To the teachers that I have had whom I've really enjoyed without showing it. It's really easy, when sitting and listening to an interesting lecture or point of debate, to nevertheless maintain a blank face - that's simply its resting state. It's really easy, when listening to an interesting lecture or point of debate, to nevertheless put my head down in a piece of paper and doodle to my heart's content (I just like to be using my hands!). But you should know that I was engaged and interested, even when I was doing those things.
I started teaching the brass section of the orchestra in Plan 3000 at the end of last week. Thursday was my first time doing it - sectional rehearsal was from 5:00 pm to 7:30. I wasn't really sure where to start, so after hearing them play through a piece once, I just went back to where I started - intonation and technique. This involved a lot of down time for the kids - sometimes we would do exercises without even playing the instruments, or exercises focusing on the trombones and not the french horns, or the other way around. When I was talking to them, or when they were sitting with their hands idle, all I could see was blank faces looking back at me. I could see they were all paying attention - they were very respectful. Yet I didn't think they were enjoying it, or even finding what I was saying engaging (or grammatically correct, for that matter). I know that teaching technique and intonation isn't the most fun thing in the world, but it's really important as a basis for playing something, especially something as difficult as the 1812 Overture (one of their current pieces). All I could think about as I was introducing these concepts was, "I am so boring. I gotta find a way to make this more interesting."
They surprised me though - at the end of the sectional, when they were all packing up, they all gave me big grins. As I said thank you to them, they all responded very gratefully. As we all walked out together, they kept coming up to me and asking me about myself, expressing their discontent that I was only staying for 2.5 weeks. You confuse me. Are you just being polite, or did I actually do better than the level of "hmm... I would compare you to Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but I think that would be offensive to him"?
Then I remembered being a student in that type of situation. No matter how engaged I felt inside, I would often look up at my teacher with the same blank stare - even if I was happy to be where I was, it still took a lot of energy to smile, and I was lazy (still am). So for that, I apologize.
To sum up, teaching's been pretty good so far I love the kids and am learning a lot from them and the various interviews I've started doing!
Monday, November 22, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
I played trombone today!
Oh Trombone, my old friend. It had been awhile for us. But the stars aligned today as we made sweet, sweet sounds together. I was excited from the start, but you just sat there casually, brass glistening in the sunlight. I knew you were playing hard to get, but I was ready for your games from the start. It wasn't long before I had you in my arms again, and oh how magical it was.
It was my first day visiting the orchestra I'm working with today. I was supposed to start on Monday, but they got stuck in a rainstorm on their way back from Santiago, Chile, so I had to wait. But I'm pretty excited! All of the kids are extremely nice, and the director is an amazing man. More to come as I do more work with them.
Other than that, I haven't been doing much this week. Just getting settled into Santa Cruz life. I wish I had more to say but not much has happened. Short post this time around!
Oh wait - last night I went to see David Guetta live for 15 dollars. It was awesome! A huge dance party in the soccer stadium, with some awesome music. Not only great songs, but since he's a dj, he did a lot of sweet improv over top of them. Fireworks, LCD lights behind the stage - it was all pretty fantastic. Jealous? This seems to be a theme. You might want to look into that.
Only 3 weeks left and then I'm finished! Hard to believe.
It was my first day visiting the orchestra I'm working with today. I was supposed to start on Monday, but they got stuck in a rainstorm on their way back from Santiago, Chile, so I had to wait. But I'm pretty excited! All of the kids are extremely nice, and the director is an amazing man. More to come as I do more work with them.
Other than that, I haven't been doing much this week. Just getting settled into Santa Cruz life. I wish I had more to say but not much has happened. Short post this time around!
Oh wait - last night I went to see David Guetta live for 15 dollars. It was awesome! A huge dance party in the soccer stadium, with some awesome music. Not only great songs, but since he's a dj, he did a lot of sweet improv over top of them. Fireworks, LCD lights behind the stage - it was all pretty fantastic. Jealous? This seems to be a theme. You might want to look into that.
