You could not fall asleep last night. You called me back. You asked if I could be there with you. I wished I could be there to hug you and put you to sleep. I wished it so much. I just kept thinking I should be there. I hate to know that you feel lonely at night.
Two more years...then this will be over. Just be patient.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Saturday, February 4, 2012
At this stage of my life, seeing people around me getting engaged, getting married. It makes me wonder when my turn is. Okay, now I sound desperate. But I guess everyone thinks about that, everyone wants to get married to the person they love one day. Well, maybe not everyone, but most people. I think that's the only thing I really really want at this point - I want to settle down. It's such a crazy thought but I feel it stronger and stronger every day.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Karl Paulnack on Why Music Matters
One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, "you're wasting your SAT scores!" On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town a few years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:
"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."
-from the 2004 Boston Conservatory Welcome Address
One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town a few years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:
"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."
-from the 2004 Boston Conservatory Welcome Address
德國為什麼立法禁止學前教育？
在德國弗賴堡大學做學術訪問期間，住在湖邊的一套公寓裏。離公寓不遠，有一個小沙坪，裏面有一些兒童玩耍的設施。每次經過這個地方，總會看到三四個小孩在沙坪裏面玩耍。旁邊站著一位女士，目不轉睛地盯著這些孩子，即使孩子滿臉的泥沙，衣服上到處是沙子，但她並不幹涉。一起散步的另一位中國同事不由自主地感歎：“老楊，你看這些孩子臉上好陽光，這在國內孩子的臉上幾乎很難見到”。對此我也深有同感。我女兒在一所北京最好的小學之一上學，盡管才8歲，但說話和臉上的表情已經和成人已經沒有多大差別。盡管孩子的媽媽感到很滿意，但我卻有些難過。
湖四周是寬闊的大草坪，不過還有些樹木可以遮蔭。在陽光明媚的日子裏，草坪上有人在打排球、網球、羽毛球， 也有人在踢足球。有的人則在草地上鋪上布，三三兩兩圍坐在一起，不知道是有一搭無一搭的聊天還是只想曬曬太陽，有的則在燒烤。我習慣坐在咖啡館的涼棚下觀察草坪上的人，其中一幕至今難以忘懷：在離我不遠處有一家子在踢足球：丈夫、妻子、大男孩和小男孩（大約四五歲的樣子）。 這四個人分成兩組：一組是丈夫和小男孩，另外一組是妻子和大男孩。雖然被分為兩對，實際上是丈夫和兩個男孩在玩，妻子只是在一邊有一搭無一搭地踢上一腳，並不上去爭搶，但眼睛從來沒有離開丈夫和兩個孩子。父親把球傳遞給小兒子，大兒子上前去搶球。父親擔心踢傷大兒子，所以動作很輕，有時故意出現失誤，讓大兒子把球搶到。小兒子比較勇猛，但球技不精，見哥哥跑來，遠遠就把球傳給父親。給我印象最深的是孩子玩耍的勁頭十足，臉上的表情可以用陽光燦爛一詞來形容。
