ltmurnau | Teachable Moment?

I haven't been keeping up with the papers Aki mostly hasn't been bringing home from school, and last night I found that he had a test in Music class today. So I went over some of the papers he hadn't done the first time around - they were asking simple questions like, "name two composers", "how many families of instruments are there?" and so forth.

I looked at some of the stuff he had completed - they asked, "what kind of music do you like?" and he answered "horror", by which he meant spooky stuff like Skinny Puppy. He did mention the homemade instruments I play, but could not name them because they have no names. They also asked, "what kind of music would you like to learn more about?" and he wrote "Like Noi Boten", by which he meant Blixa's Boys.

We started talking about how anything could be used to make music. I told him of the Goethe quote, "Das Lied schlaft in der Maschine." and played Neubauten's "NNAAAMMM" off Ende Neu for him. Unfortunately there was no time to play the soundtrack from A Clockwork Orange for him, but I did remind him of some of the Strauss and Rossini and Wagner he had heard from watching Warner Brothers cartoons.

He did wander off in the middle to throw some of those little snapper things out the door, but in the morning he did remember all we discussed, even the quote.

Then we made molasses cookies together. I will bring what remains of them to coffee tonight, if my co-workers don't steal them all during lunch.

Sometimes I think he will grow up OK after all, though there will likely be some strange gaps in his knowledge - just as there will be strange surpluses of information in other areas.