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Is Anyone Listening?

I’ve been posting my music on SoundCloud for the past couple of years.  It’s been an interesting experience, to say the least.  I began by posting a bunch of old compositions that had been languishing on a hard drive for a very long time.  Before long, I began to post new compositions at the precise moment that they were completed.  These new pieces were the result of a new year’s resolution a few years back; I decided to join a pair of composition “clubs” that encouraged members to post new work every week.  I even wrote a blog post about it way back at the beginning.  You can check it out here.

Anyway, I’ve heard some rumors recently that SoundCloud isn’t doing very well financially, which got me thinking about the good and bad aspects of freely sharing music online.  On the plus side, the ease with which new music can be published is pretty incredible.  Sure, there’s no money at stake for most of us, so it should come as no big surprise that the process is easier than posting music with commercial services like iTunes.  Regardless, the fact that I can finish a piece and post it within seconds is pretty cool.  And the number of users is so massive that it isn’t difficult to find a community of like-minded individuals that enjoy listening to each other’s music.  This is especially important for those of us who write in more obscure genres like electroacoustic and experimental music.

But I think there are some minuses as well.  First, there’s a tendency to “like” things just out of obligation, which means that “likes” can be something of a popularity contest.  If I want someone to “like” something of mine, the best tactic would appear to be to head over to their channel and “like” a bunch of their stuff.  I don’t actually do this, but I get the sense that many people do.  The other downside of SoundCloud is that the ease of sharing can result in a sort of “over sharing.”  Traditionally, composers were reluctant to release unfinished music into the world because of the amount of work required to publish something, and also out of a fear of negative criticism.  Now we have a situation where the work required to publish is reduced to almost nothing, and the culture of “like”-ing everything has removed any fear of negative criticism.  As a realist, composers will post just about anything, no matter how simplistic or unfinished it may be.  The thing is, I don’t actually care that people post rough work in principal, but I do have an issue with the fact that SO MUCH stuff is published every day.  This is true just amongst the 100 or so people I follow.  And when you add the stuff that those individuals are re-posting the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty bad very quickly.

I frequently ask my colleagues and students how they feel about this kind of service.  It’s no surprise to me that the more established composers in my social circle don’t find SoundCloud particularly appealing; perhaps they believe there is still some commercial value in retaining their work as a paid commodity?  On the other hand, my students embrace these services whole-heartedly, which is almost certainly a result of their view of the music industry; they don’t believe that a music recording has inherent value, so in their minds it is best to just give it away as a type of publicity.  I guess I’m in the latter camp as well, but primarily because I compose in a genre that is so removed from any form of commerce.  As least it makes my decision to share my music an easy one.

I hope SoundCloud survives and continues to provide a valuable service to composers, regardless of their personal reasons for using the service.  I’d hate to have to post my work to YouTube and have the experience of listening to my music bookended by cats flushing toilets.  Although I do like cats.

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Does Attendance Matter?

I find it ironic that, while every K-12 school in the country emphasizes attendance as one key to academic success, we in the higher ed community pretend like it doesn’t matter.  Or at least that’s how it seems to me when I’m told that I can’t count attendance as a graded component of my classes.  Now I understand that this is a complex issue that can’t be fully addressed in a blog post (or based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the subject).  And I know that the cynical view of the K-12 attendance emphasis is that those schools are only concerned about apportionment funding which is reduced when students are absent.  But I’m still going to try to convey my thoughts on the matter with regard to my tiny little corner of academia.

As you would most certainly know if you’ve read any of my prior blog posts, I teach both online and on-campus classes.  And in most cases I offer an online-only section for every class that I teach on campus.  (I also have classes that I only teach online, but they aren’t really relevant to this discussion.)  As a result, I have a scientifically weak but anecdotally strong (hah!) scenario for comparing online and on-campus performance.  Without a doubt, the on-campus students perform better when compared to their online counterparts.  I personally believe that there are several reasons why on-campus students tend to do better:  they are more likely to be full-time students, they are making a bigger commitment right from the outset because they travel to campus every week, they have the opportunity to develop a peer group that is more meaningful than just chatting with other students in online forums, they (sometimes) experience positive peer pressure to perform well academically for fear of public embarrassment, etc.  Another aspect that matters to me is my ability to connect with students in the classroom, and on a personal level because I see them around campus over the course of several months or even years.

