Hi all,
In San Diego for two weeks and staying in the La jolla area, would love to know of some craft beer recs in and around the area if possible! :)

I am debating on which program to try to get an associates in accounting. City colleges program is a bit shorter, just 22-26 units, whereas Southwestern’s is 37 units to get an associates degree. Both also have payroll and bookkeeping certificates. Again southwestern college has a Bookkeeping/Payroll Specialist program that is 25 units, and combined City College has two certificates, one in Bookkeeping and one in Payroll which together total about 8 units. My assumption is that southwestern college has more thorough programs, both the associates and the certificates compared to city college. Anyone have experience with these programs? I am more hoping to do a shorter program to get started with some accounting basics and be qualified to AP/AR work.
Thank you for all your help!

Digital technology in the early years: The importance of everyday learning opportunities to build young children’s digital technology skills

This factsheet will support early childhood professionals to:

• broaden their understanding of the inclusion of digital technology in the early years
• explore effective strategies to embed play-based digital practices
• support children’s concept development of digital technologies

As a co-author of the Early Childhood Australia (ECA) Statement on young children and digital technologies, can you explain the rationale for creating this statement? How can it support educator practice with regards to building children’s digital technology skills?

The ECA Statement on young children and digital technologies was created to support adults to make decisions about technology use ‘with, by and for’ young children. Increased recognition in the sector that young children use a range of technologies at home and in their communities, for playing, communicating and accessing online content, suggested that digital learning in early childhood settings was timely. The statement highlights four main areas of children’s learning and development: relationships, health and wellbeing, citizenship, and play and pedagogy. It also invites educators to think about how they understand technologies and the role of technologies in the lives of children and families.
This includes thinking about what is known as ‘philosophy of technology’ (Gibbons 2010). Philosophy of technology is a body of knowledge that proposes different ways of thinking about the relationship between people and technologies. Just as there are theories of play and learning that educators can refer to, there are philosophies of technology educators can draw on to think about using technologies with children. Three of the main philosophies of technology are technological determinism, substantivism and critical constructivism. Technological determinism is the most commonly held view. This view suggests that technologies cause or determine what happens to people. Some people hold a negative view of determinism: for example, thinking that technologies reduce the quality of children’s imaginative play. Other people hold a positive view of determinism, believing that technologies support children to communicate with others. Substantivism considers how technologies shape practices, or what people do in their daily lives over time. Critical constructivism posits that technologies are always designed and used by people according to human values. This view suggests that people can make active choices about how and why they use technologies that are relevant to their lives, such as people using videoconferencing during the pandemic to connect with family and friends.

The Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF) refers to five Learning and Development Outcomes for children. Outcomes 4 and 5 explicitly mention the inclusion of digital technologies in children’s learning. What are some effective learning experiences that explore everyday opportunities to build children’s understanding and use of digital technologies?

Technologies are part of children’s lives; however, not all educators are comfortable with using technologies in children’s learning. Rather than focusing only on the technology in digital learning, think instead about the ways in which technology creates opportunities for meaning-making. For example, making meaning using technologies may involve taking photographs, creating videos or slideshows, co-sharing digital content, or coding with robotics. Meaning-making can also be about understanding how we live with and use technologies in our daily lives. Meaning-making for understanding does not have to involve using working technologies. Children can create their own non-working technologies from available materials (such as boxes, blocks or paper) to participate in sociodramatic play that provides opportunities for talking about how and why technologies are used. For example, children might make their own mobile phones and use these in their play to send messages to each other and take calls. Educators can help children in this play by inviting children to use technologies in ways that are respectful of relationships. Are the children having a pretend meal together? Can educators invite children to put their phones away while they eat? Or if children are taking pretend photographs of each other, educators can be sure to model asking for consent. Educators can also create representations of technologies that help children learn about the internet and how information and data are shared over a network: for example, using string to ‘connect’ non-working devices in a home or office corner to help children learn about the internet as a network of connected technologies. Children can ‘send’ messages, emails or content to each other as paper notes attached to the string. Educators can invite children to consider if they know who is sending them messages or where the content has come from. This provides children with an everyday opportunity to learn about the internet and safe online behaviours.

The VEYLDF states ‘Assessment is designed to discover what children know, understand, and can do’. What does this look like in terms of children’s trajectory of learning around digital technology? How might educators connect their observations of children engaging with digital technology to children’s learning and development across other domains?

