Bloom

My second grade teacher had a poster on the classroom wall of Bloom's Taxonomy, which is a heirarchy of mental functions that employs $7 SAT vocabulary words to explain the mastery of critical thinking skills. Why it was on the wall of a room for seven-year-olds, I'll never know. Why I remember it, including the $7 words, is also a good question. Does this mean I was merely a good memorizer, or a precocious evaluator?

In the years since, the taxonomy has been updated to take the words down to a 75-cent level, which is twisted and ironic, and I'm particularly disheartened that my favorite stage of critical thinking, Synthesis, has been bastardized into the corporate-sounding Evaluating, which used to occupy the top rung, now held by the meaningless and value-driven Creating. I'm also offended on an aesthetic level by the needless conversion to gerunds.

Why is Creating a critical thinking skill? Why is it valued more highly than the others? Creating is an activity, not a thought process, though I'll grant that it is an activity rooted in thought, and an outcome of thought. But the pyramid should stop where the mind stops and the body begins, where the thought escapes its mental tomb and becomes corporeal and animate.

Synthesis, the collusion and collision of thoughts, has been wiped from Bloom's thoughtful heirarchy as, what? Outdated? But synthesis -- the very word sounding so Greek it might spawn metamorphosis and symbiosis if cooked in a grape leaf broth -- represents the holy grail of thought. It's the type of thinking that goes outside the box, to borrow some corporate jargon of my own. It's the type of thinking that distorts previous thought, couples bits of existing knowledge, spawns newness. It's, well, creative.

Tom Waits recently gave a germ of sythesis the high honor of being his wellspring: "I like hearing things incorrectly. I think that’s how I get a lot of ideas is by mishearing something." The more disparate the combined parts, the more magical (or mutated) the result, which is why a misheard quote can jumpstart, by its randomness, an unintentional synthetic process that baffles and challenges those who would Evaluate it. To skip Synthesis and jump straight from Analysis to Evaluation -- then have the gall to hope for Creation! -- is akin to completing the math homework by dutifully copying down the answers from the back of the book. If any step can be skipped here, it's the Evaluation, which, while critical, is irrelevant to art, and nobody gets more credit for genius than artists. (Nobody gets less than critics, who used to sit primly atop the Evaluating stratum and now crouch beneath Creating, hoping to sift some of its glory.)

South By Southwest, which I gamely attempted to attend during this bridge year between childlike adulthood and adultlike childrearing, is a whirlwind of constant artistic synthesis. Sixth Street becomes even more cacophonous than normal, as hip hop beats bleed into wild rock tantrums which mingle with blues backbeats and drum-n-bass subwoofing. It's as if downtown becomes a bronco and the festival goers are but gyrating cowboys upon it. Aside from the copious day drinking and desperate ware hocking, there is still a sliver of artistic appreciation that threads through Austin and gives it the modern feeling of Bohemian revelry. No matter how many people show up just to party or to pitch, there are still throngs captivated by the music of someone they never knew before. The fact that one listener might encounter one band and feel that 'click' of "this, I like" is ten times more powerful than a Facebook thumbing or a Pandora pumping, and the joy is infectious. Despite the grind of nearly constant ear-splitting music from thousands of bands at dozens of miles-scattered venues, SXSW is fun, and that's why.

What I (mis)heard last week:

Rosemary from The Snowdroppers on Vimeo.