出於好奇心我走過去和這一家子聊天。男士告訴我，兩個孩子都在上幼兒園，周末帶他們出來玩。我問：“你們不利於周末時間帶孩子參加各種學習班？”這位男士用不解的表情看著我：“參加什麼學習班？”我說：“比如跳舞、體操、繪畫、鋼琴、外語、奧數之類的，我女兒在幼兒園期間，除了奧數，幾乎把所有的課程都學了”。男士回答：“我們這裏，學前教育是被禁止的，孩子在幼兒園期間不允許教授專業知識，社會上也沒有類似的培訓班”。
原以為只有幼兒園的孩子不允許學習專業知識，後來才發現上小學的孩子也不能學習額外的課程，即使這個孩子的智商超過同齡人。來自科隆的桑德拉寫到：“今年我兒子7歲，我向學校老師提出，能否額外教他一些東西，因為他5-6歲的時候就自己在家學會了基本的閱讀、書寫和簡單的數學計算。老師表示反對並說：‘您應該讓您的孩子與其他孩子保持同步’。一個星期後我再次去見老師，並出示了孩子高智商的證書，希望得到她的理解和支持，但老師用一種奇怪的眼光看重我，似乎我像來自外星的人一樣”。老師進而解釋，孩子智力被過度開發並不是一件好事情，因為必須給孩子的大腦留下想象空間。過多的知識會使孩子的大腦變成了計算機的硬盤，常此下去，孩子的大腦就慢慢地變成了儲存器，不會主動思考了。
盡管如此，我對德國禁止學前教育的做法還是不太理解。為了搞清楚這個問題，我專門請教了德國的教育人士，他們讓我找《基本法》來看看。翻開聯邦德國《基本法》（即憲法）。讓我大吃一驚。其中第七條第六款明確規定，禁止設立先修學校(Vorschule)。我還是不明白德國憲法為何這樣規定，只好再請教有關的教育專家。他們告訴我，孩子在小學前的“唯一的任務”就是快樂成長。因為孩子的天性是玩耍，所以要做符合孩子天性的事情，而不應該違背孩子的成長規律。如果說在上學前對孩子非要進行“教育”的話，那“教育”的重點只有三個方面：一、基本的社會常識，比如不允許暴力、不大聲說話等。二、孩子的動手能力。在幼兒園期間孩子會根據自己的興趣參與手工製作，讓他們從小就主動做具體的事情。三、培養孩子的情商，特別是領導力。
原以為只有德國才有如此奇怪的規定。後來查了一下歐洲有關國家的情況才發現他們對待小孩子的做法基本上大同小異。例如匈牙利立法規定：嚴格禁止教授幼兒園期間的孩子學習寫作、閱讀、計算等。幼兒園的教育是免費的。（Ungarn： Es ist strengstens verboten in diesem Jahr den Kindern Schreiben, Lesen, Rechnen, usw. beizubringen. Die pädagogische Arbeit der Kindergärten ist kostenlos）。
與歐洲相反，中國的孩子在幼兒園期間已經把小學一年級的知識基本上都學完了。人們有理由擔心，歐洲的孩子在起跑線上已經輸給了中國的孩子。其實，這樣的擔心是多餘的。歐洲人普遍認為，孩子有自身的成長規律，他們在相應的階段要做相應的事情。表面上看中國的學前教育和基礎教育很紮實，但他們的想象力和思考能力已經被破壞掉，由此造成了孩子被動接受知識而疏於主動思考的習慣。
暫且拋開中西教育優劣的爭議和評判，讓我們來關注德國教育的成果：自諾貝爾獎設立以來，德國人（含移民美國、加拿大等國的德裔）獲得的諾貝爾獎人數將近總數的一半。換句話說，8200萬的德國人分享了一半的諾貝爾獎，而全球另外60多億人口只獲得了剩下的一半。難道這是種族的問題？恐怕沒有這麼簡單。讓我們重新審視德國的教育，看看他們的做法是否值得我們借鑒。同時也希望中國的教育工作者別沾沾自喜，因為今天所做的事情，其實是毀了中國的一代又一代。（楊佩昌）
湖四周是寬闊的大草坪，不過還有些樹木可以遮蔭。在陽光明媚的日子裏，草坪上有人在打排球、網球、羽毛球， 也有人在踢足球。有的人則在草地上鋪上布，三三兩兩圍坐在一起，不知道是有一搭無一搭的聊天還是只想曬曬太陽，有的則在燒烤。我習慣坐在咖啡館的涼棚下觀察草坪上的人，其中一幕至今難以忘懷：在離我不遠處有一家子在踢足球：丈夫、妻子、大男孩和小男孩（大約四五歲的樣子）。 這四個人分成兩組：一組是丈夫和小男孩，另外一組是妻子和大男孩。雖然被分為兩對，實際上是丈夫和兩個男孩在玩，妻子只是在一邊有一搭無一搭地踢上一腳，並不上去爭搶，但眼睛從來沒有離開丈夫和兩個孩子。父親把球傳遞給小兒子，大兒子上前去搶球。父親擔心踢傷大兒子，所以動作很輕，有時故意出現失誤，讓大兒子把球搶到。小兒子比較勇猛，但球技不精，見哥哥跑來，遠遠就把球傳給父親。給我印象最深的是孩子玩耍的勁頭十足，臉上的表情可以用陽光燦爛一詞來形容。