OK, so we’ve established that I believe on-campus students have a greater chance for success and probably have a better instructional experience overall.  (Although I do believe some classes like software training can actually be better online, but I digress.)  So what does this have to do with attendance?  If you go back and look at the reasons I listed above for on-campus student success, you’ll see that almost all of them require regular attendance.  And, once again anecdotally, I have witnessed a direct connection between success in on-campus classes and regular attendance.  Now I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing that I used to think–the students who attend regularly were going to do well regardless, so I’m making a correlation that is completely unscientific.  Yes, that may be true.  And it may be true that applying arbitrary attendance pressure to “truant” students will not increase their chance of success.  But my gut tells me that getting these students to attend more regularly does make a difference.

When I first started teaching at community college, the attrition in my classes was pretty bad at time.  I can remember more than one class that began with fifteen students attending lectures, and ended with two or three.  I was briefly puzzled by this, but after a while it became clear what was happening; students would realize at some point during the term that they could just stay home, do the reading, and submit assignments without penalty.   But it was clear to me that students who performed this calculus and decided to stop going to class did worse as the term progressed.  There was a definite drop-off in their performance after they stopped attending regularly, and they were more likely to stop participating altogether before the end of the term.  So after thinking about this for a little while, I decided to change my class policies and award a significant number of points for class participation.  (Which is something we ARE permitted to do.)  The transformation was pretty miraculous.  I’d say attrition rates in my on-campus classes are now less than 10%, which appears to be very very good for community college.  And, as an added bonus, it has made the classes more rewarding for me to teach, and has absolutely fostered greater camaraderie amongst my students.

So, if I’ve solved the attendance problem with my classes, why am I writing this post?  It’s primarily just to share my approach, which did require a fair amount of work to institute:  I had to rewrite every syllabus for every on-campus class, weight the various assignments differently to find a balance, and restructure my lectures to allow for increased student participation.  None of these are bad things, and in fact they have been completely beneficial, but they required a lot of work.  And I know that many of my colleagues are hesitant to go down that road and increase their already heavy workloads.  in summary, I feel that many more instructors could move to solve their own attendance issues, which I believe will absolutely have a positive impact on student success, if we could just grade on attendance.  The other steps to actually increase classroom participation could then be optional, but at least there would be more butts in the seats which I think is good for everyone.

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Mentor

Last night I attended a memorial concert for Mark Trayle at Mills College in Oakland.  Mark was my mentor while I was in graduate school at CalArts many years ago.  He passed away from pancreatic cancer just before he was scheduled to play on the Electroacoustica festival that I produced at Foothill in April 2015.  The memorial concert was exactly what I expected knowing Mark’s work and the quality and sensitivity of the performers gathered from both CalArts and Mills.  (For those who don’t know, those two institutions share a very close relationship between their music departments…)  The five compositions on the concert were all typical of Mark’s work:  smart, challenging, and wildly creative.  The whole experience got me thinking about my time with Mark and what made him such a valuable mentor.

Mark Trayle

You see, I spent my undergraduate years in a (much) more traditional musical environment at Oberlin.  I was studying electronic and computer music, so you have to understand that “traditional” is a relative term here, but the program was focused on classical electronic music of the mid-20th century.  On the other hand, the graduate electronic composition program at CalArts was completely open, aside from the fact the graduate composers were expected to do something unique and forward-thinking.  It was the perfect move for me because I did have a solid foundation from Oberlin, but was looking for a way to define my own style.  CalArts also emphasized solo and small ensemble performance which was very practical for composers about to set off on their own.

Anyway, Mark was one of the reasons I was attracted to the program when I interviewed at CalArts.  He just seemed so smart and relaxed and friendly.  Subsequently, my private composition lessons with him were the highlight of my two years there.  Unlike my undergrad composition lessons, which felt more like receiving a stern lecture from a grumpy grandfather, Mark was very down-to-earth and supportive.  We would rarely meet in his office; we typically went down to the campus coffee house to get espresso which we would sip while walking around the campus.  Pretty funny when you consider that we were talking about computers and software and building unusual control interfaces that often required soldering.  But it was exactly what I needed at the time.  He was open to anything, never laughed at my crazy ideas, and pushed me to collaborate with everyone and create as much music as possible.  Above all, he taught my by his example that creative success required hard work and that the creative process should be taken very seriously.  Oh and that it was OK to walk around and drink coffee and stare at trees while you thought about your next project.

