The Best of What Was There

Feeling History

Two subjects we've covered in the class I co-teach have made me especially aware of living at a particular point in history.  I feel old, both because I have a perspective my students don't have on the past, and because we've been discussing a particular aspect of the future that I won't see completely play out.

The past?  Well, there are 13 young women in this class; seniors and graduate students -- and the other day, when the subject of "Ms." as an address came up, my fellow teacher and I realized that that the majority of them had no idea why it had come into being.  We explained that, prior to its introduction, women -- as opposed to men -- were forced to identify themselves as married or single.  We watched as "aaaaaah!" expressions bloomed on their faces.  I reminded myself to research nursing homes as I celebrated the fact that "Ms." was a non-issue for a woman today.

The future -- and a more sobering topic.  We've been talking about music therapy program development and areas of health care and education where music therapy will be especially significant in years to come.  One of the most likely areas?  Veteran's care. 

The war in Iraq is producing a group of young combat veterans who face a lifelong struggle to cope with physical wounds so severe, they might not have lived through previous conflicts.

The nation's system of veterans' health care is already seeing the first of those men and women, saved by modern battlefield medicine but in need of long-term rehabilitation. While their numbers are not nearly as large as the injured from Vietnam or World War II, the severity of their wounds is often greater than from previous wars.

"What is important is the really more profound nature of their injuries," says Tony Principi, the Veterans Affairs secretary during President Bush's first term.

While armored vehicles and jackets sometimes protect vital organs, the car bombs and booby-trap explosions so common in Iraq have left American soldiers with catastrophic amputations and serious brain trauma.

"The nature of their injuries is different in some ways from what we've been dealing with before," says Stephan Fihn, the VA's acting chief research and development officer. "They are a group of people who are going to be alive for a long time. Our goal is to return them to a functional and productive and fulfilling existence."

The numbers of traumatic brain injuries and amputations (sometimes multiple) are significantly higher, as a percentage of injuries, than any previous conflict.  Add in the inevitably huge number of soldiers who will require help for post-traumatic stress, and you have a completely new and unexpected population of people who will need our therapeutic intervention in the years to come.  All health care professions need to be preparing their students for this.

Clinic Stories

Many wonderful things happening in the music therapy clinic here, with both clients and students learning new things.

• One student, K, is working with a young man who has autism and functioning at a moderately high level.  We are trying to encourage the client (17 years old) to initiate more music on his own, rather than simply following a schedule of music strategies.  One of the things we're doing is some instrumental improvisation with various rhythm instruments -- and occasionally, K playing the guitar, which he does very well.  But this is all new for our client and he doesn't always participate all that much; just a drum beat here, or a short series of alternating notes on large tone bars there. 

  Yesterday, I noticed that K seemed to be responding to his client as if he needed to "modify the behavior" and this made him do more talking/explaining, and less music.  I told him that what I've realized over the years is that you must work with your client as a fellow musician, and respond to what he/she does as you would with anyone else.  I told K to play as if he's jamming with a minimalist. :-)  What he will find, I'm sure, is that the more he interacts with his client as a musician, the more of a musician his client will become.

• Another student, Y, is working at a nursing home with a group of folks who are in early stages of dementia.  The clients, mostly ladies, are wonderful and we've had a great time with singing, playing instruments, doing exercise with colorful scarves, and learning simple signs for "What a Wonderful World."  One of the things Y does near the beginning of each session is to go around the room having everyone beat their name rhythmically on a drum.  There is a "chorus" chant for everyone, the Y beats out her name, asks the client's name, and has that person beat the rhythm -- then back to the chorus.  And so on. 

  In almost every case, the clients have significant trouble with memory and do not recall much from week to week.  The first few times we went this semester, I know Y thought she wasn't making an impression.  So it was a joyous moment a week or so ago when, during the rhythmic naming song, she said, rhythmically to one client "What-is-your-name?" and the woman said, "Sweetie, why are you asking me that?  You know my name!" 

  (This reminds me of the story of the patient with who saw her daughter waiting for her in the hall when she came out of  a neuropsychology evaluation session.  "Do you know who the President is?" the patient asked her daughter.  "Sure," said the daughter.  "Well, I wish you'd tell Dr. Jones," the patient said, "because he doesn't.")

