Mr. Whirly

Mr. Whirly is one of my favorite Replacement songs.

Give it a listen if you’d like. It’s a frenetic remix of Beatles songs, put through a blender by an early 80’s Minneapolis punky, new wave, alternative panic attack. That’s a pretty great description of the Replacements. Maybe I should’ve been a music journalist. Write for Pitchfork. There’s still time.

It’s not that I enjoy listening to Mr. Whirly, though I have it playing here and now as I write these words. I bring up the song because I appreciate the messy collage of taking what is already there, pulling it apart and putting it back together to make something new. There’s something so creative, so affirmational, so improvisational about that process.

***

I have a pretty great line about my teaching. I’ve used it any number of times. Sure, I think it makes me sound clever. But I also think it expresses something that is true.

“In the past, I described myself as a punk rock teacher,” I tell anybody who lets me talk about my teaching, “but now I’ve come to see that I’m more of a jazz musician than anything else.”

Profound, right? Somebody give me a medal. Or a PhD.

But seriously, there’s something important to me in that well-rehearsed line. Early in my career, I raged against the machine. I did my best to invite students into teaching and learning that questioned power, critiqued oppression, and poked and prodded at the status quo. Sometimes I did this in more serious ways, but mostly I was silly. I dripped with sarcasm and made fun of the powers that be. My father’s son. Oh, and I wore ripped jeans. Even on Mondays. I got in all sorts of trouble for all sorts of reasons during my high school teaching career. Often without realizing it. I was naive during my early years as a teacher. My middle years too.

Eventually, I came to realize that I operated within systems. There were powerful forces around me and, unless I learned how to move with them, it was useless to imagine I could move against them. Those systems could do real damage to me or, at the very least, withhold my paycheck.

Jazz musicians and improvisers learn to move with what is there rather than to rage against it. They listen deeply to the melody or the scene before they try to add something onto it. Transformation is available to the improviser or jazz musician, but only in the adding and the riffing on what is already there. It took me many difficult years to learn this but, slowly, I started to see that I could only be what was available for me to be in the space. This, in some ways, is at the heart of my writing and thinking about improvisation and education over the years. We are only capable of what the context allows us to be capable of and we are part of that context. Very complicated.

Anyway, that line about being more of a jazz musician than a punk rock teacher stays with me. I continue to learn to riff peacefully off what is available to me as I make my way through institutions.

***

Riffing is about hearing what is there and adding onto it. How do you take something established and remake it so that it is something new? Something distinct to the people who work with it in the moment. The Replacements Mr. Whirly offers one example. I think of the ways I’ve tried to be in schools as another. Take the collective weight of 100 years of compulsory schooling in the United States and try to riff with it in order to make something new. That’s pretty idealistic, but I hope, in part, that is what my teaching career has been after.

Mr. Whirly just sounds like noise to some people. My teaching probably just sounds like noise to some people. But there’s a method in all the madness. Something that matters. Something that is distinctly a product of the riffing that comes from listening deeply and working to remake reality to the degree I can in the contexts I’m given.

And here, let’s end with this beautiful little nugget of words from Mr. Whirly:

Come on, Whirly
Whoooo
Go on baby
You’re cool
Shake it around