Beyond School

I’ve chronicled my ups and downs with turning my students onto passion-based, self-directed learning via “Visionary Classroom Blogging” since starting the project back in October or so.  In saner moments, I’ve also reminded them and myself that blogging magic doesn’t happen overnight.  My own experience, stumbling about like a drunk through my own first month or two on this blog, was my teacher.  Then one day things clicked, and I wrote a post called “Sharpening the Focus.”  And I was off.

I hoped and hoped - expected is only barely too strong a word - that the same thing would happen with a percentage of my seniors (who are we kidding? Teaching is always a success with only a small percentage of students, isn’t it?).  All it would take is time.  With all the pressures to grade everything quickly, allowing that time for learning to happen by not grading at all, but simply giving time and space for regular blogging, was the hardest part of this whole project, by the way.

Anyway, it did happen with one of my seniors, Jung Hee, recently.  He found his “mission moment” in his post, “My High School Dream: Finally in Action.”  I hope you’ll visit his blog, listen to the posts of his music-CD-in-the-making, and support this visionary student blogger in his self-directed learning journey.

Moreover, I hope some of you who share his interest in music will drop a comment - only if sincere - and simply invite him into your twitterverse, blog, facebook, whatever, in the interest of helping him discover how all these things can serve as more than social fun, but as Personal Learning Networks (and JungHee, you know about Trackbacks and Technorati reactions, so you should find this post. Here’s a gift: join my own MusicGeeks Ning network to play with global song-making).  Expect more on PLN’s soon - I’m obsessed with it.

Here’s a clip from his mission moment. Significantly, it came during winter break, when schooly homework receded and gave some breathing room to his own spirit:

Ok, so senior first semester is coming close to an end. And so comes the second semester. Maybe the first thing that we would face would be the scary “senioritis”. It wasn’t long ago that I even heard about senioritis. But actually, I think I had already been experiencing it a little, when I’m not supposed to.

One day, our AP Literature teacher mentioned senioritis very briefly. He just had one comment. “You guys are going to face senioritis anyway, so wouldn’t you want to do something that’s outside of classroom, yet meaningful?”

This conversation arose because there is an audition for a play, “Waiting for Godot,” going on in our school. Well, people who have been around with me for a long time would definitely know that I am not an actor.

But I can do something with music. In fact, I had this plan in mind since the beginning of 9th grade. It’s just that I never had consistent time to complete it. So maybe this is the actual time to put it into action.

Here is the plan.

I have been composing songs, most of which are incomplete, since 9^th grade. I will complete viable ones, and also make some new songs over the winter break and first part of the second semester. I will pick maybe around 12 songs and record them. I already have two songs that I recorded in 9^th grade and 10^th grade, but I will rerecord them anyway because my recording sound quality has been improving significantly over last four years. After recording all the songs, I will figure out some places where I can make CD jackets and cases. That will become my personal album that contains all my history as a high school musician.

I mean, wouldn’t it be really cool if inside a CD player is a CD with a picture of me?

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

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