Back to School

 

Back to School: Thinks I knew, but wish I’d believed…

The start of another semester. For me, it’s the final year of a convoluted journey across 13 years, 5 states, a couple different collegiate institutions, (at least) on global pandemic, and more Monster Energy drinks and nicotine than I care to recount. For everyone returning to a classroom, it’s anxiety, excitement, anticipation, trepidation. New challenges, new environments within familiar spaces, faces both new and familiar, and a return to the thrills and frustrations of the American education system that the majority of us have been conditioned to function in at the same time we rail against it for the most formative years of our life. (We are a revolutionary people, at the heart of our psyche.)

I’m far from a subject matter expert, by any means. But in getting to this point, I’ve actually learned some things. Most of what I’ve “learned” comes back to the same pithy one-liners we hear gratuitously throughout the course of formal education. It’s not that we don’t believe them, but in my case, I feel like far too often they’ve been left in their most succinct form and I’ve failed to grasp the actual content of their meaning until I learned them the hard way. So, a few reminders for myself in this reflection that perhaps would help my fellow students, and maybe even some of the wonderful educators returning to their own classrooms that are living their own stress right alongside their joy at being in their element for another year of instruction and learning.

 

Make a Plan

This one seems obvious (spoiler: all of these seem obvious). I’ve worked 60-80 hour weeks all summer, while trying to maintain my horn chops to some degree, keep my house- and yard-work done, get through some part of my summer reading, still produce some kind of art… the mountain of things on the list of things I’d like to accomplish never seems to diminish, no matter how much time and effort I pour into checking things off the list.

I’ve started each year of college off with a variation in my planning (my last year, for example, the variation was that I didn’t plan at all), and had various degrees of success. My first year, accustomed as I was to life dictated by my Band’s “Plan of the Day” (PoD), my calendar began with my waking up, and had everything blocked off from meals, exercise, hygiene, studying, and classes, all the way through going to sleep. I kept these things blocked on my calendar for the first two weeks, stuck to it as best I could, then adjusted things based on the needs of the moment. It was ridiculously over-the-top, and I loved it, and I absolutely thrived under those prescripts. The adage “Fail to plan, plan to fail” has proven true within my own exploration, certainly. But starting out with a structured plan has helped me form routines that became habits, and facing a lack of skill, capability, talent, motivation, or any number of other driving factors, having plans and routines established helped keep carrying me through the day/week/month/semester/year.

Back-plan from Success

Every year, I’ve structured practice time on my horn by listing things I wanted to dig into over the course of the semester, passages I needed to work on, concepts I wanted to – if not master – explore. Having lesson times and performances laid out at the start of the semester is an absolute gift, and the most wonderful thing about a syllabus being published at the beginning of a course is the schedule that generally comes at the end.

Knowing the hard date of when I’m going to be expected to demonstrate a proficiency, be it through the medium of an exam, performance, or presentation, I can pace all the little benchmarks that will take me to where I need to be. Not only does that give my practice/study sessions a directed purpose and allow me to evaluate where I am and what more I need to do, it breaks big events with higher stakes into smaller and more manageable chunks. The same way you don’t just up and run a marathon without preparation, jumping into an evaluation or performance without preparing yourself is seldom as successful as we’d like it to be.

Shoot, Move, Communicate

              In any capacity and application, this is the best maxim I’ve ever heard. Either act, be positioning yourself into a better place from which to act (studying, practicing, learning in general), or be communicating (asking questions, making arrangements, sharing things you’ve discovered). Not only does this let you get more out of days and moments, it helps manage expectations. Even if what you need to accomplish is going off-grid and disconnecting from it all for a while, communicating that you’re unavailable and then moving to that point of unavailability lets the folks around you know where you are and to count you out of their active planning for the time being. You get what you need, hopefully, and don’t complicate someone else’s planning and execution in the process.

