Nowhere Man

Al,

I chuckled the other day when you said you envision this blog as like Meier & Ravitch's Bridging Differences blog. It's just like it, except they are smart, accomplished and have a huge following.

Sorry to have another post about music but Sandra and I saw Paul McCartney last night at Yankee Stadium. It was an amazing show, the guy is an icon. The reason I am writing about it is because during the show, Paul stopped between songs and was talking to the audience. In one of these intervals, he told the crowd how much he was trying to ignore the signs they were holding up. He say something like "I'm trying not to read the signs wen I'm up here because I am trying to remember the cords and lyrics and make it sound good for you all." I was struck by this because here is Paul McCartney, a Beatle, a living legend that has been doing this for 50+ years and he has to seriously concentrate when he is up there and these are songs that he has performed hundreds of times. It reminded me of the passage in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers when he was talking about what made The Beatles great:

“And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn’t that it paid well. It didn’t. Or that the acoustics were fantastic. They weren’t. Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. They were anything but. It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play.

“Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band’s performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra:

‘We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.’

[…] ” The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, five or more hours a night. On their second trip, they played 92 times. On their third trip, they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg gigs, in Nov and Dec of 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. But the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you know how extraordinary this is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.

“‘They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,’ Norman went on. ‘They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers—cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.’”

Then I started thinking about our students. How are they suppose to understand concepts or get better skilled at things at the pace and rate of school? Last year our Junior team taught the history of the world in one school year and I am not pointing fingers. My Psychology College Now class covers so much material in one semester, it is a mile wide and an inch deep (I would love to post another time about how I could improve that but still feel comfortable that students covered basics) I know you might go back to your "Jaywalking" analogy here and I understand why you do. But I guess this raises the same question for me that I raised in my first post. What is the purpose of school and education? Do we want kids to know a little bit of everything or have a real deep understanding of a select group of concepts & skills. I am sure the answer is somewhere in the middle but this is the thing that I think about when I go see Paul McCartney.

My next post will be about STEM Education and seat time, it is going to be great (probably not).

Live and Let Die,
Jeff