And there’s another reason I’ve been thinking about Mark since his death.  When I arrived at CalArts, Mark was beginning his second year there.  But the interesting part is that it was his second year in academia after about 20 years in the corporate world.  At that time, Mark was in his early 40s, with a wife and a young son, and he had just left a (potentially) more lucrative career in the Bay Area to take a position at CalArts.  My current situation is oddly similar; I spent about 15 years in the corporate world, alternating between creative and technical work, before I had the incredible fortune of finding a full-time faculty position.  And, I’m about the same age that Mark was back then.  It gets you thinking about cycles and mortality and all that deep stuff.

I don’t have private composition students at Foothill, although I hope that some day I will.  But I do mentor students on a regular basis.  I just hope that I can inspire and encourage my students the way that Mark did for me and many others.

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Textbook Boogie

I was looking forward to a (relatively) relaxed winter term this year.  For the past couple of years, I been busy taking classes for professional growth and writing curriculum for my own new classes.  (And composing music, and producing an electronic music festival, and raising two kids, and trying not to get divorced, and…)  My plan this quarter was to take just one class, and I don’t have any new classes on my teaching schedule.  But, being a glutton for punishment, I decided this was the perfect time to rewrite a pop music history class that I’ve taught many times.  It was a solid class, but the previous materials were inherited from another faculty member and didn’t really reflect my personal take on the subject matter.  So, I decided a rewrite was in order.

So, the first important fact here is that this is exclusively an online class.  Now you may be thinking that updating the course materials for an online class must be easier than preparing a dozen new lectures for a brick & mortar class.  You’d be wrong (for the most part).  The online class material preparation is quite different from the usual routine of reading, digesting, and presenting information in a classroom setting.  The primary difference from my perspective is that I often end up doing my “digesting” of the information while actually writing the online content;  despite my best intentions there is never enough time to fully digest everything and then switch over to the “writing code” mentality that is required to get the learning management system (LMS) ready for Monday morning.  You see, in an online class, the changes most be “set in stone” early enough to be posted to the LMS at the beginning of each week.  And then I can’t really change anything until the next term(!), because there’s a chance that someone will read the material and take that week’s quiz on Monday morning.  (How often do you find yourself cursing the proactive students when teaching a brick & mortar class!?!?)

Fortunately, I found an excellent textbook for this particular class: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! by Bob Stanley.  It strikes just the right balance between breath, depth, and readability.  And the years covered in the book align almost perfectly with my class (although his book starts about a decade earlier than my course).  So the bulk of the work is in organizing the course structure, coming up with meaningful discussion forum topics, building a listening guide (the biggest task), and writing new exams and quizzes.  Fortunately, it’s a labor of love with this type of class, although not as near and dear to my heart as my electronic music history class.

One problem that arises with online courses is something that might not occur to teachers who only teach in the classroom; the blowback from requiring ANY textbook, even one that costs $10 as an e-book, is pretty intense.  I think the reason for this is that my classes are very inexpensive (for CA residents), which in turn makes the slightest additional cost more meaningful.  I went to college in the era of the $100-200 book expense for almost every college class, so it’s a little hard for me to relate.  But the downward pricing pressure on ALL media is obviously a huge thing these days, and you can see it in the open source book movement.  Anyway, there’s quite a bit of pressure for online instructors to write proprietary course content.  I do it for several of my classe, but it is a MASSIVE undertaking that requires a summer break (or similar amount of time).  The rewards can be worth it:  you end up with content that reflects your own personal take on the subject, and there seems to be small connection between courses with no book fees and enrollment numbers.  But I’ve never really investigated to see if the enrollment connection is true.  Perhaps I’ll poll my fine arts colleagues and see if there’s some merit to that hypothesis.

Regardless, I’m using a book for this class and it seems to be working.  I guess we’ll see.

 

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The Script

As I mentioned in my last post, I make a ton of screen capture videos for my various classes.  Over that last few years many of my colleagues have asked about the tools I use and the basic workflow, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about it.

