Yeah, but then there are potholes in the plateau, too, just in case an old dog thought that a stroll along the flats might be pleasant and restful. Potholes? Maybe not so much that as thick, sucking mud, the kind that slurps and holds on to your rubber boots with every step you try. Sucking muddy plateaus, anyhow!
It’s Labour Day Tuesday and, for the fourth straight year, I am skipping school. It’s about 2:30 p.m., and in the olden days I would have been well into the last teaching period of the day. The Teacher Dreams – can’t find my classroom, can’t find my clothes, don’t know what subject I teach – are over. The performance anxiety – can I still DO this? – had evaporated two minutes into period 1, and I would now be feeling the great fun of a new beginning (even though the marking pile already grows thick) and the eagerness to find out who these kids are and what we’ll be able to do together.
I would be in my element. I might be sitting at my desk watching them write their first journal entry (“All About Me by Me” or “What Am I Doing Here?”) or exercise or assigned reading, but more likely I’d be strolling about, interviewing students, offering random observations, observing the creatures in their unnatural environment. Or maybe I’d be standing at the front, leaning slightly against the chalk ledge, right ankle crossed over the left, rambling on. (The horizontal streak of chalk dusting my butt didn’t concern me; at least once, though, the grommets on my right hiking boot hooked the laces on my left, so that a particularly animated point I wanted to step up and make vaulted me face-first into the legs of the front-row desks. That was a good one. I bowed deeply.)
By this time, I would already have forgotten to send down the afternoon attendance check, so a (usually) cheery secretary calls to try again to get Mr. H. properly trained. But there’s no staff meeting, no reporting deadlines, no rebellious kids (yet), no sense of depletion or the (inevitable) frustration of my most dearly held intentions. Hope springs in an educator’s autumn. This was a great day to be a teacher.
Plateaus in the learning curve…
I learned about this concept in the Education Faculty at the University of Windsor (Ontario), and it has served me wonderfully ever since. Here’s the summary. Any sort of learning is an organic thing, and it does not happen in straight lines. In other words, if you put increasing knowledge or skill on the vertical axis of a graph and the passage of time on the horizontal one, progress is not a smooth upward line. In fact, even if you’re working hard to learn something, anything, there are flat spots in the graph. Plateaus. And it’s during these flat spots, when it seems like we’re not getting better/stronger/smarter, that we are likely to give up on learning French, developing a better jumpshot or staying on the midlife road to guitar glory (of the most feeble kind).
Especially as a basketball coach, but also while nursing kids through an especially difficult part of a novel or play — with Shakespeare, it was Act I — The Plateau was something I loved to explain to young learners. Those flat-line periods are not only frustrating “I ain’t gettin’ anywhere” times, but they are also necessary to the learning that comes after them. The brain (and the hand, and the eye) can’t learn continuously. It takes time to consolidate what has already been taken in before more can be added. Digestion.
Little was more encouraging to my students and players, and more likely to convince them to persevere, than understanding about plateaus. When they knew that the flat line was not a sign of death but a launch-pad to new learning, hard work didn’t seem, well, so deadly. And, as you’ve guessed, I’m only writing about this because Yea, though I walk the flats of the valley of pointlessness, I shall fear no guitar practice, for I am only on a plateau in the learning curve, and this comforts me…
The work is paying off. I’m getting in a dullard’s half an hour every day, and the finger positions on the fret board come to me a little faster as the days pass. The only semi-smooth chord change I can make is from E to E minor, which is only slightly more difficult than lifting my forefinger from a hot stove. But I count everything. Old dogs trying new tricks should moderate their expectations and lower them at need.
So I keep my 30-minute promise to myself, but the clock was slow tonight. Damn, but it’s true. I’m bored.
Two full weeks of the Old Dog Year are done. It is a perfect time to sit back and evaluate. How am I doing? What components of this self-indulgent midlife quest, this pale adventure, are effective and what parts need re-tooling?
Well, screw that. No nerdy analyses for me, at least not today. (I’m a natural at rumination.) I’m playing every day even when I’m lost. I make up stuff. I pretend. I turn off my critical ear and just make noises. Last night (yes, I’m cheating today: my after-midnight guitar churning was possible with eyes closed and a burnt brain, but I sure as hell couldn’t write), I tried to get a little smoother on the tunes I’m picking and the chords my fingers are trying to find.
