My observations on music.

On part of being an educator is having a keen eye for observation. Observing behavior, trends, actions, etc of the students can all be help full in determining the course of an educational experience. However, this time I observed my own behavior and actions but not in the classroom.

I got an MP3 player for Christmas and began my online world of music. The first things I could think of to download was music from my teenage years that I really loved and all of it was very heavy metal. I'm not talking MTV's version of heavy metal, Poison, Warrant, Damn Yankees, I'm talking the real stuff; Metallica, Megadeath, Iron Maiden, Motorhead. I got back into the stuff I used to get drunk to on a Saturday night, sober up to on the same Saturday night so that I could be sober enough to walk in the house and greet my mom who'd waited up till 11:30.

After a few weeks of this I began to notice something about myself; I was PISSED OFF at everything. The crappy driver on the road, the kids in class, the neighbor's kids who played their bumping rap music too loud, even my wife. It took that few weeks but I made to correlation between the faster, angrier music that was listening to almost exclusively and my poor mood.

With that being said I resumed to my more mainstream listening habits which include, strangely enough, the blues, jazz, general pop/alternative radio, even some oldies. However, after some careful consideration I have decided to try an experiment on myself. For the next few weeks I'm going to force myself to listen to country music exclusively to see if my dog dies, my wife leaves me, my mom get run over by a train while on her way to pick me up from prison in the pick-up truck in the rain. I'll let you know how it goes.

Ed U. Cayshun