Frank Kogan

I had a thought the other day about "classroomy shit but not The Classroom" -- my students HATE the stuff we do that is the most classroom/hallway-busting (even if it doesn't really accomplish that goal) -- getting into what actually matters to them and letting them do it in the way they want to do it, but expecting some of the rigor they're expected to apply to "the subject matter" even though what we're doing isn't, strictly speaking, "the subject matter." Except to the extent that in the hallway, everything is always the subject already, hence there is no "subject." (Don't really want to mangle up my teaching observations with your metaphorical landscape here. I know that's not always the most productive way to apply it; it's just where my head's usually at.)

What my students usually want to do is pure hallway; but what they believe they SHOULD do, or are supposed to be doing in school, is pure classroom. So first choice: pure hallway. Second choice: pure classroom (this surprised me a little, but it makes sense). Third choice: Dressing up the hallway as the calssroom (as when, e.g., a Jeopardy review game is secretly just an excuse to hoot and holler and gossip and sing and not learn things about what you're supposed to be learning about). Fourth choice: Dressing up the classroom as the hallway (this is just watered-down classroom, and it's usually when students wonder why they can't just pick the hallway or the classroom). I don't know that they really have choices of what they'd like to do in school that doesn't abide classroom/hallway. They don't think that these things should "count" as school.

Employing the practice and deliberation and care that the classroom demands to everything outside of it (*potentially* doing that, anyway -- not that you have to, but that you can and will) is uniquely difficult, I think, when you grew up inside the split.

An imperfect metaphor: when I learned jazz piano, after 15 years of classical training, I was really stuck on how to do it right, since "doing it right" was EASY in classical, was a series of accomplishments achieved with the right practice, more or less. But in jazz you had to do all that technical stuff and also be COOL. You could do everything right, study and practice and all that, and still sound like a dork, still have no hairstyle to show for it. ('Course you needed a hairstyle in classical, too, and I had one. My problem was always with the deliberation and practice, not with the hairstyle. In jazz, my problem was BOTH. I wasn't great at the deliberation and practice, but I also needed a lot more hairstyle to not sound like a goober, and even once I had a hairstyle, people could still make fun of it and they wouldn't be wrong.)