Son Dave the TVPI has left town, and I may be forced to pay for lessons now. (He’ll still be a Teen Punk-rock Intellectual, perhaps the only one of his kind in Canada’s Nunavut territory, but a Vegan in the Arctic? Don’t think so. Pass the raw fish, please. And how would you like your caribou this morning?) Before we took him to the airport, the T(V)PI tuned the Dégas and pointed out that the E-major and A-minor chords that I’ve been practising are rather similar – the same fingering pattern, just one string higher – so that is a chord transition that I can learn to make. (Can a three-chord rock anthem be far behind?)
And since Dave was leaving, his brother Will had convinced a good buddy to drive him up for a visit: seven hours through the tail-end drowning of Hurricane Ernesto’s sorrows. Big Man Will (the only BMW I’ll ever have) and Little Jason are a Mutt and Jeff pair (see, I looked it up for you), an odd but loyal funship, a couple of guys who can yack and laugh without end. Jay was one of the funniest kids I ever tried to teach, funny/quirky and funny/ha-ha and an apparently hopeless student. He bobbed and floated like a drunken butterfly through a couple of my English classes, writing and reading what he had to. He showed up and passed ‘em, but somehow managed to flunk guitar class miserably.
And somewhere in the four years since, Little Jay Forbes picked up the guitar again, along with a pencil, some chords and a million burning ideas. He walks through malls and hears riffs and runs for his guitar. He writes like a mad thing at 4 a.m., sings in local restaurants and Legion halls and just had a professional pressing of his first CD of original songs. He sang for his spaghetti last night in my basement, a tune too new for the album, and it was full of clear-voiced feeling and melody and solid guitar playing. It makes no sense at all, this development in his life, which is why I love it. Jay Forbes, the six-string dropout and English class lounge act, made interesting music come out of my broke-neck guitar. If I can’t find inspiration there, I ain’t lookin’ for it.
As one writer put it, “I hate writing. I love having written.” I feel the same way about running, although once upon a more youthful time moving these limbs could be its own reward. But I’ve long known, as athletes told themselves in advance of Barcelona, “No pain, no Spain.” I’ve proved it to myself as a writer, too, although the pain is something different, some intrinsic clumsiness in the dance between inspiration and monotony. That’s where “the dullard” I referred to yesterday comes in.
The Canadian writer David Carpenter put the writer’s need for blazingly bland routine like this: “Most writers must learn to make a pact with dullness. Not boredom, or lack of imagination or passion, but dullness of routine. Keep your daily appointment with the computer screen and keep your ass on the chair until you’ve reached your daily quota. However rich your inner life may be, seek also the dullard within.” The pact with dullness, once the initial excitement of cradling a curvy beauty in one’s arms begins to fade, is exactly what the novice guitarist needs to cultivate. This midlife strummer does, anyway. (My curvy flesh and blood beauty, now, that never gets old, though rumour has it that we might.)
They say, whoever “they” might be, that any habit requires about 21 days of faithful performance to establish. As this Old Dog marches forward on a planned year of daily strumming and picking, I have tiny shivers of embarrassed joy at the things I can (nearly) do on the guitar. Mostly, though, I’m glad to have made Carpenter’s “pact with dullness”. Getting the arse in front of the screen, or under the echoing hollows of the guitar, is a fine though very private victory. Nearly two weeks in.
If you’re a basketball lover, 1992 seems like a long time ago. In Barcelona, the American “Dream Team” of mainly NBA pros (‘member who the lone collegian was?) waltzed and shimmied and giggled and jammed their way to uncontested wins over the world. (It was Duke U’s Christian Laettner.) Only ten years later, Dream Team Whatever was griping and stumbling its way to a sixth place finish in the world championship, right in Indianapolis. Then came another shock with the scuffling bronze in Olympic Athens. And so the Americans have gotten serious. They have player commitments through to Beijing in 2008. They have had actual tryouts. They have trained. And they hammered most of their opponents, though the Italians obviously got neither the memo nor the white flag. And come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve heard anybody dropping the “Dream Team” name for a while now.
And then came Greece. Did you see it? I’m fascinated by this surprising (but the more I think of it, not stunning) semifinal result, 101-95 for the Greek national team. They have not one NBA-er. (That will change.) In part, this is due to a 180 degree turn in the sociology of sport — turnabout fair play? — a case of a racism reversal from the once-widespread resistance to accepting black athletes. In basketball, certainly among its North American fans, there is now obvious suspicion about Caucasian ones, Nowitzki and Gasol and Nash notwithstanding. Perhaps a topic for another day.