• We're thrilled with the progress of a little 5-year-old girl who is a client in our clinic for the first time this year.  She herself is the daughter of a mother with developmental disabilities, and has been adopted by a terrific family.  We've been working on various communication and cognitive skills and she's making tremendous progress.  What's frustrating for us now is that the school district has told her family that she cannot stay in the early childhood classroom that has been so good for her -- because she's too old.  They want to put her in a regular large kindergarten class.  I'm almost certain that age alone is not a legal justification, and we're researching it.  This is a girl who, with careful work now, may really blossom.  We don't want to lose the opportunities for maximum learning in these early years.
• I have two Korean students who are doing some of the most creative music therapy I've ever seen with a group of women, most with cognitive and physical impairments, who come to our clinic from their group home.  Each intervention they plan is something that challenges the women, has a skill that they can transfer into their daily lives, and is richly musical.  At first, we wondered if the clients would have trouble with the students' accents, which can be strong, even though technically their English is wonderful.  It really hasn't been a problem, though. 

  That meant that we could all laugh the other night when the students were leading an activity that had the clients listening to music and matching it to pictures of famous places around the country.  The students played "Dixieland" and, when the clients didn't immediately see a match between the music and a picture, one of the students asked (and this is sort of how it came out), "Do you know where Dizzieland is?"  One of the clients perked up immediately.  "California!" she exclaimed.  Get it? :-)

So every day with our clients is, as usual, interesting, challenging, and fun.   Our clients continue to give us as much or more than we give them.

Language Barriers

How tough should a professor be on students from other countries for whom English is a second (and more recent) language? In the field of music therapy, should one be tougher on verbal or written communication? Our university has a Writing Center, where "foreign language students" can take their written work and get corrections before turning it in. For music therapy practicum students, this can include up to 3 different kinds of documentation per week, just for their clinical work.

If you study a subject in another country, can you develop a thorough understanding of it in your native language if you can't express it well in the second one? A Japanese student recently spoke to one of my fellow graduate students -- a Korean woman -- and confessed that she didn't think she'd been well-served by the faculty at her school, who had given her breaks and extra considerations because she wasn't an English speaker. She told my friend that she really wasn't sure of the basic concepts of music therapy -- in either language.

I don't speak a second language with any degree of fluency, so I don't have a perspective on this. I have had foreign language students, and I've seen what many of them have to deal with. Several of them, for example, came from countries where the language has no articles ("a," "the"). Can you imagine having to remember to insert all of those -- correctly -- into a paper?

If you have any experience with this, I'd be interested in hearing about it. Email me!

Learning on Demand

Learning (and writing) on demand is the most difficult thing, and the most helpful thing, about coming back to school. Over the past 20 years, I've managed to do quite a bit, but those accomplishments have happened in spurts, as I (often in partnership with Kathleen) got inspired and had blocks of time to focus. Kathleen will tell you that she had to get used to the way I think and write.

• Stage 1: When a project or article or book comes to mind, I have an initial rush of creativity and ideas, which are fertilized through discussions and reading and handwritten notes.
• Stage 2: Weeks and maybe months go by. The goal of the project remains, but I do almost no focused work on it. I mull it over, write in my head, write longhand paragraphs on various subjects -- about half of which I manage to keep around -- and tell people about the project, processing as I tell them about it.
• Stage 3: Someone (Kathleen) or something (fear of being beaten to the punch) creates pressure to Finish Already! A deadline is set.
• Stage 4: Long, last-possible-minute writing marathon, which begins to flow beautifully about an hour or two in, and becomes a natural high as the pieces fall into place. All-nighters (or darn close) occur. Manuscript is dropped off at Kathleen's at 4am of print day, or put in the mail to a journal via FedEx.

And...well...this process doesn't work here in Graduate School World. :-) There's no waiting for inspiration, no waiting for fortuitous meetings that will provide key information, no waiting for the pieecs to click into place. Nope. It's due this Thursday. Yikes.

The upside of this is that I've finished one journal article, completed a pilot study for my experimental research, read 15 books, and am in the process of writing a proposal for a brain imaging study. That amount of output would not have occurred if I'd been left up to my own, bizarre, devices. On the other hand, I'm sleep-deprived.

So...there you go.

