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| A Young Scholar and his Tutor, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, c. 1629-1630 Digital Image Courtesy of the Getty Open Content Program |
Hello friends,
I've mentioned my always-has-ideas-friend Kim before. One of Kim's many great, creative ideas is a D.C. area program called Little Academy. Little Academy offers affordable, one-session classes for adults curious about various creative, intellectual and socially conscious topics - art history, poetry, music, film, women's studies, you name it. The classes I've taken so far included a class on how to film an entire, high-quality movie using your smart phone and a class on the history of protest music in America. The classes are meant to be easygoing and social, so if you're in the D.C. area and like cocktails (after all, they're taught at a bar) you should absolutely check it out before this Summer's session is over.
Kim also knows that I'm a Jewish music nerd, and so one thing led to another and I am now going to be teaching a class titled "Challah Back: A History of Jewish Music in the U.S. and Beyond" on August 8.
All credit goes to Kim for the clever title and the enticing course description on Little Academy's website; if I had had my way the title would have been something like, "Jewish Immigration Patterns and Ethnic Diversity and their Lasting Influence on Modern Popular Music."
The difference between the two titles really highlights one of the biggest challenges for me as I plan my class: Figuring out the line between what is universally interesting and what is just interesting to me as someone who is already super into this topic. It's particularly hard given that this class is entirely voluntary and something people are doing for fun, so they're not the usual trapped audience there because they need to be there.
I have plenty of teaching, training and public speaking experience. My big girl job requires me to present trainings and speak at conferences in regard to really dry, technical topics on the regular. I mean, I'm not a total Ben Stein about it. I try to pepper in some humorous anecdotes or human impact stories and throw an occasional interesting graphic into my PowerPoints. But the real difference here is that when you're teaching a technical topic that people need to understand to do their job, the goal is to clearly convey only those the facts and information your audience absolutely needs to know.
But what about teaching something you absolutely love and are passionate about and do for fun? You would think this would be easier but I'm actually finding it extremely difficult! I'm not complaining. I looooove the fact that I'm being presented with an opportunity to spend two hours externalizing my internal geek monologue and showing people cool music videos that I'm really into. The problem, however, is that if I include everything I was originally hoping to say, packing my PowerPoint with with images, article links and embedded videos, the session will last nine hours.
(A little teaser: This video is by an artist named Riff Cohen, a Jewish Israeli of North African descent I just discovered and am OBSESSED with - I'll be discussing another one of her videos during my class that has significantly more Jewish imagery in it, but I love this one, too, and personally am thrilled she sings in French because I don't understand Hebrew or Arabic - look at how her ethnically diverse perspective on Paris differs from the stereotypical one)
How do I decide what to cut? How can I not embark on the only tangentially relevant but absolutely fascinating discussion of Jewish contributions to the bourbon industry and the fact that anti-Semitism was a driving force behind the prohibition movement, given that the class is taking place in a bar that specializes in bourbon cocktails? How can I not talk about how, even today, popular culture uses cribbed motifs from recognizably Jewish music to trigger imagery about greed and money, and compare that to similar uses of musical tropes from Black, Chinese and Native American cultures that are used to immediately evoke stereotypes about those groups in settings where members of those cultures are not actually present? (Here's my favorite overall example of this phenomenon, and here's my favorite example involving stereotypical Jewish musical tropes - nice stock tickers, ladies.)
How do I gauge what parts of my presentation will be interesting to my audience, when I'm mired in this stuff and therefore interested in all of it and they're only just starting to dive into the topic? How do I make this topic interesting to Jewish people and non-Jews alike? How do I balance people's expectations that this class is going to be all about Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon with all the really other important and very cool stuff that I find super interesting but that isn't as well known and probably isn't what my audience is expecting to learn about? How do I deal with the fact that most Americans' exposure to Jewish culture involves white-looking dudes from New York or New York-like places, leaving out about 90% of the rest of Jewish culture, which involves Jews of many different races and ethnic backgrounds and geographic locations and a wide diversity of languages and traditions?
As someone whose major claim to be able to teach on this topic is simply the fact that I love it, have spent a lot of time with it, and have compiled a lot of cool information and facts about it, and who doesn't have any professional or educational credentials in musicology, Jewish studies or like fields, how do I deal with a challenge from someone who claims to know more about the topic than I do or who adamantly disagrees with my interpretation of my topic? What happens if someone in my class expresses a bias or stereotype about Jews that just isn't cool, without even knowing that they're doing it? Am I qualified to take that person on?
And what do I do about managing people's questions, facilitating organic discussion, and making things interactive but still making sure we cover everything I want to cover during the session? At presentations for work I always build in question time, but work topics aren't endless and aren't areas of passion for me where I could talk for ages and always have another video to show.
I guess the good news, however, is that most of the people in my audience will probably be a little tipsy :)
What about you? Have you ever had the opportunity to teach something just for fun, or to teach in a more serious setting on something that's a topic of passion for you? How do you manage to deal with the challenges of gauging what other people will actually be interested in, keeping yourself from going off on tangents, or cutting out things that you care about because you simply don't have enough time? How does this type of teaching or presenting differ from other types of presentations you've had to perform, like school presentations, talks at conferences, or briefings at work? If you could teach on anything, what topic would you want to teach and what would your class look like? What do you think would be your biggest concern? Discuss in the comments.