Anyhow, I wouldn’t have thought the Americans would lose with their improved preparation, but then I’m a Coach K fan and a Bosh/Wade/Heinrich/Battier/Brand fan AND a build-for-the-future fan. Once (if ever) the basketball public in the States gets over the bitterness, it may be a good thing that they did lose. (I’m a big Silver Linings fan, too. It helps make sense of all the seemingly lost causes I’ve embraced, not to mention the ones I’ve coached!) At least now the Americans can’t so easily say “our game is fine”, even though it’s tough to find great shooters or passers or, apparently, defenders. Meanwhile, the Canadian hockey establishment continues to bellow exactly that, even when the NHL’s dash and delight are mainly imported from Europe. That’s where the NBA goes looking for outside shooters now, too, although the top scorers are still homegrown.
The Don, my one-time coach and long-time coaching buddy, wasn’t short of opinions. He views the American game as follows: about looking good, not about winning…can’t defend…it’s all 1 on 5…it was men against boys – talented boys, but boys…they don’t create for anyone but themselves…Coach K needs more time, I suppose, and so do a trio of superbly talented captains whose average age must be about 22.7. Yup, they’re young. From what I can tell, the players had their heads on pretty straight, but they started into their victory lap a bit too soon in the Greece game. For a change they had started quickly, and maybe they thought they could cruise from there. (That worked against Angola in ’92, but not against Greece on an ’06 evening in Japan. The Americans would even have to pay attention against a massively improved Angola squad, these days.)
Post-game email of the day was The Don at his most acerbic. Answer: BALL MOVEMENT. (Question: What aspect of the game does Team USA know nothing about?) John Stockton, come back! But he acknowledges their youth, and recognizes what the American players themselves may be starting to get. The international game is different. Clearouts don’t work so well. The individualism that sells so many NBA tickets, but that remains the bane of purists such as the immortal Coach John Wooden, can now be countered and even overcome by the teamwork and experience of national sides whose players have spent so much of their development together.
There are a few voices, mostly drowned out by the And 1 videos, that have been crying in the American sporting wilderness about how poorly taught too many of the best American kids are. (It’s the same in Canada for hockey.) While most thoughtful youth sports people advocate a 2:1 ratio of practices to games, it’s often the reverse (or worse), especially in the summer camps, the AAU all-star tournaments, and the high school hoops factories masquerading as private academies (the “diploma mills”).
Athletic kids can pick up flashy ballhandling, dunk-sickness and a certain kind of brittle, macho competitiveness from each other. Many of them, though, suffer from a lack of fundamental coaching – glaringly evident when it comes to shooting the ball – as opposed to just playing game after meaningless game. There are some who think this accounts for some of the problems in American ball. Kids play so many games that are really just about an individual’s Oooh Factor that, quite aside from limited skills, they develop an “oh, well” attitude toward team wins and losses. The elite kids must be playing 80 or more games per year for four or five different teams. Loyalty? Team feeling? The hoary old benefits of playing team sports? Hmmm.
Maybe the K can develop these things with the marvellously talented young men he has chosen. (And maybe a few others, speaking of Kobe.) Canada will have a heckuva job just qualifying for Beijing, especially since this loss means that the Americans will now have to compete for one of the same qualifying spots as we are. (Good luck, red ‘n’ white!) But that’s not the only reason I have for not gloating over the American loss, as many will. As long as they’re not playing against the maple leaf, I have no problem cheering for this American squad. Maybe what they’re learning will help make team play cool again. Now there’s a dream.
Just because there are weights I haven’t lifted recently, and long-cherished books I haven’t yet read, it doesn’t mean that my ten-by-twelve home library cum sleepover chamber is where temporary enthusiasms go to die. (I can’t believe that.) That would just be a superstitious and silly way to think when I’m on the verge of two straight weeks of daily guitar practice! But I’m tending to jam it in at the end of long middle-aged evenings, sometimes playing at eleven o’clock, and that may not be a sustainable development.
I am trying to “encourage the dullard within”. Remind me to tell you about that one sometime.
Today, another milestone in the epic journey of musical (and personal) discovery that is my midlife dream of guitar glory: I lost my first pick. I think the TVPI, who seemed so innocently to pick up my guitar and show off while we talked, slickly pocketed my little black shark fin. Now I know why real players have picks planted all over themselves and their digs.
Today’s exercise in strumming determined conclusively that when it comes to substitute picking, a yellow paperclip beats a polished, pointy black rock. (I was cheering for the rock. It was a sleek little implement with a high Funksmanship quotient. I had promised to make it my professional trademark – you can see what a subtle bit of marketing coolness it is – until I realized it didn’t work worth a butterfly fart. Pick shopping tomorrow.