Tools

First, let me say that there are many tools out there, and they range from very simple capture utilities (like the built-in QuickTime Player capture on the Mac) to full-blown video editors (like Avid’s Media Composer or Adobe’s Premiere Pro).  I use a very cool application called Screenflow, which falls somewhere in the middle of the complexity/features spectrum.  The best thing about Sceenflow is that it handles the capture AND the editing in a single application.  It’s amazing as a capture tool, with the ability to capture a computer display, a USB video camera, the computer audio, and a USB microphone all at the same time.  It’s not a pro video editor, and it can get very sluggish with HD video footage, but it has all the standard features and enough sophistication to get the job done.  Also, it will export directly to a bunch of media hosting services including YouTube and Vimeo.

I don’t generally use a USB video camera for my class videos, but I own and occasionally use a Logitech C615.  It can capture Full HD 1080P, and looks pretty amazing as long as the lighting is relatively bright.

My biggest recommendation gear-wise is to invest in a good microphone.  I did my first few YouTube videos with a Logitech USB headset, and they sound pretty terrible.  (I cringe whenever I go back and listen to them.)  But after about a dozen videos like that I worked hard to find something better.  I have several setups that I use now, but the best price-to-performance ratio is with dedicated USB “podcast” microphones.  My recommendation is to go with something like the Audio-Technica AT2020 USB.  This baby costs about $100, which ain’t cheap by “normal people” standards (IE – people who don’t regularly work with $5000 microphones in the studio), but will make a HUGE difference in that quality of your voiceover.

Workflow

OK.  So now that we’ve got the gear talk out of the way, let’s talk about workflow.  This is definitely a place where you’re going to have to figure out what works for you, but I’m happy to share my workflow.  It’s really pretty simple.

  1. I start by writing down a bulleted list of items that I want to talk about in the video.  Note that I do not write out any text that I’m actually going to speak into the microphone.  I just have the bullets.  I prefer to do this rather than writing out a full script.  It takes about one minute assuming I have a course book table of contents or my own lecture slides, etc.
  2. I set up the software project (for me that’s Pro Tools or similar software) so that I’m not doing silly things like launching applications while the video is recording.  Note that I don’t always get it set up perfectly because I don’t know EXACTLY what I’m going to say (see #1 above).
  3. I begin recording.  It’s awkward for about the first minute, but then I usually get into a groove.  Because I don’t have a written script I frequently repeat myself until I nail each phrase.  I’ll even pause the capture sometimes if I really don’t know what to say next, or if I discover that I need to modify my project because I didn’t anticipate where I was going (see #2 above).  I know this sounds tedious, but I’ve performed a completely unscientific study which proved (to me) that it’s much faster than spending an hour writing a script for a 5-minute video.
  4. I finish the recording.  Typically, I’ll have about 20 minutes of video captured.
  5. I beging editing the video.  I like to cut my videos very tight, with no filler and no “umms” and “ahhs.”  Hey, people watching can pause and/or rewind if they need to, right?  I’d rather give a fast and efficient 5 minutes than a bloated out video that bores people to death.
  6. I add a title card, zooming effects, and subtitles for sections that need it.  This often includes mouse effects and keyboard shortcuts and such which Screenflow can generate automatically.
  7. I export my video (typically to YouTube) and get the embed link to add to my online course modules.

That’s it.  Like I said, this may not be the ideal workflow for everyone.  It may make more sense for some people to just record lectures in the classroom.  But this is the workflow that I use, and it’s been working pretty well for me.  If you want to check out the result feel free to visit my YouTube channel.

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Showtime

I just returned home from the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show this evening before sitting down to write this post.  It’s one of several conferences that I try to attend every year (although the Audio Engineering Society conference is the most relevant to my field).  Anyway, in spite of the usual long-haired metal heads that seem to be living in a 1980s, Sunset Strip time bubble, there were actually several new trends at the show.  One of those trends was definitely a greater emphasis on education.

The influence of video training sites like YouTube, Groove3, and Lynda.com is starting to have a noticeable impact on the audio engineering industry (and on the media production industry in general).  You can see it in many of the booths at NAMM.  Traditionally, manufacturers would present a well-choreographed demonstration that made their product look fast and powerful, but was very difficult for novices to follow.  These days, manufacturers are actually presenting meaningful tutorials that are slower-paced and accessible to everyone.  They take the time to explain concepts, and they may even have the camera zoom in on elements of the software or hardware interface to make sure everyone can see what’s going on.  And the crowds are eating it up.  Don’t get me wrong, their primary goal is to sell product.  But the focus on education through accessible demos is a clear sign that the industry has shifted its focus to the current generation of autodidacts that make up their growing customer base.

