(below: woman triumphs before watching the recording back, remembering the case of the broken microphone, and acknowledging that the video did not and could not work under these circumstances)
Inquiry has already been fraught with failure, as per last week’s post suggested. I’d set out two tasks since last checking in – get to work on assembling the sheet music for my final performance, and actually assemble my flute and try it out. Surprisingly, I took to the flute first, and I wish I’d been confident enough to video that instead of meticulously follow my transcription process. Allow me to explain:
to transcribe my performance piece, Enfant, i’d have to use my previous experience to write out the notes that i was hearing and transform it into readable sheet music.
to play the flute, i’d have to put 3 tubes together (i could only guess how), arrange my fingers on the valves (which ones where? how many?) and blow air into the mouthpiece (surprisingly, there are many ways to do this).
guess which one fed my fixed mindset?
I wanted to save transcription for a pat-on-the-back treat, and I wasn’t ready to put myself out there on a visual record. So, I thought I would give a little whistle on the flute just to get a sense for where I was at. Would you believe it? I had a fantastic time. I needed to consult video after video to get there, but I actually played a C major scale – something I thought I’d be able to do only after a month’s practice. What I most wish I’d gotten on video was gleefully shouting across my house to my husband, understandably brushing his teeth at 9pm, every time it actually made noise. Did you hear that honk? I made him listen to me eke out the scale before going to bed.
That was Monday. On Thursday, I do the majority of my classwork with a relatively open schedule, so I stacked up my EDCI weekly reflection, editing my letter of introduction for my practicum placement, taking notes on two chapters for math pedagogy, and packing for a camping trip. I also thought I would jot down the flute solo for Enfant during this time. Wow, I cannot find the words to aptly describe how frustrating that experience was. To begin, I’d already learned that Enfant is written in the key of C major, but the flute solo starts with a key change to Eb. Great!! Not the notes that I had just learned on the flute! It also included a “fun” little ascending line, but not a traditional scale – which I couldn’t tell for about half an hour, because I was of course listening to a recording that had a blend of instruments all at once (otherwise known as a song). If you think that this is manageable so far, you try listening to one passage of a song you thought you liked for an hour at 0.25 speed.
Things did get better mentally once I got past the ascending line, but eroded somewhat in other ways: my notation lost all sense of time stamps as I clicked from studio to live recordings, things became scratched out more often, my handwriting leaned more functional than legible…
But I got to the end. And despite the mania creeping up from those hours spent, I was feeling pretty good. And I wanted to have something concrete to show after all, so front-facing camera in check, I proved my day’s effort with a rendition of the solo on the keyboard I’d been working with. After capping off with a righteous selfie (never thought that I would ever say that), I obliterated my ego by playing it back, which reminded me that my phone’s microphone was broken upon repair – an issue that has wigged me out over the last few months, but I can’t afford a new one yet. When my husband got home from work, I borrowed his – it doesn’t have the same water damage, thankfully.
This made me think about the term “failing upwards,” which often has negative connotations, whichever way you spin it. One implication could be impostor syndrome – you feel like you’re failing despite upward movement. The more common one, I think, is when incompetence is inexplicably rewarded. Within the context of growth mindsets, could failing upwards be embracing failure as an opportunity to continue learning and growing? What would it take for failing to not be seen as a negative, full stop? I suspect that what makes the “incompetence” definition the most unfavourable is that it is an unwillingness to learn or change, despite failing. That’s an uncomfortable place to sit – two wrongs somehow making a right (depending on how you define success).
In my case, I think defining success is being okay with things taking longer. I will admit to you that after reaching the ascending line the first time, I Googled and downloaded the heck out of apps that could transcribe a song just by uploading it. Fortunately, I’m rather cheap these days, and the free versions don’t work. They say cheaters never prosper… What’s interesting to me is that by the time I got this final recording, it’s not neat. It isn’t even in musical notation, I just wrote out the names of the notes to work on it again later. According to my agenda, I failed to complete the task – that doesn’t mean I have nothing to show for it. I’m further along than before, and that’s something.
