Patterns and Passion

I have a couple of audio clips to share with you today.

I spoke a while back of my anticipated meeting with Freddy, a 19 year old musician all around talented guy. Well, we spent a good 2 hours together chatting about all things education and he shared with me some of his fabulous music demos that he produced. He feels really fortunate to have been led by one of his high school teachers to Urban Arts (Toronto) where he was able to develop his musical talents over the last few years and is now working there, mentoring students in music as he was.

Here’s a sample of his work:

In the short excerpt from our conversation below, you’ll hear how he feels about school in general and what he considers most important for teachers to share with their students…even more so than any new technology.

Freddy

I had been thinking of Freddy and a number of the other interviews I’ve conducted so far, while I was having lunch with my friend Michele, who I spoke of in a recent post. In this next clip I share my remarks about how I’m starting to detect patterns in the interviews I’m conducting and I address some of the questions I have about how to work with the audio material thus far.  Michele shares some insight about an MA thesis from Siman Fraser (1992) that she found extremely interesting.  It speaks of 14 interviews that were conducted with students in Alternative education; what was identified included the key areas of the Alt Ed  system that would typically render it successful and what aspect of Alt Ed seem to work best…

Now keep in mind, we were having lunch…so, lots of chewing; and no, I’ll probably never conduct an interview like that again… even if it was meant to be casual! It was an experiment… I thought it might add a little ambiance… no, no it doesn’t.

Michele & I having lunch and talking Ed.

Michele and I

Oh, in passing, you’ll notice that I am now using the Zoom H4N audio recorder (seen on the table). I returned the Olympus LS10 that I once mentioned I had bought because I found it overly omni-directional! The H4N is really crisp and truly geared toward interviews…  the XLR inputs don’t hurt either!