And I chalk it all up to a generation of musicians and audio engineers that have learned most (perhaps all?) of their skills from online videos.  The value of video-based training is something that I recognized several years ago.  As a result, I’ve been making YouTube videos for my students for some time now.  And I just completed a game audio tutorial series for Groove3, a subscription-based video training site that specifically caters to musicians and audio engineers.  I personally believe that these videos are essential for my online course sections, and are also a nice “value add” for students in my brick and mortar courses.

I try not to duplicate course materials in my online lessons, and the videos are a perfect to way to expand upon the concepts presented in the course textbooks without simply writing a bunch more text.  It’s also a way for me to inject something of my personal take on various topics; this permits me to offer the online students an experience that is more similar to attending my classroom lectures.  I try to make the videos as concise as possible, with a quick pace and tight editing.  This may seem to contradict my previous statement about accessibility,  but you have to remember that viewers can pause, rewind, and replay videos at their leisure.  Also, cutting out the pauses and “ums” and “uhs” makes me seem smarter that I really am.  So that’s good…

Overall, I think the videos are some of the best and most meaningful work I’ve done in the last couple of years.  And recently I’ve stated asking students to create their own videos as a means for submitting class assignments.  It’s actually very helpful and enjoyable to see students visually present and verbally describe their work.  In addition, the skills they are developing by producing the videos will be useful not matter what they do down the road.

 

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So Many Hats

My wife offers zero sympathy whenever I’m stressed-out about my job. She loves to quote some unnamed study that (she says) scientifically determined that being a “college professor” is the least stressful job in the universe. My usual response, borrowed from a fellow music department colleague, is “not if you’re doing it right.” Still she remains non-plussed.

But in all seriousness, I do find my job to be somewhat stressful. Certainly more stressful than it may appear from the outside. And here I’m defining “outside” to mean anyone who has never taught at a community college. You see, we have a lot of friends who are tenured faculty at four-year colleges. And I guess they do seem pretty relaxed about their job. (The only time they ever expressed concern about their job was when the topic of tenure review came up.) Which is not to say that teaching at a four-year college is easy, but it certainly appears to be less stressful than what I do.

So, this week I’m trying to take a critical look at what I do on a day-to-day basis and figure out why I feel a lot of stress. And what I’ve realized is that we community college faculty wear many more hats (so to speak) than other individuals that work in education. There’s the obvious stuff like teaching classes, developing curriculum, and working on committees. Many if not all educators have to deal with that stuff. But show me a full-time instructor in any other segment of education that has to deal with the range of issues that we confront at community colleges on a daily basis.

For example, every quarter I’m in a state of sheer terror as I watch the enrollment numbers for my classes. Like most community colleges, we have an enrollment minimum of 20 per class, and it’s not always easy to hit that number.  I have some classes that do blockbuster enrollment, which makes my life a bit easier.  But several of my classes are either new or more specialized and struggle to hit 20.  As a result, I do a lot of marketing for those classes: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, an email list, and good old-fashioned networking. You can probably guess that I don’t really want to be doing all that stuff. But I feel that it reflects poorly on myself and my program if a class is canceled.  That fear of embarrassment is a pretty strong motivator.  At least for me.  It’s a bit frustrating to hear my colleagues at four-year universities discuss their upper-division classes that run with single-digit enrollment (not to mentioned graduate-level courses).  There are no upper-division classes in community college (with a few exceptions), so I simply don’t have that luxury.  Perhaps some day I’ll be able to run classes based on the average enrollment across all of my courses, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Another hat I wear is to develop online curriculum for almost all of my classes. Even the classes I teach on-campus typically have an online-only section that requires a huge amount of time to design and manage. I don’t personally know any other educators (at least in the public sphere) who even teach online classes. When I mention it to my colleagues at four-year colleges they give me this dumb look that says “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to teach online.” The thing is that I’m proud of the fact the we offer classes (and even some degrees) online at Foothill. When you combine that kind of access with our extremely affordable tuition, you’re truly opening doors for a lot of underserved students to pursue a meaningful education. To make matters worse, we’re moving to a new online learning management system over the next year and I’m going to have to port about fifteen classes. Fun.

