A repost from March of 2009:
Eugene and Bonnie Hamilton just spent a few days with me. Eugene is a Latin teacher and musician (French Horn) and Bonnie is a high school German teacher. We were talking between classes and Eugene said that he thought of stories as jazz, when some TPRS teachers turn them into classical pieces.
He explained that in jazz there is a most definite underlying structure to the improvisation, but that there is freedom on top of the structure, so that, to the untrained ear, it looks as if there is undisciplined (too much) freedom in jazz, when in reality there is tremendous structure – but it is structure that leads to expansiveness, power, grace, and things coltrane.
Many of us in TPRS, already infused with the concept of control so necessary to school teaching, try to control our stories as if they were pieces of classical music, following the musical script in front of us in a rigid way. If we could but trust the underlying structure of the three steps of TPRS and those skills that make CI work for us, we could be playing jazz.
Thank you for that insight, Eugene!