Tuba Skinny

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20s, 30s, authentic, band, classically, cornet, created, decade, drum, energy, erika lewis, folk, fun, genre, hot, hot jazz, immersed, jazz, listen, listening, music, musician, new orleans, night, original, piano, player, popular, screen, Shaye Cohn, singer, street, style, syncopated, time, trained, tuba, tuba fats, tuba skinny, tune, washboard, watch, youtube

I was up late the other night listening to a band on YouTube called Tuba Skinny from New Orleans. I could not stop listening. These are young folks that can really capture the hot jazz sounds 20s and 30s. Singer, Erika Lewis (also bass drum), is particularly interesting. With a style and approach that is strikingly authentic and true to the style, Lewis seems as if she is somewhere else deep in the music. The group often plays on the streets of New Orleans, where the band originated and can range in size. No matter the size, they play very hot jazz with no music in front of them. They have an energy that can only come from young folks who are immersed in this genre of music. Turn off the colour on your screen and the band looks as if it is back in time, back when their music was just being created for the first time.

Cornet player Shaye Cohn is classically trained in piano, however took up the cornet to play this music. I find that most classically trained musicians don’t usually play with a hot syncopated style. I have found it rare, however that is not the case with anyone in the Tuba Skinny band, despite how any of them may have been trained. The washboard player is truly interesting to watch.

Tuba Skinny takes its name in recognition of a popular New Orlean tuba player, Tuba Fats, who passed away just before the band formed in 2009. Initially, the band was a collection of street musicians, however, in the less than a decade of existence, it quickly garnered great attention as a unique and authentic sounding jazz band that now travels extensively. YouTube is full of great Tuba Skinny videos. While they do many popular tunes, most of gathered from lesser known sources and some are originals. This band is well worth a listen and fun to watch.

Tuba Skinny

Round peg, square hole

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abilities, adaptable, archery, attributes, backward, box, business, chaotic, characteristic, circles, citizen, college, compartmentalized, confine, contention, contribute, corner, creating, criteria, curve, decade, define, degree, department, description, difficult, disorganized, education, efficiency, essence, experience, expression, fit, fluid, force, forcing, function, golf, grad, graduate, group, guarantee, hockey, hole, human, humanness, idea, ignore, imagine, inabilities, interest, job, keywords, leaner, learn, learning, mould, myself, natural, notion, oblong, organize, organizing, oval, peg, people, person, phrase, popular, position, possibilities, posting, problem, profitable, resource, reversed, rigid, round, rounded, roundish, roundness, scan, sense, sharp, situation, society, speak, specific, square, squarer, squarish, squish, stock exchange, straight, talk, think, thinking, tighter, train, training, trim, trimming, uncomfortable, unique, uniqueness, universities, university, unusual, useful, valuable, website, worker, workplace

Have you heard the phrase ‘He’s a square peg in a round hole?’ I don’t like it! To me it doesn’t quite make sense and I think it is time to set the expression straight.

The ‘peg’ phrase is generally used to describe a person who does not fit into a job or position. Hold on, my contentions is that it is backwards. To me, society is made up of all sorts of boxes, not circles. The boxes are getting squarer and tighter and more defined. Look at a list of job postings on one of the many job related websites and you will find most postings are for a sharply defined position. The don’t seem very round.

I propose that the expression be reversed. After all, people seem more rounded to me. Let’s have it make sense. Now, i’ll bet you are thinking that the round peg can actually fit into the square hole. Sure, that could work, however, the corners would be empty and that wouldn’t work. I like to think that the round peg exceeds the size of the hole, so in essence, the round peg has attributes and characteristics that don’t fit the mould.

In a group of people, if you can talk hockey or golf, you will easily find someone to talk to. If your interests are in something less popular, like archery, your chances are less. You might well have many interests, more than most people and, yet, if you don’t speak the popular ones, you can be left out.

Now, apply the same idea to the workplace and jobs and you will get what I mean. I feel I am a round peg, many possibilities and, well, you get the idea, I’m sure.

How is it that we can’t have a world that is fluid and adaptable, one that can allow the abilities and inabilities to be used to the fullest? Is it just a natural result of humans organizing their society that everything becomes more rigid and compartmentalized? Is it necessary for all aspects of society to be so organized in order to function? How about the stock exchange? I’m not sure what it is like now, but I know at one time, it looked about as disorganized and chaotic as one might imagine. And yet, it functioned.

For a few decades now, the business world has been working toward more efficiency, to be leaner and more profitable. Education has become more about training and preparing workers for specific work and jobs, rather than creating citizens to contribute to society in a variety of settings. In doing so, they seem to carve the curves of their humanness into sharp edges—into a shape that I would call square. Shaping people into a squarish shape means trimming unique aspects of each person, uniquenesses that are valuable and useful. Somehow, they must fit in and the place they must fit is square.

Here is another view of this notion. Perhaps the round peg is a bit soft. In that case forcing the peg into the hard, square hole might cause it to squish, thus becoming uncomfortable. Now that rings true.

I would consider myself a roundish person. Perhaps not a circle, or even an oval, or oblong shape—certainly not square. I feel I have uniqueness that I have never been able to bring to any job I have had. Usually, I have to confine myself to the specific needs of the job.