A third hat that we in the CTE (career and technical education) sector wear is to keep pace with our industry. I try to keep my finger on the pulse on what’s happening in the audio engineering, audio post-production, and game audio worlds. And in a CTE program I’m also tasked with steering our curriculum to keep it relevant in the industry. That means not just personally following trends (like in a traditional academic program), but modifying our courses and degrees to reflect those trends as quickly as possible. One reason I’ve been buried in work for the last two years is that I’ve written six new classes during that time. And to make matters worse, because I’m so dedicated (or crazy), I’ve had academic terms where I’ve taught TWO of those new classes for the first time.

Geez, writing all this down is really not helping my stress level.  But you can start to see why my wife thinks I make this job much harder than it needs to be. And she’s probably correct. But I love my job and I wouldn’t want to do it any other way.  Now if I could just get a couple of teaching assistants…

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Showing Up Is Half The Battle

I’ve been teaching full time for almost three academic years now. In that time, I’ve learned some valuable lessons about myself, my students, and my field. One thing that has become very clear is the difference in student success between those students who participate every week, and those who do not. I just finished grading midterm exams for one of my online music history classes, and the grades were quite predictable. Students who log in every week almost always get an “A” on the midterm or perhaps a “B”, while students who only occasionally log in achieve much lower grades. And I mean MUCH LOWER. There’s a crazy inverted bell curve that occurs in many of my classes, and this class is no different:

50 Students Total

(21) A
(12) B
(4) C
(3) D
(10) F

So, if we correlate those grades to online class participation we can see a clear connection. The “A” and “B” students log in every week without exception. The “C,” “D,” and “F” students log in with less frequency. The sad part (for me) is that I can look at the login stats and know that most of those “C” and “D” grades will become an “F” by the end of the class. But the inverse is also true; many of the “B” students will achieve an “A” by the end of the class (they probably just got off to a slow start and are just getting things figured out). Oh, and almost every student with an “A” at the midterm will finish with an “A.”

I’ve tried a lot of strategies to bring the low-performing students up, but they almost never seem to work. I send reminders, and even occasionally personal notes. I ask them to contact me if they need assistance. It’s very different from a face-to-face class where I can see significant improvement from just one small intervention. But the face-to-face students are a different bunch, especially considering that they are choosing to come to class over taking the class online. (All of my face-to-face classes have a corresponding online-only section.)

Anyway, this is something that I think about at midterm time every term. It kind of gets me down, but after three years I’ve been forced to accept that an (unacceptably) large percentage of my online students will not be successful. But it also creates a talking point for my face-to-face students. In some ways (not all), success in school is similar to success in life; showing up is half the battle.

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Call Me, Anytime.

I give my mobile phone number to students. There, I said it. I give them my personal mobile phone number. It’s not a shiny red “Bat Phone” that I reserve for student calls. It’s my everyday phone that I use to call my wife, receive calls about freelance gigs, check email, read Twitter feeds, and map the fastest route to school (gotta love Waze!). As a matter of fact, I don’t even know the phone number in my office at school. I think it’s x7949, but I’ll bet I’m off by a number or two.

I’m always amused by the reactions of my colleagues when I tell them this. They range from shock to sympathy to accusations of masochistic tendencies. And then the questions start. “Don’t you get calls at 3AM?” No. “Don’t they send you a ton of text messages?” No, although I do get the occasional annoying text message where the “texter” (is that a word?) fails to identify themselves or the class in which they are enrolled. I’ve been doing this for three (school) years now and it’s really not a big deal. You see, most of my students come from a generation that will avoid making an actual phone call at any cost. I find it kind of amusing, actually. I’ve got over 150 students this quarter and I can easily count the number of phone calls I’ve received from students on two hands. They just don’t call, even when they should! And I suppose even these students respect the title of “College Professor” enough to realize that text messages are probably a little too informal. (They certainly don’t hesitate to send off email messages; I guess they see that as a step up in the hierarchy of communication formality…)

Initially, I refused to use my office phone because I’m only in my office a few hours a week for office hours. The rest of the time I’m on campus I’m either teaching a class or working in one of the labs or the studio. And guess what, students can actually find me in the lab or studio by calling my mobile phone. That sort of makes sense, right? I don’t even know how to set up my office voicemail. Why would I want to call in and check voicemail on yet another annoying phone system? It takes me back to the days when I had a landline at home, or even further back to when I had an answering machine with those little cassette tapes.

