TITLE: One Way I'm Like Tom Waits
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 23, 2020  1:14 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 At one point in
<A HREF="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/elvis-costello-tom-waits-interview/">
   this conversation between Elvis Costello and Tom Waits</A>,
 the two songwriters discuss some of the difficulties they face in
 the creative process.  Costello remarks that he sometimes writes
 notes that he can't sing, only to be disappoint himself when he
 gets into the studio.  Waits commiserates:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Anything that has to travel all the way down from your cerebellum
 to your fingertips, there's a lot of things that can happen on the
 journey.  Sometimes I'll listen to records, my own stuff, and I
 think god, the original idea for this was so much better than the
 mutation that we arrived at.  What I'm trying to do now is get
 what comes and keep it alive.  It's like carrying water in your
 hands.  I want to keep it all, and sometimes by the time you get
 to the studio you have nothing.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 This is something I notice all the time when I'm teaching.  I'll
 have an idea for class somewhere: walking home, riding the
 exercise bike, reading something.  My brain dives into the
 process of making the idea real: telling a story, writing code,
 explaining an idea in relation to things we've done in class
 before.  Then comes deployment.  We get into the classroom and...
 it feels flat.  On rare occasions the new ideas bombs, but most
 often it just seems not quite right.  It doesn't feel like what
 I had in my mind when I first had the idea, and I'm not sure how
 we ended up feeling the way we feel in class.  The idea was so
 perfect.

 Teaching ideas are abstraction.  Teaching is concrete.  It
 involves other humans.  Their learning is what's important, and
 sometimes the idea doesn't make the connection intended by the
 teacher.  The classroom is where reality sets in.

 There is good news.  Sometimes a disappointing or failed idea
 can be salvaged by analyzing the experience and redesigning the
 session.  But most of the time it never feels as perfect as it
 did in my head at the moment of conception.  Part of the art of
 becoming a teaching is making friends with this fact and moving
 forward.
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