Only 3 weeks left and then I'm finished! Hard to believe.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
My Independent Study Project
So for SIT programs, every student spends the last month of the semester doing an independent project of their choice that relates to what they have been studying throughout the semester. As of this past week, I have figured out what I'm going to be doing for mine! Here's a little info on what I'm going to be doing.
I'm going back to Santa Cruz (for more information on the city, see "Coa", a post on the blog of Matt Taylor. What? Did he just reference himself? Yes, he did.), where I will spend 3 weeks working with a youth orchestra in an area of the city called Plan 3000. This orchestra is meant to be an outlet for high school kids after school so that they are not on the streets, where they can easily find trouble and possibly find a reason to drop out of school. I will be playing trombone with them, helping teach trombone if they need it, doing whatever other things they need me to do for them and making a video about the orchestra. My video is the way I'm going to present my project - usually, students write 25-page papers in Spanish, but we have the option to make short documentaries, which I thought would be cool.
The reason that Plan 3000 could use this type of outlet for its students - Plan 3000 is one of, if not the, most under-developed and poor areas in Bolivia (one of the 8 poorest countries in the world). Basically, 25 years ago, 3000 families were displaced by a huge flood in Bolivia. The government moved them to an area outside of Santa Cruz which, at the time, was just a jungle, with no roads or way of reaching the outside world for resources and help. After placing them there, the government left them completely on their own - 3000 families who had lost everything in the flood were left to fend for themselves.
Somehow, they managed to build a small city out of what they had, which is now a part of Santa Cruz (with 300,000 inhabitants). However, with a population made up of migrants, they don't possess a lot of money, and still lack running water for the most part.
I leave to start my project on Friday, so I'm getting pretty excited!
I'm going back to Santa Cruz (for more information on the city, see "Coa", a post on the blog of Matt Taylor. What? Did he just reference himself? Yes, he did.), where I will spend 3 weeks working with a youth orchestra in an area of the city called Plan 3000. This orchestra is meant to be an outlet for high school kids after school so that they are not on the streets, where they can easily find trouble and possibly find a reason to drop out of school. I will be playing trombone with them, helping teach trombone if they need it, doing whatever other things they need me to do for them and making a video about the orchestra. My video is the way I'm going to present my project - usually, students write 25-page papers in Spanish, but we have the option to make short documentaries, which I thought would be cool.
The reason that Plan 3000 could use this type of outlet for its students - Plan 3000 is one of, if not the, most under-developed and poor areas in Bolivia (one of the 8 poorest countries in the world). Basically, 25 years ago, 3000 families were displaced by a huge flood in Bolivia. The government moved them to an area outside of Santa Cruz which, at the time, was just a jungle, with no roads or way of reaching the outside world for resources and help. After placing them there, the government left them completely on their own - 3000 families who had lost everything in the flood were left to fend for themselves.
Somehow, they managed to build a small city out of what they had, which is now a part of Santa Cruz (with 300,000 inhabitants). However, with a population made up of migrants, they don't possess a lot of money, and still lack running water for the most part.
I leave to start my project on Friday, so I'm getting pretty excited!
Friday, October 29, 2010
Coa (Ko-a. Phonetic pronunciation. Like in a dictionary!)
Last Friday, our group had a coa at the house of one of our academic directors with his wife. A coa is an Andean traditional ceremony - it is performed at on the first Friday of every month. It is performed differently depending who you're with (and whether you're in the city or the countryside), but in general, you burn coca leaves with various other spices as an prayer for a safe and healthy month.
You may be saying to yourself, "but Matt, last Friday wasn't the first Friday of the month - it was the 22nd! What sort of tomfoolery are you up to?" (tomfoolery? yes, tomfoolery. fantastic word.) Well, the reality of the situation was this - our academic director, the one who's house we were at, has been in the hospital for the past month due to issues with his pancreas. The day before the coa he received life threatening surgery, so we did the coa for him - to ask for safe and healthy recovery. And it's getting better - he's out of intensive care now! So, hopefully he'll continue the upward trend.