I find that my college has a weird attachment their landline extension system. I haven’t had a dedicated phone number at a private sector job since 2008. There are some forms I fill out at school that ask for my extension, and I just cram my mobile phone number into the space. Same with online forms, although sometimes they only allow four digits so I leave it blank.

I guess ultimately the decision to give out my personal number comes down to a simple premise: I’m a full-time instructor. I don’t believe there’s any ambiguity to the term “full-time.” Sure, I can make myself inaccessible when I’m not physically at school, but I choose not to. I consider myself to be “on-call” during core hours for student interaction, which I find to be something like 10AM to 7PM. And, ultimately, making myself more accessible saves time and headaches because I don’t need to return a bunch of calls at a later time. I suppose the only thing I dislike more than landlines is a backlog of student communication. I want my students to feel valued and respected, and timely communication is a huge part of that. And I get a kick out of the typical student response when I answer the phone: “Wow, I can’t believe I called you and you answered.”

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How Did I Get Here?

When I was a kid, I was a pretty good student. I was always good at taking tests, and that carried me through even though my study habits were not that great. (Actually, that didn’t work so well in college Calculus, but that’s no big surprise.) Anyway, it’s kind of funny, considering my current career in education. Or perhaps its not so funny, when you consider that government officials, educators, and even parents are more obsessed with test scores than ever. Come to think of it, maybe this IS where I’m supposed to be. Who knows…

Anyway, the one thing I did consistently work hard at throughout my childhood was music. I started on the Piano at the age of five (six?), and continued studying, performing, and composing music in one form or another until this very day. In those days, the arts were considered an enrichment activity and not essential to success in life. And I find it somewhat unbelievable that this general attitude towards the arts continues today. Even after study after study shows that exposure to the arts is beneficial to children, arts programs are always the first to go when money gets tight. Well, it’s either the arts or physical education, which in my humble opinion is almost but not quite as appalling.

In hindsight, I can see a couple of things that very clearly influenced my decision to pursue music and audio engineering (and eventually education) as a career. First, my parents were both musicians, so in our household everyone played music and it was really no big deal. Growing up in that kind of environment pretty much guaranteed that I would be something of a musician no matter what else I chose to pursue. I’m pretty sure that’s what kept bringing me back to music on the few occasions when I got burnt out on a particular instrument or style of music. As I got older I would just bounce around to another instrument or style of music (or some new piece of music technology that my mother, bless her, was willing to pay for) and continue on.

And there was a second event, this one much more specific, that led me down this path. My mother was a psychologist and worked with medical students from one of the local medical schools. As a result, she developed a close personal relationship with the dean of that medical school. (I believe she was Greek, like my mother, which was probably a factor as well.) One day, when I was about sixteen, my mother decided that I should have lunch with the dean to talk about medical school. I can’t remember much about the conversation, but there was one tidbit that stuck with me: She told me to major in music in college. Now, I know what you think I’m about to say; that she thought I should pursue my one true passion and career be damned, right? Wrong. She told me that music majors had the highest rate of acceptance into medical school. What? No, not that most doctors were music majors. But that music majors were accepted at a higher rate than any other major (including classic pre-med majors like biology and chemistry). So, I went of to college and majored in music. I gave up on pre-med a couple of years later, but that’s another story.

So if med schools (whom we’ll assume know something about choosing strong applicants) are desperate to get more music majors, why do we still consider arts education to be a luxury as opposed to a necessity? If I had to venture a guess, I’d guess that it’s because of the current cost of education. If education were cheaper (or free?), I believe more parents would be supportive of their children who show an interest in the arts. But in the current reactionary education climate, even parents who innately understand the value of arts education are willing to throw the arts out the window when school budgets (and student loans) enter the conversation. Hey, we’re falling behind much of the rest of the world in math and science education, right? Everyone, FREAK OUT! My question is, where do we rank in arts education?