Listen Closely to my Symphony

I need to remind myself more often, 

no one can hear the symphony in my mind. 

Listening to Bjork’s talk on “How We Learn Vs How We Think We learn” made me realize that, as learners, we are pretty poor judges of what or even if we have learned something. I can hop on board with this idea. However, at the end of the talk, I felt personally attacked. Bjork highlighted the fact that sometimes when I teach I assume the information I am transmitting through my long PowerPoint supported soliloquies are in fact not the confluence and transference of beautifully structured knowledge poured directly into my students’ minds. Bjork thinks that my symphony is only in my mind. As evidence of this, Bjork performs a little experiment where he drums the beat to Jingle Bells on a table—to the audience it sounds like an intentional tapping, rhythmic but devoid of pitch and tone and meaning; yet, to the drummer the unforgettable Jingle Bells tune frolics with every tap as electrical activity in the brain resting in a web of past experiences: opening presents on Christmas, signing choir in high school, watching Home Alone in December. Bjork then shows the audience the outcomes of a study pertaining to this phenomenon, highlighting that a majority of the time people who fill the role of the drummer in the experiment assumed that the listener (audience) could correctly identify the tune being drummed, when in fact, very few could correctly identify the music. You can’t hear my symphony.

"Jingle Bells..." by Suzanne Schroeter is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

No one can hear the symphony in my mind, 

and I need to remind myself more often. 

No one can see the synapses firing, transmitting messages from axon to dendrite in an idiosyncratic neural map, nurtured and cared for over years of dutiful learning and forgetting and retrieving and forgetting and retrieving information about topics that others have never even had to consider—and I am not unique. Formed in various environmental, social, and historical contexts and experiences, my schema encompasses nuanced discussions on countless topics related to English and education and teaching and learning and playing the violin. But I cannot transmit that violin’s solo to you. It plays in my head, dancing along a musical staff that carries with it my understanding of what pianissimo means, learned in a secondary education classroom, and it is interrupted by the guitar tabs I learned while playing in a garage band, and it is surely also integrated somehow with the infatuation I had with Eminem in my earlier years; how about with my dislike of knees and dirty porches? I use this symphony of experience to understand and make sense of the world around me as it relates to music and art and teaching and learning and pants and porches and playing the violin. And it is my job to use this network of information as a tool to organize information I want others to learn, sent to my students through activities and projects and, occasionally, monological lectures. And it is true that in these solitary speeches my symphony is subdued by the imperfect medium of language.

Image by Samantha Jade Royds is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Reminding myself more often that no one can hear 

the symphony in my mind is something I need to do. 

Toward this end, I will s  p  a  c  e out and Inetrlevae my practice on this topic. Meaning instead of writing things or reading things over and over, back to back, I will space     them     out and up mix them wtih ohter thnigs in between, such as conversations and images about music and minds and knees and porches and pants and playing the violin. Even if it feels like this is less productive, it is important to remember we are poor judges of our own learning—what feels better might not actually be better. Instead of standing up in front of the class on a pedestal, composing the symphony of Jingle Bells for an audience listening to taps on a table, I will create a varied environment that presupposes retrieval practice, and I will forget and then retrieve Bjork's aggressive reminder that, in my mind, there’s a symphony no one else can hear.