The next day we went to the city of Santa Cruz for a 5-day excursion. Santa Cruz is in the tropic lowlands of Bolivia, so the climate was much different from here in Cochabamba, or La Paz or PotosÃ. Here are some highlights from the trip:
There is a national park that we visited that possesses more species of birds that the entirety of the U.S.
Bolivia has 1,000 species of moss - more than all of the Americas combined.
There were mango trees everywhere - I ate 5 mangos in one day, for free, by taking them from trees around the area.
The GuaranÃ, an indigenous nation from the lowlands, was the only group to resist conquer by both the Incas and the Spaniards. They had an advanced form of guerilla warfare.
For much of the trip, we were visiting small towns and national parks outside of Santa Cruz. I can count the number of paved roads available for the people of these communities on one hand.
The indigenous communities of the lowlands make up about 5% of the population of Bolivia. Consequently, they are often marginalized - even by andean indigenous groups, sometimes.
That's all for now!
You may be saying to yourself, "but Matt, last Friday wasn't the first Friday of the month - it was the 22nd! What sort of tomfoolery are you up to?" (tomfoolery? yes, tomfoolery. fantastic word.) Well, the reality of the situation was this - our academic director, the one who's house we were at, has been in the hospital for the past month due to issues with his pancreas. The day before the coa he received life threatening surgery, so we did the coa for him - to ask for safe and healthy recovery. And it's getting better - he's out of intensive care now! So, hopefully he'll continue the upward trend.
The next day we went to the city of Santa Cruz for a 5-day excursion. Santa Cruz is in the tropic lowlands of Bolivia, so the climate was much different from here in Cochabamba, or La Paz or PotosÃ. Here are some highlights from the trip:
There is a national park that we visited that possesses more species of birds that the entirety of the U.S.
Bolivia has 1,000 species of moss - more than all of the Americas combined.
There were mango trees everywhere - I ate 5 mangos in one day, for free, by taking them from trees around the area.
The GuaranÃ, an indigenous nation from the lowlands, was the only group to resist conquer by both the Incas and the Spaniards. They had an advanced form of guerilla warfare.
For much of the trip, we were visiting small towns and national parks outside of Santa Cruz. I can count the number of paved roads available for the people of these communities on one hand.
The indigenous communities of the lowlands make up about 5% of the population of Bolivia. Consequently, they are often marginalized - even by andean indigenous groups, sometimes.
That's all for now!
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Potosi/Sucre
My latest excursion! Kind of like two sides of the same coin - both are full of history, but with different lasting effects. I only had about a day and a half in each city, which was kind of disappointing, but here's what happened.
Potosi - the highest city in the world! (I don't know by what measures this is true, but someone made some system and Potosi came out on top. It's like 14,000 feet high, so, you know, that's a lot.) This city has a lot of history - it was at one point the 2nd largest city in the world (1600s), and, at that time, it supplied Europe with pretty much all of its wealth in terms of silver from its mines (something like 16,000,000 kilos of pure silver came from this city over the course of 50-100 years). This is probably the most heartbreakingly beautiful city I have ever had the chance to see or hear about. It is rich with beautiful architecture, but riddled with economic strife - Europe and the U.S. squeezed its silver and tin mines for all they were worth, leaving nothing to the people who live there now. I got the chance to visit the mines, which are still active, actually - but that story is a little long for this post.
Another thing I did while I was there was visit a school created for the children of the miners (who might not be able to send their children to school otherwise). little. children. are. so. ADORABLE! It was a lot of fun getting to hang out with them, and I hope that if I have some time free later in the semester I can go back and visit the school.
Sucre - like Potosi, this city is rich with architecture from the 16-1700s. Unlike Potosi, this city is rich in money. It attracts a lot of European tourists due to its clean-cut beauty and museums, and is also sometimes called the "intellectual center" of Bolivia, since it has the oldest university in Bolivia (and the supreme court). We got to visit an indigenous music group there called Los Masis - they tour around the world playing their music, and have also founded a school for children to teach indigenous music. I didn't really get the opportunity to do much else there besides visit some museums, due to lack of time.