My experiences in education have shown me that the same thing applies to learning. As I have said, this is what education is about. Trim learners into square pegs that can easily fit into society. Those who are not easily trimmed will have difficulties and even be deemed a problem. Why are graduates of universities going back to colleges? Because a general degree does not guarantee a job in today’s society. To get a job, one must be trained for a specific job. To get a job one must meet all the criteria in the job description and have experience that matches. New grads can have a huge problem here in some situations. These days, human resource departments may scan job applications for specific keywords. How square can this get?

Our society seems to have little use for uniqueness. I’m not talking necessarily about unusual people. I think everybody has roundness and uniqueness that usually gets ignored in order to fit in. Thus, square pegs in square holes. Well, I’m still a round peg trying to fit into a square hole.

Getting work done

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advertising, aimed, amazing, boyfriend, brain, capsules, careening, claim, coffee, computers, concern, conclusion, connection, construct, consume, consumed, consumer, convinced, country, countryside, creative writing, critical thinking, critically, culture, daughter, decade, decades, depth, designed, dialog, education, english, examine, focusing, getting work done, grades, hand, hesitantly, homework, humankind, humans, impression, individuals, information, instant, intelligence, interviewer, invent, iphone, know, learn, learning, life, lifestyle, listen, machine, major, manage, masters of education, message, messages, minutes, movie, multitask, music, myth, organize, paradigm, people, pickings, practice, practicing, presented, problem, proof, quality, quantity, rapidly, read, reading, research, researcher, scenery, school, sentence, shallow, sift, sinister, smart, snippets, societies, society, students, studies, study, studying, superficial, synthesize, task, technologies, technology, television, text, texted, think, thinking, thought, track, train, training, TV, twentieth century, understand, understanding, university, watching, western, windows, wisdom, working, write, writing, written, young

My daughter, who is away at university, texted me from her iPhone to my old iPhone. Her majors are in English and Creative Writing, so she has plenty of reading and writing to do. Today, she announced that she was in a coffee shop with her boyfriend and was “getting work done.” It flies in the face of what I was told and grew up doing, is against the research into how people can best learn. I know, because I studied education, training and learning to the level of a Masters of Education. Yet, this is how young people ‘get work done.’ The more they have going on, the better, or so it seems.

A few months ago, I caught an interview with a few young folk and they were asked how they do their homework and studies. The interviewer began with asking how many do only their homework. No hands went up. Next, they were asked if they do two things at once. Still no hands. He continued with three and I think I saw someone hesitantly put their hand part way up. I think most claimed they did about five things at once, including their studies.

So, the interviewer decided to find out if this is common and if there is any proof that this sort of practice resulted in lower grades in school. Sure enough, they managed to find a researcher who stated that the research is showing that grades are not impacted when students do more than one thing at a time when studying.

I have a couple of concerns. I am still not convinced, nevertheless, even if it should prove out over time, what does this say about where society is heading? Certainly, there are messages, such as advertizing, that are designed and meant to be consumed in an instant. We can see how much faster advertizing is presented compared with a decade or two ago. Particularly, advertizing aimed at young people. And the culture, for example the music of young people, is presented rapidly. It is almost as if, it is not the message itself that is important, it is the overall impression it leaves that matters.

My conclusion then is that the message must be superficial, since there is no time to really take-in the entire message. It is there and gone before one can even think about it. Therein lies a huge problem. Learning and understanding and finally wisdom come from critical thinking. It’s not just taking the time to think about and think through information, but, to also think about what you think about it and to critically examine the information, the message, what is behind the message and how it affects you the consumer of the information.

Let me put forward that intelligence and wisdom do not come from the quantity of information, but, from the quality and depth of thought that arises from it. Yes, there are very ‘smart’ people these days, doing amazing things. Yet, is seems as if we as humans, know so much about many things, and understand so little, particularly, who we are.

What if we, humankind, are on the verge of a massive paradigm shift that takes us away from a deep connection through critical thought and dialog with the information we create. Perhaps, our brain might catch up one day, or more likely, since we rely more each day on technology, that we may develop computers that might sift and organize our information into capsules that synthesize what we need to know. A machine that tells us what we need to know. It sounds sinister in some ways. What if we simply invent ourselves into a lifestyle that has all our needs met through various technologies and we simply have to enjoy life. This is the myth I grew up with, as western societies passed the mid-point of the twentieth century.

It was a myth in that, as the twentieth century was entering its final couple of decades, we seemed to be working harder to pay for the technologies that we had come to rely on and we found we were generating more information daily than we could ever consume. It has turned out that we can only pick small snippets here and there. Perhaps, it is these small pickings are what will make us individuals, or who we are. Like careening down a track on a super fast train, we try to look out of all the windows to see the scenery. In a matter of minutes, we pass through a section of countryside and claim that we have seen the country, yet, we have only seen snippets along a track that, in no way, passes through the entire country. Who is to say we have or have not seen enough?

I have been practicing. This has been written while watching TV. As a movie plays on the TV, I write and look up every now and then and I listen as I go. Well, I do manage, as you can read, to get something written, however, I don’t feel that I am really thinking deeply as I construct each sentence. My writing, may be shallow compared to what I might write if I were in a quiet room and focusing.

People claim that they can multitask and still do each task well. I am not convinced, but as I said, I am trying. I’m not up to doing five things at once and I don’t even think I will get there or want to. I have managed, though, to get this done.

What do you think? Do you multitask? How do you get work done?