G's Laws

I have always been a person who, more than anything else, wants to understand how things work. The first real intellectual love of my life, music theory, was all about my trying to understand the inner workings of sound: what did it consist of, how it was assembled, what made these raw materials turn into something that could make you laugh or cry or get up and dance or get up, walk down the hall, and punch the guy in the next apartment in the head.

Over the course of the past several years I have had the good fortune (?) to have emotional wrestling matches with any number of people, experiences, bureaucracies, compromises, ethical dilemmas, catch 22's, and some just plain outright cruddy luck.

Being that I am still a person who lives in a constant state of trying to understand and figure things out, and being that I have been exposed to the aforementioned life experiences, I have come up with a few observations that I have formulated into what I call "G's Laws". They may be original, or maybe not; they aren't things I've heard people discuss prior to having them slowly coagulate in my head. But then again, I've also never been a person who ever thought himself or claimed to be all that much smarter, or slicker, or more clever, than anyone else, so for me to think that I am the first person to make such observations is somewhat contrary to my usual demeanor.

But anyway, I've mentioned some of these ideas to students over the past few years, and each time I have, my students have said that I should write them down, put them in a book, etc, etc. In other words, they really dug hearing my ideas. So, for their sake, I will surrender my usual manner of disregarding most of what I think as being little more than babble, and set some of them into their rightful place: my obscure blog in cyberspace.

And so, my little school cherubs, it is for your benefit that I begin the process of emptying the contents of my mind here, where the world can read, and laugh, and point their fingers at me without my knowledge. I wish teaching was more like this.