It would have been nice to spend more time in each of these cities to learn some more about them, but I guess the program wants us to do concrete schoolwork too? I dunno.
Potosi - the highest city in the world! (I don't know by what measures this is true, but someone made some system and Potosi came out on top. It's like 14,000 feet high, so, you know, that's a lot.) This city has a lot of history - it was at one point the 2nd largest city in the world (1600s), and, at that time, it supplied Europe with pretty much all of its wealth in terms of silver from its mines (something like 16,000,000 kilos of pure silver came from this city over the course of 50-100 years). This is probably the most heartbreakingly beautiful city I have ever had the chance to see or hear about. It is rich with beautiful architecture, but riddled with economic strife - Europe and the U.S. squeezed its silver and tin mines for all they were worth, leaving nothing to the people who live there now. I got the chance to visit the mines, which are still active, actually - but that story is a little long for this post.
Another thing I did while I was there was visit a school created for the children of the miners (who might not be able to send their children to school otherwise). little. children. are. so. ADORABLE! It was a lot of fun getting to hang out with them, and I hope that if I have some time free later in the semester I can go back and visit the school.
Sucre - like Potosi, this city is rich with architecture from the 16-1700s. Unlike Potosi, this city is rich in money. It attracts a lot of European tourists due to its clean-cut beauty and museums, and is also sometimes called the "intellectual center" of Bolivia, since it has the oldest university in Bolivia (and the supreme court). We got to visit an indigenous music group there called Los Masis - they tour around the world playing their music, and have also founded a school for children to teach indigenous music. I didn't really get the opportunity to do much else there besides visit some museums, due to lack of time.
It would have been nice to spend more time in each of these cities to learn some more about them, but I guess the program wants us to do concrete schoolwork too? I dunno.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Something...
Something Old: Last Saturday night, the SIT students all went out to celebrate our friend's birthday (it was also my Mom's birthday! Yaaaaay!). We first went to a cafe/bar to get her a cake and drinks, and then decided to go to a club afterward. Everyone began to enter the club - it is important to mention here that, because there are 20 girls and 3 guys on my program, our group was heavy in numbers for girls. So, as I get to the front and am asked to show ID, I am told that I can't go in the club because I'm not 21. Apparently a lot of clubs in Cochabamba require girls to be 18 and guys to be 21 to keep the ratio at 50-50 or something, according to my Bolivian friend. I decided to just call it a night since I was tired, but as I turned to go, all of my friends who had just gone in (I was literally the only one who was not either 21 or a girl) came back out, saying that they would be happy to find somewhere else where we could all hang out. However, as our group of 13 or 14 girls and 2 guys began to exit the club, the bouncers suddenly had a change of heart, and out of the kindness of their souls decided to let me go inside. Wasn't that really nice of them?
Something new: I just bought Final Cut Pro - for 23 dollars. (For those of you who don't know, it costs 1000 dollars in the U.S.) Jealous? Well, don't be - it's not a very becoming trait on you.
Something borrowed: I just started learning how to play the charango - it's a small, mandolin-like instrument with 5 double strings (How many strings is that? 10! 5 times 2 equals 10!) that sounds beautiful, and is very popular here. I'm currently using my teacher's charango until I get my own.
Something blue: It has yet to rain since the first day I got here. Kinda nice, but at the same time, the farmers have to wait a month longer than usual to plant their crops.
Something new: I just bought Final Cut Pro - for 23 dollars. (For those of you who don't know, it costs 1000 dollars in the U.S.) Jealous? Well, don't be - it's not a very becoming trait on you.
Something borrowed: I just started learning how to play the charango - it's a small, mandolin-like instrument with 5 double strings (How many strings is that? 10! 5 times 2 equals 10!) that sounds beautiful, and is very popular here. I'm currently using my teacher's charango until I get my own.
Something blue: It has yet to rain since the first day I got here. Kinda nice, but at the same time, the farmers have to wait a month longer than usual to plant their crops.
Friday, October 1, 2010
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