出於好奇心我走過去和這一家子聊天。男士告訴我，兩個孩子都在上幼兒園，周末帶他們出來玩。我問：“你們不利於周末時間帶孩子參加各種學習班？”這位男士用不解的表情看著我：“參加什麼學習班？”我說：“比如跳舞、體操、繪畫、鋼琴、外語、奧數之類的，我女兒在幼兒園期間，除了奧數，幾乎把所有的課程都學了”。男士回答：“我們這裏，學前教育是被禁止的，孩子在幼兒園期間不允許教授專業知識，社會上也沒有類似的培訓班”。
原以為只有幼兒園的孩子不允許學習專業知識，後來才發現上小學的孩子也不能學習額外的課程，即使這個孩子的智商超過同齡人。來自科隆的桑德拉寫到：“今年我兒子7歲，我向學校老師提出，能否額外教他一些東西，因為他5-6歲的時候就自己在家學會了基本的閱讀、書寫和簡單的數學計算。老師表示反對並說：‘您應該讓您的孩子與其他孩子保持同步’。一個星期後我再次去見老師，並出示了孩子高智商的證書，希望得到她的理解和支持，但老師用一種奇怪的眼光看重我，似乎我像來自外星的人一樣”。老師進而解釋，孩子智力被過度開發並不是一件好事情，因為必須給孩子的大腦留下想象空間。過多的知識會使孩子的大腦變成了計算機的硬盤，常此下去，孩子的大腦就慢慢地變成了儲存器，不會主動思考了。
盡管如此，我對德國禁止學前教育的做法還是不太理解。為了搞清楚這個問題，我專門請教了德國的教育人士，他們讓我找《基本法》來看看。翻開聯邦德國《基本法》（即憲法）。讓我大吃一驚。其中第七條第六款明確規定，禁止設立先修學校(Vorschule)。我還是不明白德國憲法為何這樣規定，只好再請教有關的教育專家。他們告訴我，孩子在小學前的“唯一的任務”就是快樂成長。因為孩子的天性是玩耍，所以要做符合孩子天性的事情，而不應該違背孩子的成長規律。如果說在上學前對孩子非要進行“教育”的話，那“教育”的重點只有三個方面：一、基本的社會常識，比如不允許暴力、不大聲說話等。二、孩子的動手能力。在幼兒園期間孩子會根據自己的興趣參與手工製作，讓他們從小就主動做具體的事情。三、培養孩子的情商，特別是領導力。
原以為只有德國才有如此奇怪的規定。後來查了一下歐洲有關國家的情況才發現他們對待小孩子的做法基本上大同小異。例如匈牙利立法規定：嚴格禁止教授幼兒園期間的孩子學習寫作、閱讀、計算等。幼兒園的教育是免費的。（Ungarn： Es ist strengstens verboten in diesem Jahr den Kindern Schreiben, Lesen, Rechnen, usw. beizubringen. Die pädagogische Arbeit der Kindergärten ist kostenlos）。
與歐洲相反，中國的孩子在幼兒園期間已經把小學一年級的知識基本上都學完了。人們有理由擔心，歐洲的孩子在起跑線上已經輸給了中國的孩子。其實，這樣的擔心是多餘的。歐洲人普遍認為，孩子有自身的成長規律，他們在相應的階段要做相應的事情。表面上看中國的學前教育和基礎教育很紮實，但他們的想象力和思考能力已經被破壞掉，由此造成了孩子被動接受知識而疏於主動思考的習慣。
暫且拋開中西教育優劣的爭議和評判，讓我們來關注德國教育的成果：自諾貝爾獎設立以來，德國人（含移民美國、加拿大等國的德裔）獲得的諾貝爾獎人數將近總數的一半。換句話說，8200萬的德國人分享了一半的諾貝爾獎，而全球另外60多億人口只獲得了剩下的一半。難道這是種族的問題？恐怕沒有這麼簡單。讓我們重新審視德國的教育，看看他們的做法是否值得我們借鑒。同時也希望中國的教育工作者別沾沾自喜，因為今天所做的事情，其實是毀了中國的一代又一代。（楊佩昌）
Saturday, January 7, 2012
The Case for Active Practicing, by Henry Myers
I started to have a completely different approach in my practice and playing in general since my recital last year. My dissatisfaction with the recital plus the way my teacher has been pushing me, had made me realize I should start a new way of practicing. It worked and still works. Everything is different now. I knew what was different but couldn't put it into words. This article is basically speaking my mind for me. It is interesting to see someone else discovering this and analyzed the whole process.
