Life in Flagstaff

Like I said in last post, I’m working harder to keep this blog updated.

I wrote a bit about our place a while back. It’s even more settled now. I love our new home, and having space to actually use things instead of keeping them in storage. Our apartment is the far back corner of the last apartment complex on the hill, so we get a nice view of a woodsy area out our front door.

We are really enjoying Flagstaff! We are so lucky to live in a beautiful, interesting place. Some tidbits:

It has a historic downtown shopping district that looks intriguing, although we haven’t visited it yet. The public library lends quality DVDs, our own free Redbox! The grocery stores are very pricey, but the cheapest one is Fry’s, which happens to be the one closest to us. The Walmart here is lame-sauce. The City Hall has a grassy field perfect for Ron Paul supporters to camp out with their signs along historic Route 66. We actually drive on Route 66 on our way to school each morning. I’ve noticed three street-corner prophets on a regular basis. There are beautiful hikes, and we recently took the ski lift up to the highest mountain point in Arizona. And, the forecast for tomorrow is snow. Not sure how I feel about that last one. We’ll deal with winter bit by bit as it comes and sticks. Up until now (July to October), the weather has been breezy, rainy, and cool.

Chris and I are really lucky in our school schedule too. We are taking all of the same classes except for one (Chris is taking the Search for Meaning, which I tried to get into, but it filled up too quickly). Having the same classes helps us study, keeps us motivated, and sometimes makes us be more accountable than we might be otherwise. J A quick overview of our classes:

World Music: A study of music in culture and music AS culture, this has been the most intriguing class! Our professor is vaguely hippie, with a long pony tail, a drop of Spokane blood, and a hands-on, semi-mystical attitude about studying the musics of the world. The only drawback is that he tends to judge for the crime of being middle-class and white. I think he’d like us better if we were from China, Poland, or the BaAka tribe. All I can say is, we can’t help it. I’d love to be Black. It’s not my fault that I’m not. Psh. However, he is a really good teacher, giving us lots of chances to study and attempt to make the music of other cultures. In fact, for our final, we are performing an A.R. Rahman song at a concert with a famous Indian classical artist! I prefer getting elbow deep in the music, combined with weekly tests, versus cramming for a mid-term at the last minute.

Diction: Our diction professor is a very complex person. At once loving and terrifying, at once an expert and yet with a certain detachment from reality, she is passionate about her subject and assigns more loads of work for one night of pronouncing fricatives than others do for an entire month. Picture your stereotypical high school drama teacher. Mix in a little bit of Professor Trelawny, a little bit of opera diva past her prime, and a hint of Beatrix Potter. That’s our professor. She’s delightful, because she is the sweetest person and has no idea she comes off as crazy. She likes to dance her arms to spoken song text, chew every sound, and then get within an inch of your face to make sure you’ve got it right. To top it off, she can extend her jaw farther than Jacob Marley and wiggle it faster than her vibrato. It’s bizarre. MY jaw drops just watching it. Regardless, I’m learning a lot in her class

Christianity: Can’t deny, I thought I’d like this class better than I do. It is neat to see the branching tree that makes up Christianity. But the class is full of zombies, and I think the text makes the content dryer than it should be. At least the professor offers lots of extra credit, that’s always nice.

Educational Psychology: Really great class as well. I’m learning so many new things! So many things we’re learning, like developmental stages and theories, teaching methods, and behaviorism, are going to be incredible helpful to us not only as school teachers but as parents. The catch to this class is that it’s 2 ½ hours long, once a week. We are really luck that the subject matter is interesting and that the professor is engaging, so it doesn’t drag on too long. It’s always a relief when the teacher teaching you how to be a good teacher is, well, a good teacher.

Voice Lessons: Doesn’t necessarily fit in the category of a class, somehow. We attend a weekly vocal divisional recital on Tuesday mornings, a weekly master class on Tuesday afternoons, a weekly half-hour rehearsal with our accompanists, and a weekly hour lesson with Dr. Saunders (in addition to practicing every day). It’s very time consuming. But we love being able to work with Dr. Saunders, who is also the vocal pedagogy teacher at NAU; it’s a perk because not only are we learning to improve our own voices, but we’re getting tidbits of vocal pedagogy information that will be more useful to us as teacher than perhaps the abstract imagery used by some vocal performance teachers, used to create a certain sound in your voice only, rather than giving you the tools to teach that to people with voices different from yours. That’s a run-on sentence, but you get the idea. ;)

Shrine of the Ages Choir: How we love Shrine! We’ve been in many choirs, but none quite as good as this one! Dr. Copley is my idol. I am amazed at how with a minimum expenditure of outward effort she can get us to fix the choir’s problems with incredible precision. Her conducting is natural, her control of the sound of the choir is impressive, and her musical interpretation teaches me new things every week. Dr. Copley has a way of making students step up to the plate with on-the-fly questions, although she never shoots anyone down for being wrong; she just gets someone else to say it right. She’s terribly funny too, with fabulous comedic timing and a natural way of relating to people. On top of that, she’s just one of those people that make you feel important every time you talk to her. I learn a lot from her example of how to be an effective and memorable teacher. I also really enjoy being in a choir again, period. We enjoy the music. Chris even got a solo in our last concert! It was a very prestigious concert too, for the International Alliance of Women in Music Congress (for an idea of the scale of this thing, I’d like to point out that the Congress was last held in Bejing. Pretty big, worldwide event). He sang wonderfully, as always. J

So, that’s some of what we’ve been up to! There’s more, of course, there always is. But alas, there isn’t more time, there never is. So I’m off to bed!