Live Improvisation

The evening class on the Upper West Side is amazing, because there are only five people and we can pretty much talk about anything we want.  We never know if the class is going to be canceled the next day because there aren’t enough students enrolled.  We have survived two weeks at this point.  It’s not my fault.  I do my best to make the experience enjoyable and informative.  The students who began have stayed, but it’s summertime, and overall enrollment is limited at 8 pm on week nights.  That doesn’t stop us from having a great time though.

A few hours ago I asked each of the five students who the happiest members of their families were, because that was the activity suggested by the book.  This exercise gave them plenty of chances to share and for me to teach and learn.  I learned that the Chinese man is from Chengdu, the city where I spent two weeks in May of 2010 reading War & Peace, waiting for my visa renewal, and meeting travelers from around the world at Mix Hostel.  It’s also the closest city to Emei Shan, the holy Buddhist Mountain where I'd hiked and spent three nights at the top waiting for the moon.  The man, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, had been there several times.  That led us to how we don't have a national religion so we don't really call any of them holy or spiritual.  This led to an improvised lesson about Mt. Washington, the highest point in the Northeast USA.  But to explain that, I had to tell them about the popular video game Halo, produced for the X-Box, the mighty video game system produced by Microsoft.  This required a definition of halo, such as a glowing light or aura around a human's mind, the moon, the sun, and even once I saw a rainbow around my shadow.  I waved hello.

Meanwhile, back on the mountain, the most spiritual music my friend and I could think of bringing to the summit was the theme music from the first-person warrior adventure game Halo, even though neither of us had ever owned an Xbox or played the game since the first half of college.  We had joked about it earlier, so my friend had actually specially downloaded it and played it on his iPod with some mini-speakers when we were atop the summit of the Northeastern USA.  There were many tourists at the top, because you can also drive there.  One of them exclaimed with delight that she could hear the monks chanting, before her brother said, “Wait, is that Halo?”

Then I taught them vocabulary words such as elevation, sea level and gains, before returning to the original topic of happiest family members.  The Dominican man’s sister is always happy, and he sees her twice a month.  The Chinese girl was happiest because she was an only child and her parents always encouraged her, believed in her and called her to make sure she was happy.  The Dominican woman’s younger sister is always happy.  The Mexican woman’s youngest sister was the happiest of five siblings.  On to the next question...

Activities.  We talked about hobbies that make us happy, what we do to cheer ourselves up, and plenty of improvised tangents that unexpectedly deviated from the main theme but then returned back to the first train on the track.