---
Practicing: the word itself inspires pain, suffering, depression, boredom, angst, and turmoil; it evokes images of stern-looking students, arduously drilling a passage until they either squeeze out five consecutive successes or quit in frustration. The sheer effort that it requires seems monstrous and intimidating; the payoff, relatively small.
Predictably, it’s an activity that relatively few people enjoy.
I myself have struggled with it for most of my life. Having professional musicians for parents and an aspiring cellist for a brother, playing the cello always felt more obligatory than elective, and thus I learned to resent practicing and avoided it at all costs; subsequently, my inability to play well induced much pain during my lessons, where I was often brought to tears by my teacher (no hard feelings!)
Eventually I realized that I did, in fact, want to play the cello, and starting about 9th grade I became a practicing fiend; in the following years I would only log more and more hours. Yet I felt like the archetypal student musician (as the image so succinctly and somewhat humorously depicts). While I did improve over my high school years, I often felt that the countless hours I put in weren’t quite paying off. I tormented myself with thoughts of being inadequate, untalented, unintelligent.
Why was I so incapable of efficiency?
Truth be told, I was inefficient because in my practicing I placed repetition over thought. Compared to the sheer amount of hours I practiced, the level of brainpower that I exerted was rather underwhelming. I didn’t really have a coherent method: I just practiced somewhat aimlessly until I either hit some preplanned number of hours or drowned in frustration.
Once, during a moment of exasperation as I neared a deadline, I was told not to worry; that even if my progress seemed stagnant, if I continued to work I would eventually have an epiphanic moment where everything would come together. Instead of feeling soothed, though, I felt angry. Why can’t progress happen incrementally? Why does practicing necessarily have to be so passive? Ironically, I found the answer by examining that question.
See, the term “practicing” is deceptive. It should instead be thought of as “learning”.
This may seem like a tautology, but it really isn’t. The term “practicing” suggests repetition, while “learning” suggests the acquisition of knowledge, which is what I believe the colloquial “practicing” should be. Furthermore, “practicing” is passive; learning is active. To define the italicized terms, let us consider the mind.
Image of "Thinking out of the Box"For practical purposes, imagine that your mind is neatly divided into conscious and subconscious halves. The conscious is active; it’s basically what most people would identify as the “thinking” part, in which thoughts occur and observations are made; we control this part directly. The subconscious, is passive; it functions behind the scenes and is responsible for taking the observations made in the conscious mind and memorizing, interconnecting, and abstracting. It is also responsible for what we call “intuition”, which could be understood as unconscious reasoning. The subconscious is basically out of our control.
When we practice, we too often leave the process of abstraction entirely to our subconscious. If we keep missing a shift, for example, and try to remedy it by sheer repetition, we have to wait until our unconscious mind develops a solution based on repetitive data. However, if we instead stop to examine the problem consciously, we provide our subconscious with a variety of more helpful information that it can much more quickly extrapolate into something useful.