WARNING: Boring Parking Rant Ahead

Anyone who studies, works, or lives on a college campus knows that parking is a problem.  I'm studying and working on a college campus, and I'm on- and off-site at least one extra time a day, sometimes more -- supervising students, working at home (instead of cramping my office mate in our [no kidding] 8 X 8 GTA office), etc.  But hey -- I bought my $85 student parking pass, and it's hanging proudly from my rear view mirror.  No problem!  No problem, that is, as long as I arrive at campus before 7:45am or after 4:00pm.  For anything in between you have to allow an extra 30 minutes to prowl the nearby lot, looking for departures, and/or walk from the far-away one where you finally find a place.   That's 30 minutes lost; no homework, no reading, no paperwork.  And sometimes I'm coming from a supervision to a meeting and I don't have those 30 minutes, period.

This is where the parking garage comes in.  By next year, I will have moved through the waiting list and will have a pass for the garage, which is conveniently located on the side of campus where I attend classes and work.  Until then, I pay.  $1 an hour, or any fraction of same.  Yikes.  So far this year, I have easily spent double the cost of the original student parking pass.

And today?  Well, I had to park in the garage.  When I finally got out after my last session, I inserted the paper parking card into the reader (you pay in the lobby before you drive out) and it read $5.  I had?  $4.

So, I walked the 1/4 mile to the nearest ATM, withdrew some money, was charged the $2 extra because the ATM isn't from my bank, and walked back.  Put the paper card into the reader and it read...$6; Yes, in the time I had taken to go get money, I'd crossed over into the next hour.

*Sigh*

Philosophy of Music, Men, and American Idol

• So...I've been keeping up with American Idol. I tune in most weeks and keep my finger near the MUTE button on the remote. Each singer gets 10 seconds to keep the sound on and then is silenced. I turn the sound back on for the judging, so I can keep track of who's in favor. Commercials, phone numbers, group skits? Muted. I get quite a bit of stats homework done during the show.

  Ridiculous, huh? Except, not really. Here's why. At the break in my doctoral seminar on brain imaging last week, several of us headed for the ladies' room. While washing up, one of the other students -- acknowledging me as "the music person" in the class -- asked, "Betsey, do you watch American Idol?" I could tell from the tone of her voice that it was an invitation, so I said, "Sure!" and this led to a silly discussion among four of us on the relative merits of Nikko and Carrie and our preferences for Bo and Nadia...a discussion which continued at an enthusiastic pace all the way back into the lab.

  And while everyone has been friendly and more communicative than the group of masters-level speech therapy gals in my class last semester, this was the first time that I felt like I was connecting in a social way with these folks. That's important. These are potential colleagues and collaborators, but they all see each other in their primary buildings and in various classes and lectiures, while I'm across campus at the music school. Sharing questions and information in class about fMRI studies is one thing, but it really helps to establish another level of connection -- even if that level is American Idol! :-)

• Paying for my fountain drink at the Kwik Shop yesterday, I responded to the clerk's comment about the wonderful weather with, "The good news? I'm going to be sitting out on my porch swing under the trees and blue sky. The bad news? I'm going to be reading this week's philosophy book."

  Actually, this week's book is more neuroscience than philosophy; after being immersed in discussions of Kivy and dewey and Goehr and Small and Godlovitch, it should be interesting to relate it all to anatomy and physiology this week. At least I think it will be interesting, which is probably why I signed up as discussion leader!

  More on this later.

• Do male music therapy students experience any discrimination during their education? When I was teaching at SMU, I became aware of how the way I ran my discussion-oriented classes favored the conversational and processing styles of my female students, and I made some adjustments. Here at this university, I have a male student who has commented on various little things that he notices, like the kinds of examples female professors use with a largely female class. The GTAs have discussed the different processing we notice in our male clinical students, and how we find we must -- more often -- make sure they write our instructions down, as this is the way they are remembered. When I asked a female student about this recently, she commented that a single male student in a class always feels exposed vocally, because he is singing an octave lower than anyone else.

  When I posed this question to the men on my music therapy e-mail list from North Texas, I received responses that ranged from "nope -- never had a problem," to "sheesh -- get over it!" Certainly it is true that women have many more concerns about discrimination than men, but it doesn't make it right. And I wonder if any feelings of isolation among males contribute to the fact that our music therapy university faculties have a significantly greater percentage of men than exist in the profession as a whole. Is it about having some kind of a status position? Is it simply about their interests? Or is it, perhaps, because some don't feel as connected to the clinical community as they might?

  Just asking.

Yes, yes, I know!

Not that anyone's reading this, since everyone assumes I've been kidnapped by Martians and lost my ability to type, but...hi! I'm still alive and immersed in PhD life. I'm going to be catching up with some news here, and I've posted some new pictures. Onward!