Category: Walk My World

I’ve been in and out of the Walk My World Project a bit this year, following when I can and adding when I find time and inspiration. The most recent Learning Event for Walk My World has participants exploring “turning points” in their life — a time when that metaphorical fork was there and you made a choice (or had a choice a made for you).

I suppose Life is made up of these Turning Points, and all the “what ifs” that come with reflecting back. I chose a strange period in my life when the music in me went mostly silent. I had been playing my saxophone and guitar since childhood and teen years, but in my mid-20s, I packed them away.

That was for about 10 years.

I could probably point to all sorts of reasons, from the relationship I was in at the time, to the cramped apartment I was living in, to the confusion about the present and the future, to …. maybe I was just tired of music at that point. Maybe all of the above, with a little swirling action to stir the mix.

What changed that — what became my turning point — was a chance lunch. A colleague at the newspaper where I was working as a journalist was leaving the office to become a self-employed editor, and before he left, I suggested we have lunch. On the day of our lunch, he wasn’t feeling great, but he invited me to his house for coffee. I agreed, and we were hanging out when he brought me up to his “office” in the attic.

There, beyond his office area, was an attic full of musical instruments: guitars, bass, keyboard, amplifiers, drums. It was the outline of a band, and it turns out (unknown to either of us) that he was not only a musician, but he was also in the midst of starting a new band. When he found out I once played saxophone, he asked if I wanted to jam.

The rest is history … I did jam and he and I and the drummer have now been playing in various bands for nearly 20 years (we’re in the midst of reforming yet another new band right now as our Duke Rushmore band fell apart last year).

I am grateful for that particularly turning point, because it reminded me of what I loved about making music, and about writing songs, and about playing my saxophone, and about life, too, being more than work and family (though, of course, that is very important) and about having something just of your own.

I’ll never be a professional musician — I not good enough nor am I dedicated enough, and I have long been at peace with that — but I can’t imagine life without it, either. It’s odd now to think of that ten year gap — as if it were another false life being lived at the time, as if I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing.

Peace (in the Muse),
Kevin

I am dipping in a bit to this year’s Walk My World project. As always, Greg and Ian and company are encouraging people to think of identity of Self, and the connections to the Larger World. One of the early prompts has to do with thinking of Culture, and how we reflect the Culture we have inhabited.

I’ve been thinking a lot over time about my own privileged role as a White Man from the Middle Class teaching mostly White Boys and Girls from an insular White Suburban Community. (All those capital letters make what I wrote look strange and sort of gibberish.) Listening to Macklemore, and thinking of the controversy the year he and Ryan Lewis won the Grammy as white rappers, is giving some focus.

But I don’t have answers. Only questions.

Recently, I was in the audience of an event for Martin Luther King Day, at a local church in our small progressive city (Smith College sits at the center), and the guest speakers included college representatives of the Black Lives Matter movement. I glanced around the audience and saw mostly White Faces. The moderator of the panel was a white college representative, who dominated the discussion in an attempt to put the movement into some cultural context. I just wanted to hear the young organizers talk.

The raising of a Black Lives Matter banner sign on City Hall after that same MLK event continues to cause support and dissent and ripples and indignation in our community, as much for defending and criticizing the movement as for using City Hall as a backdrop for political statements. We’ve had our share of newspaper articles about the flying of the Confederate Flag in local communities, too. Not even our liberal Western Massachusetts is immune to the ways of the world.

I know I grew up privileged, even though we were by no means wealthy and even though I suspect my parents struggled at times (and kept it hidden from us kids) to keep us in the town they chose to raise a family (coming from New York City to do so). In fact, when I signed up as an infantry soldier in the National Guard, it was the first time I spent any extended time with people of other races, mostly Black soldiers, and most of them were from a deep urban setting that I had little understanding of. Until then, I was blind to the ways of the world. Now I was the lone white man in a platoon of black men. Mostly, I kept quiet and tried to learn from them about the world I did not know. It was a culture shock, but one I am very grateful for. It taught me lessons about life.

And it is in life that we make change, right?

As part of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, we make it part of our Mission Statement to focus on Social Justice themes and to find ways to work with school districts in urban and rural centers that often are left out of things due to socio-economic issues. Race and access and equity issues remain on the forefront of many of our decisions of programming.

The mission of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, is to create a professional community where teachers and other educators feel welcomed to come together to deepen individual and collective experiences as writers and our understanding of teaching and learning in order to challenge and transform our practice. Our aim is to improve learning in our schools — urban, rural and suburban.

Professional development provided by the Western Massachusetts Writing Project values reflection and inquiry and is built on teacher knowledge, expertise, and leadership.

Central to our mission is the development of programs and opportunities that are accessible and relevant to teachers, students, and their families from diverse backgrounds, paying attention to issues of race, gender, language, class and culture and how these are linked to teaching and learning.

I won’t deny that where I come from — the World Where I Have Walked — has opened up doors because of the color of my skin (white), my gender (male), and the place where I grew up (suburban Connecticut), and other factors that I was born into. But I can try to make a difference for the young people whose lives I can impact in my own classroom as teacher or in other classrooms as profession development leader. I can lay the foundation for tolerance in the hearts of my boys.

We can all make a difference. We just need to try.

Peace (be it so),
Kevin

 

I know there are a few more learning events for Walk My World (including the last one around heroic myths and the current one around the Story of Us) but I had pulled together a sort of digital portfolio via ThingLink as a way to capture the projects I had been doing since the start. I like using the visual, with links, although it does not leave room for post-project reflections without cluttering up the page.

Oh well. I am also keeping a Diigo Outline that I can share out another time. That might give me more reflective room to write. For now, I hope you enjoy a walk through my work and tinkering.

Wondering what Walk My World is?

The #WalkMyWorld Project is a social media project in which we share and connect online at Twitter using one hashtag. Groups of learners across the globe are connecting and sharing for 10 weeks using the #WalkMyWorld hashtag. — from https://sites.google.com/site/walkmyworldproject/home 

Peace (in the composition),
Kevin