14 October 2011

Flamenco and the Khan Academy: Notes from the PNAIS conference

Here I am eating my sack lunch in the gym of a local independent school and I have been so inspired this morning that I am taking my lunch break to share.  (And I know if  I don't do it now, I will let it go for a month and then something else will come up.)

I have been able to connect my flamenco experience directly to the talks I just heard by Sal Khan of Khan Academy, and Dr. Tae, physicist and avid skateboarder who uses skateboard examples to make his points about education.  I have been able to do much the same with flamenco.  Mindset, deliberate practice, and flow are the main concepts he touched upon to present ideal learning:  Your mindset has to be one of growth, that admits talent is overrated (the title of a book he referenced and recommended) and anything can be achieved with work; your practice must be deliberate and focused on what you really need to improve because "feel good" practice doesn't actually improve your work; and you need to experience moments of complete focus when the work just happens almost in a time vacuum where you are deeply challenged but totally dedicated to the challenge and feel some sense of progress or success.  These are all concepts fundamental to school and to doing art.



María Bermudez
I was at a flamenco workshop last weekend that totally challenged me, mostly because I wasn't able to attend the first day and I was incredibly stressed in general.  I came home from María Bermudez's workshop ready to cry, and in fact, I took my feelings of inadequacy out on my family.  But I knew even in the middle of the class that the hurt was important - we are not going to improve unless we spend some time (not ALL the time) doing things that we really can't quite do yet, but almost.  I am still out of practice and found that I expected to do steps no problem and follow sequence but I am in fact still very rusty.  That was hard to realize.  But the next day I went back and tried to keep my energy positive, and I did have a better day.  It's amazing how much of a mental challenge dance can be, and particularly flamenco, where your strength, confidence, and individuality are the whole point.  It was such a good example of deliberate practice and of flow, even if it was difficult, and both of those things almost always are.  When the difficult feels fantastic, you feel alive. 

I have been a "natural" with language most of my life, but certainly not with dance so I can identify with my struggling students from that perspective.  My "natural talent" was nowhere to be seen in my first semesters of dance class, but I was crazy enough to keep going.  Over a decade later, I am dancing as well as others who do in fact have a long history of dancing and growing up in ballet, etc.  It is so uplifting to feel for myself, not just hear it in lectures, that over time even the "slow" student can excel and make up for lost time. 

That brings me to Sal Khan, who was our keynote speaker this morning, who made just that point about traditional classrooms:  If you never ever let kids work at their own pace and do as many repetitions of an activity as they may need to master it, you are locking them into your schedule for what has to be learned and when.  He showed us graphs of classrooms that are using his videos and teaching system that displayed the amount of time each student spent doing particular activities, and the point was this:  there were students who clearly started off low on the graph, who clearly had long plateaus of working on just one topic, but who then jumped off and became the most advanced in the class once that one topic was mastered.  Our normal learning environments don't allow for this because you have to take the test and move on.

The things I am excited to do in my classroom are have students take grammar notes and study the rules at home so that we can practice and interact more in class; I also want to give them study days when they can work on any topic they want in the class so that they can get help from each other and from me at their own pace.  It's not about content, it's about process and focus.

The things I want to remember in my flamenco practice are that I need to push myself to do the details, consistently, rather than fart around and let myself do the easy stuff (even though the easy stuff is what needs to come out in performance), and I want to really keep encouraging myself to put in the hours.  Time, time, time.  Eventually, I will be improving and changing, just like I already have been, up until my maternity break. 
Last night I talked to Amelia of Oleaje after their gig at Guaymas Cantina downtown, and we were both sharing how hard it is to do this with a toddler at home, and how hard it is to be a tall American doing an art form created by the smaller women of Spain centuries ago. 

There are always challenges to overcome.  I am so excited to tackle them, both in the classroom and in the dance studio, thanks to Sal Khan and Dr. Tae. 

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