I’m enrolled in MVCR’s Moodle muddle. Yes, it’s acronym city and jargon aplenty. MVCR = making the virtual classroom a reality. Moodle is the interface (lame). So far, I’ve been writing ‘in the style.’ i.e., academic light. But as I grew restive, I broke out into micro fiction with the following DQ (discussion question). OK? (ok.)
8. What do you think about taking the physical presence of an instructor out of the classroom? What contributed value is gained by a physical presence versus a virtual one?
What distinguishes a physical presence from a virtual one?
There’s your flesh and blood teacher there, straggling in for his 9 AM. He’s got a bundle of books and papers, and he’s forgotten again to shave. They obviously don’t pay these people enough, because he could use a new pair of sneakers. The jeans he’s got on bear traces of last night’s dinner (Marinara) and the t-shirt took a coffee hit on the way up the stairs. Still, you gotta love this old fart. He really knows his counterpoint! It’s a potentially dry subject, but he brings the dead to life. It’s been a long story. We started with the species: note against note, the proper handling of the dissonance in two to one (crochets over minims), then eights over quarters, all the while hearing examples sung by the monks that know it and have practiced it for years. “Ah dissonance!” His head close to the beat up old spinet, whacking away at an interval with fingers like spider legs, “you like that!” He shouts again, “you think that sounds GOOD?” And now that we’ve gotten down to Bach, the daddy of ’em all…the old guy actually teared up as we listened to the final fugue from the “Kunst Der Fugue.” Just as Bach was about to blow the lid off, signing his name in the theme and bringing the counter-subject back in, the piece trails off, unfinished due to death. That’s pedagogy!
Mary, a flautist, took this same course online. Yep, “
Counterpoint 1 and 2.” It was clearly laid out with
modules like the rooms in a house and it lacked the flesh and blood distractions. Exercises were submitted as
Finale files. Mistakes were circled in red in the returned
PDF, and the rubric was the same as it’s always been for counterpoint: five points off per mistake. The same examples were used, but Mary only listened to the first few seconds of each one. She worked the exercises in the software, keeping track of the intervals, keeping her head above water at 80 points out of 100, 9 times out of 10, while listening to
Lady Gaga on her
iPod. Her favorite part of the course was the interaction with her peers, the other students. Their profiles sported head shots, and some of the dudes were
hot, hot, hot.
It seemed to some of them that Lady Gaga was pretty good at counterpoint. The facilitator jumped on this. She asked for an mp3. Yeah, they all agreed…”
Bad Romance” starts off like Bach and pits an eighth note bass line against a florid melody. That’s fifth species, pure and simple. It was the Lady Gaga discussion that actually led Mary to like totally ‘get’ counterpoint. So it’s the idea of keeping up the harmonic tension without letting the texture collapse and go bland for a beat. It’s about the propulsion of harmonic tension by alternating stress and repose in time . It’s about the beat! Alright! It was really funny when Lady Gaga led to “
Lady Madonna.” John Lennon (
or is that actually Paul’s song?) has the bass coming up to meet the descending melody. But pop music repeats, goes around and around like a wheel, or like wallpaper. One of the hotties in the class wrote quite the paragraph about it. He called it “a static form, not nearly what music is capable of.” “Go check out the
Bach,” he emailed. So Mary checked out the Bach (middle movement of the
Double Violin Concerto, BWV 1043). The melody hangs over the bass like forever, man. It’s really amazing. She sat at her terminal and had a good cry over it. It ended up on her iPod.
I think empathy can suffuse any discourse, mediated or not. If not, neither literature nor cinema would work.
What do YOU think?