Free Yourself Up

              No discipline is so sterile that it benefits from you subserviating yourself to it. Our greatest cultural and scientific growth has come from individuals where were thoroughly and authentically themselves. Studying, practicing, executing ideas, meeting deadlines, and completing tasks are all important to growth and forward movement. But we live each moment only once. Finding “self” things to sustain you, and then bringing them to bear in your daily practices is something only you can do. Falling in love is different at 20 than it is at 30, whether it’s the first time or the fiftieth. Fall in love with as many people, places, and concepts as possible, and then share that in your spaces. The goal of education neither has to nor needs to be focused on the mastery of skills and concepts introduced in a formal classroom and then evaluated on a scantron test that will determine an arbitrary number like GPA. Developing as an individual and bringing life into the classroom is at least as important as taking what is presented in the classroom out into the world. You don’t find out and create who you are if you make your sole purpose the fulfillment of whatever requirements a course demands of you.

Health and Nutrition

              We’ve heard it constantly. “You should get more sleep! Are you sleeping enough?” Plenty of folks survive on the bare minimum (or less) for plenty of time. But in all of this chaos, and adding the stress of what may or may not be the actual and literal apocalypse happening around us, physical/mental/emotional exhaustion is real. Many folks are feeling it in a way they have never felt it before. I’ve put myself in the position where I was sneaking 20 minute naps between classes, sleeping 15 minutes before working at night, and then trying to power through homework in the hour before class. This was NOT the pinnacle of my time in school, and I pushed myself to the point of “well, there’s no recovering this grade in the last 4 weeks of the semester, let’s just discard any effort on that front and do better next year.” Pounding water like my life depended on it, and getting an adequate amount of sleep is the only thing that let me even try and function at my best. Being chronically sleep-deprived kept me “functioning,” at best, as the manager of a flaming paper-construct spiraling out of the sky, with the only definite assurance being that I would eventually hit the ground. It is so much easier to avoid that spiral than to pull yourself out of it, and sleep and water have been, for me, the first steps to just keep moving forward.

Assume the Best

              It is so unlikely that any of the folks around you are out to get you. It’s not impossible, for sure. But one of the hallmarks of (what I understand to be) the collegiate experience is the camaraderie and community that fosters learning and growth, and allows for mistakes and development. I have not met two people that communicate the same way, and I’ve met plenty whose communication style was foreign to me and took time for me to adjust to. I’m direct and blunt, and I enjoy when others are direct with me. “That was not pleasant. Let’s work on it.” is great feedback, in my opinion. For some of my friends, that feedback at the wrong moment would ruin their entire week. Allow people to be on the same journey of developing their communication we’re all on, and what is abrasive to you might be nothing at all to them. Do not assign malicious intent to someone’s words or actions. It is so much more common for humans to misunderstand each other than it is for them to act out of malice, and our actions are so much more directed by our own internal needs of the moment than they are active ill wishes towards someone else.

              Our “best” fluctuates constantly. My best is severely hampered when I’m physically exhausted and running at my limits. My best with adequate preparation and without self-sabotage is a high that I chase constantly, and in the brief moments I can grasp some part of it to use, I’m ecstatic. Assume folks are giving their best in every given moment. When that’s not enough for them to meet the moment on their own, help them. In every experience that I’ve had in my life, the ones I have gotten the most from (and given the most to) are the ones where a group worked together to meet the moment and got everyone there. It’s a power that defies textual depiction (with my limited writing capabilities, at least), but is one of the myriad reasons we thrill in human interaction and accomplishment as a species.

 

              The summation of all of this (tl;dr) is to bring you everywhere you go. Your classroom experience is not the product. The knowledge you gain is not the product. Neither is the degree or certification, nor state testing scores, nor performances, nor projects, nor any one piece of what you do, both during the active pursuit of formal education and beyond. Investing in you as the product of all of these things, and as the never-quite-finished project that can grow in infinite and unexpected ways, is the goal product of the entire educational journey. That remains true whether you realize it at the start, when you’re trying to hammer out the last of 15 pages that you need to submit by 11:59pm and it’s already 11:30pm (goodbye, proofreading), or if it becomes evident decades later, when you realize that you are what you have to show for all your effort. You are enough, at every stage of the process. Invest in creating the “you” that you want to be, and you’ll be ready to be in all of the places that you need to be.

DMG