To be clear, I don’t advocate trying to replace your subconscious functions with your conscious functions. First, it’s impossible, and second, you WANT your subconscious to work for you! It’s incredibly powerful and capable of doing amazing things. What you don’t want is to rely entirely on it. Instead, use your conscious to guide your subconscious. The conscious part of the mind needs to play a more active role in learning.
Let’s return to the shifting example. Rather than merely attempting the shift several thousand times, ask yourself what you can learn about it. For example:
What do the positions that I’m shifting between feel like? What fingers are on what notes? How does the hand balance on the instrument?
How can I go between the two positions fluidly? How do I feel and understand the transition?
How can I work vibrato into my shift? How can I coordinate it into the shift?
Answering these questions involves experimenting physically, so while it’s possible to abstract something verbally about what you discover, the answer itself may be non-communicable. Eventually, this process can be automated, where solutions and ideas just occur naturally. Once you have answered these questions, i.e figured out how to improve the shift, then it’s time for repetition. Repetition is used to convince yourself that what you’re doing is correct, and to establish everything as part of a sequence of motions. In that way, repetition allows you to merge a process into a single thought.
After you finish practicing that shift, set it aside until the next time you practice. If you come back to it in an hour, you might find that you can’t exercise the ability that you worked on, that you can’t activate the mental pathways you thought were created. This doesn’t mean that your practice was lost: in fact, it probably means that your subconscious is processing it. So put it away, sleep, and give your mind time to work. When you start practicing in the morning, you might find that you know the shift better than you did before. Congratulations! Your practice was effective. It wasn’t boring at all; it was just like solving a puzzle. It was even fun. Now it’s time to start practicing again, but fortunately you’ve gained ground since yesterday and have new puzzles to solve.
It has always been the case that much of the process of learning is subconscious. However, we tend to struggle with practicing because they simply go through the motions and rely almost entirely on whatever the subconscious does to learn. What we need to be doing instead is actively using our conscious to investigate, analyze, and solve problems. Practicing shouldn’t be a mindless, repetitive exercise; it should instead be both mindful and informative. If I could leave you with a single thought, remember that practicing is learning: learning to practice is only a specialized version of learning to learn, and learning starts with thought. Remember, activity is key. Now get off your butt and go practice.
Or rather, get off your butt and go learn.
---
Practicing: the word itself inspires pain, suffering, depression, boredom, angst, and turmoil; it evokes images of stern-looking students, arduously drilling a passage until they either squeeze out five consecutive successes or quit in frustration. The sheer effort that it requires seems monstrous and intimidating; the payoff, relatively small.
Predictably, it’s an activity that relatively few people enjoy.
I myself have struggled with it for most of my life. Having professional musicians for parents and an aspiring cellist for a brother, playing the cello always felt more obligatory than elective, and thus I learned to resent practicing and avoided it at all costs; subsequently, my inability to play well induced much pain during my lessons, where I was often brought to tears by my teacher (no hard feelings!)
Eventually I realized that I did, in fact, want to play the cello, and starting about 9th grade I became a practicing fiend; in the following years I would only log more and more hours. Yet I felt like the archetypal student musician (as the image so succinctly and somewhat humorously depicts). While I did improve over my high school years, I often felt that the countless hours I put in weren’t quite paying off. I tormented myself with thoughts of being inadequate, untalented, unintelligent.
Why was I so incapable of efficiency?
Truth be told, I was inefficient because in my practicing I placed repetition over thought. Compared to the sheer amount of hours I practiced, the level of brainpower that I exerted was rather underwhelming. I didn’t really have a coherent method: I just practiced somewhat aimlessly until I either hit some preplanned number of hours or drowned in frustration.
Once, during a moment of exasperation as I neared a deadline, I was told not to worry; that even if my progress seemed stagnant, if I continued to work I would eventually have an epiphanic moment where everything would come together. Instead of feeling soothed, though, I felt angry. Why can’t progress happen incrementally? Why does practicing necessarily have to be so passive? Ironically, I found the answer by examining that question.
