrics to the Canticle is an amazing experience for young students. Chord-wise, it’s a reasonably easy song to play. But adding the other instruments as well as a secondary story interweaving with the primary story makes it a masterpiece in my eyes, up there with anything Poe ever did. One girl was spinning from the ride.
11 Me too.
12 When I was younger, I was sometimes looked down by the “intellectuals” because Simon and Garfunkel were “…too pop. Dylan is the real deal!” they would say.
13 Huh? To me there is no denying that Dylan is one of the most talented artists to emerge from the folk-rock genre. But really? Simon and Garfunkel deserve the accolades. Dylan: Uglier. Equally poetic. Lousier voice. Has been a ghost for years.
14 I don’t really like comparing artists, in general. It is truly a matter of personal taste, but I used to get bugged by the “too pop” stuff. And Simon’s solo career really began when Garfunkel decided to move his career into the movies.
15 Simon kept re-defining himself, and the two would often quarrel, and oftentimes not even speak to each other. And yes, Paul Simon released a lot of tepid songs always with reasonably good lyrics, but not many met the purity and essence of poetry as when the two worked together.
16 Those five songs rocked my students. I worried that my assignment might have turned two artists I loved into an “Englishy” assignment to my students, and that they might just see it as yet another in a bunch of authors stuck in a book.
17 But Cloudy, a more obscure song, always lights the students up. It’s a fun, carefree romp, at least on the surface. Some students last year found it brooding and grey. They saw “The sky is grey and white and cloudy” as a person who was depressed. The lyrics say that, but the music doesn’t. Interesting.
18 So even though the tune tumbles and skips along, some of the words don’t seem so light to some of the students. Interesting, because I always feel happy whenever I hear the song. I assumed everybody else felt the same vibe. Am I allowed to use that term? “Vibe”? Request permission. Permission granted.
19 Here is a link to the tune. Listen immediately, and enjoy. It’s pretty sweet if you’ve never heard it:
Cloudy by Paul Simon
Performed by Simon and Garfunkel
Cloudy
The sky is grey and white and cloudy,
Sometimes I think its hanging down on me.
And its a hitchhike a hundred miles.
I’m a ragamuffin child.
Pointed finger-painted smile.
I left my shadow waiting down the road for me a while.
Cloudy
My thoughts are scattered and they’re cloudy,
They have no borders, no boundaries.
They echo and they swell
From Tolstoi [sik] to Tinker Bell.
Down from Berkeley to Carmel.
Got some pictures in my pocket and a lot of time to kill.
Hey sunshine
I havent seen you in a long time.
Why dont you show your face and bend my mind?
These clouds stick to the sky
Like a floating question, “Why?”
And they linger there to die.
They dont know where they’re going and my friend, neither do I.
Cloudy,
Cloudy.20 AnywayZ it is alway fun watching the students discover this little gem.
21 And I never really know who will enjoy the tunes. Some are quite close-minded, and not willing to listen to anything but the music THEY like. I’m quite open to the music that they like, so I invite them to enjoy the music I like. All is music.
22 Others become instantly enthralled. One student came up to me this morning and whispered, “Um…Mr. Harrington, while we’re between songs, could I share a poem I just wrote, just now, with the class?”
23 It was SO cool. His poem was free verse, which is usually pretty nice because most high school students think that all it takes to construct a poem awkwardly to throw a bunch of words together so that they will achieve a rhyme.
24 <basketball buzzer>
25 It doesn’t matter to them that I tell them that a large majority of poems nowadays don’t rhyme. In general, overdoing any device in a poem is going to make it not work. That being said, I also mentioned to my class that Cloudy is arguably the first poem that succeeds beautifully with four lines in succession rhyming ( the rhyme scheme is an absurd a a bbbb a a cccc dd eeee). I love it though:
These clouds stick to the sky
Like a floating question, “Why?”
And they linger there to die.
They dont know where they are going and my friend, neither do I.26 But my students step into battle today today equipped with five poems apiece. I will have coffee, orange juice, icy milk, water, cinnamon buns, coffee cake, and a large assortment of Cuties, bananas, apples, and other fine items. I will probably play some Miles Davis as they come in, and let the day take off. These guys write beautifully, so I am really looking forward to our biggest day of the school year.
27 I might add here and now that this is the first Daily News EVER that contains an embedded YouTube video! I have no idea how I did it, and when I went to google how to do that, you evidently need special tools, a guy from You Tube to instruct you how to use the bot that will later teach you, and a complete codebook that is a thousand pages in length. Something having to do with Sanskrit was also brought up; not sure what. It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery…
28 So this one worked, at least it did last night. I tried to get another on today’s DN, and it was a complete “access denied”. Open the pod-bay door, HAL.
29 I’m sorry Dave…I’m afraid I can’t do that.
30 So I wrestled around with that last night, but nothing wanted to work after the first one.
31 I’ll give it a look this weekend. It was pretty fun when it happened because the implications are that I could finally have videos on the DN.
32 So I think that enough time has been taken from me on this guy.
33 I’m putting this DN to bed for the night or morning or whatever it is.
34 Have a great weekend.
35 Peace.
~H~