See, the term “practicing” is deceptive. It should instead be thought of as “learning”.
This may seem like a tautology, but it really isn’t. The term “practicing” suggests repetition, while “learning” suggests the acquisition of knowledge, which is what I believe the colloquial “practicing” should be. Furthermore, “practicing” is passive; learning is active. To define the italicized terms, let us consider the mind.
Image of "Thinking out of the Box"For practical purposes, imagine that your mind is neatly divided into conscious and subconscious halves. The conscious is active; it’s basically what most people would identify as the “thinking” part, in which thoughts occur and observations are made; we control this part directly. The subconscious, is passive; it functions behind the scenes and is responsible for taking the observations made in the conscious mind and memorizing, interconnecting, and abstracting. It is also responsible for what we call “intuition”, which could be understood as unconscious reasoning. The subconscious is basically out of our control.
When we practice, we too often leave the process of abstraction entirely to our subconscious. If we keep missing a shift, for example, and try to remedy it by sheer repetition, we have to wait until our unconscious mind develops a solution based on repetitive data. However, if we instead stop to examine the problem consciously, we provide our subconscious with a variety of more helpful information that it can much more quickly extrapolate into something useful.
To be clear, I don’t advocate trying to replace your subconscious functions with your conscious functions. First, it’s impossible, and second, you WANT your subconscious to work for you! It’s incredibly powerful and capable of doing amazing things. What you don’t want is to rely entirely on it. Instead, use your conscious to guide your subconscious. The conscious part of the mind needs to play a more active role in learning.
Let’s return to the shifting example. Rather than merely attempting the shift several thousand times, ask yourself what you can learn about it. For example:
What do the positions that I’m shifting between feel like? What fingers are on what notes? How does the hand balance on the instrument?
How can I go between the two positions fluidly? How do I feel and understand the transition?
How can I work vibrato into my shift? How can I coordinate it into the shift?
Answering these questions involves experimenting physically, so while it’s possible to abstract something verbally about what you discover, the answer itself may be non-communicable. Eventually, this process can be automated, where solutions and ideas just occur naturally. Once you have answered these questions, i.e figured out how to improve the shift, then it’s time for repetition. Repetition is used to convince yourself that what you’re doing is correct, and to establish everything as part of a sequence of motions. In that way, repetition allows you to merge a process into a single thought.
After you finish practicing that shift, set it aside until the next time you practice. If you come back to it in an hour, you might find that you can’t exercise the ability that you worked on, that you can’t activate the mental pathways you thought were created. This doesn’t mean that your practice was lost: in fact, it probably means that your subconscious is processing it. So put it away, sleep, and give your mind time to work. When you start practicing in the morning, you might find that you know the shift better than you did before. Congratulations! Your practice was effective. It wasn’t boring at all; it was just like solving a puzzle. It was even fun. Now it’s time to start practicing again, but fortunately you’ve gained ground since yesterday and have new puzzles to solve.
It has always been the case that much of the process of learning is subconscious. However, we tend to struggle with practicing because they simply go through the motions and rely almost entirely on whatever the subconscious does to learn. What we need to be doing instead is actively using our conscious to investigate, analyze, and solve problems. Practicing shouldn’t be a mindless, repetitive exercise; it should instead be both mindful and informative. If I could leave you with a single thought, remember that practicing is learning: learning to practice is only a specialized version of learning to learn, and learning starts with thought. Remember, activity is key. Now get off your butt and go practice.
Or rather, get off your butt and go learn.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Though I get annoyed with mom sometimes, I have to acknowledge the fact that she is an amazing mother. She tries hard to understand me, even though it is sometimes hard to. She listens, and changes for me. I can't ask for a better parent. I am so grateful for that. And I know that, I will work hard and make her proud and feel the same happiness towards having me as her daughter one day.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is a gap. For the first couple of years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative, work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way though.
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