Children are likely to follow a developmental trajectory when using technologies due to their experiences using technologies at home and in the community, with their family, friends and peers. Children’s experiences with technologies are variable and so they will come to early childhood education and care settings with a range of technological knowledge and skills. This can depend on the access children have to devices, reliable internet and opportunities for adult engagement during technological activity. Educators can observe how children build their capacity to use devices over time. This is important because some basic operational knowledge with technologies is required of children as they enter formal schooling. For example, do children know how to turn technologies on and off? Can children point, touch, swipe and resize using a tablet? Pre-school aged children may also exhibit technological language, such as download, upload, click and save, and will probably know the difference between still and moving images. This language helps children communicate and share information with other people, including family members and peers. When children use technologies, educators can also support connections with digital media or content that supports children’s identity. For example, which programs or games do children enjoy at home and how are these recognised in the classroom? This can be achieved by providing children with access to pretend technologies and apps, such as a cardboard box representing a touchscreen device, with cut-outs of their favourite applications. Other examples include learning about digital media interests alongside children, examining and sharing storylines, or providing opportunities for children to express digital media interests through more traditional play, such as box construction, drawing or painting. Using internet-connected technologies also provides opportunities for children and educators to access information to resource play and learning, such as through video content, or well-curated resources from reputable early learning providers in topic areas including science, mathematical thinking, history, music and visual or performing arts.

The VEYLDF identifies eight Practice Principles that illustrate the most effective ways for all early childhood professionals to support children's learning and development. One of these Practice Principles is ‘Partnerships with Families’. What are some effective strategies to engage families in discussions about digital technologies and young children?

Families are central to children’s learning and development. When educators engage in discussion about technologies with families, they can help adult caregivers facilitate positive digital learning opportunities for children at home. The VEYLDF states ‘Early childhood professionals … actively engage families and children in planning for ongoing learning and development in the service, at home and in the local community’ (VEYLDF, p. 9). Many organisations in Australia are involved in promoting and supporting young children’s safe and productive engagement with technologies, with tip sheets, videos, infographics and games. Educators can invite families to use these materials with children to explore topics such as staying safe online, being active with technologies, using technologies to support social relationships, and fostering children’s digital play.

What would be some final key messages for educators who want to support children’s digital skills and understanding?

Two key messages are important for educators thinking about supporting children’s digital skills and understandings. The first message is to start involving children in digital opportunities that feel achievable within the service. Not all services have access to technologies and not all educators feel comfortable using technologies with children. Programming can involve using non-working technologies in children’s play, such as using a block in pretend play as a mobile phone, or teachers creating representational technologies for children to use in the home corner (for example, printed life-size copies of tablet devices). Working technologies do not need to be complicated. While coding, robotics, digital microscopes and augmented reality provide highly engaging learning opportunities, children can also learn from educators modelling appropriate technology use on more accessible technologies, such as touchscreen: for example, by asking permission to take photographs or fact-checking information online. It may also be helpful for services to complete a technology audit – such as the eSafety checklist for early learning services – to see which technologies are available for children and where these might be integrated with ongoing learning opportunities in the service. For example, digital music can be incorporated into rest times, or children can be provided with opportunities to create digital drawings alongside traditional mark making.
The second message is to understand that young children today are part of a digital world. At any one time there are more than 8000 satellites around the earth that are sending and communicating information and data. It is becoming harder and harder to isolate children from technologies because so much of the world is now digital. It may be more helpful to think intentionally about supporting children to live within a digital world. The VEYLDF states ‘Early childhood professionals … use intentional teaching strategies that are always purposeful and may be pre-planned or spontaneous, to support achievement of well-considered and identified goals’ (VEYLDF, p. 15). This shifts the pedagogical focus from trying to keep children away from technologies to thinking about the purposeful use of technologies with children, allowing children to develop the knowledge and skills they require to participate in a digital world.

Questioning and listening

Asking questions and then listening to the answers can propel children’s learning, and it is this approach that is at the heart of an inquiry model. Questioning and listening are essential in any learning relationship, and they are both part of an active process where you do not just listen and question children but also interpret, respond to and make meaning of their thinking and learning processes.
The pedagogical strategy of listening can provide educators with a new framework in which to consider their role in children’s learning and development. When educators look deeply at what holds children’s attention, the result is that children and adults are able to recognise capabilities and qualities in each other.
Do not always rely on asking questions and trying to provoke answers as a way of engaging with children. Educators who give children the time, space and resources to think long and deeply are often rewarded with rich responses.

‘The right question at the right time can move children to peaks in their thinking that result in significant steps forward and real intellectual excitement. Although it is almost impossible for an adult to know exactly the right time to ask a specific question of a specific child – especially for a teacher who is concerned with 30 or more children – children can raise the right question for themselves if the setting is right.’ (Millikan, et al 2014, p. 69)

The value of questioning cannot be overstated, particularly when working with a pedagogy of inquiry. You need to consider what directions you are leading children with your questions, as well as what type of questions you ask children. Are they ‘thick’ questions or ‘thin’ questions? That is, are they questions that are open ended and encourage children to think broadly or do they close off children’s thinking?

Wonder and uncertainty

Wonder and uncertainty are necessary dispositions for learning. Both of these dispositions are considered important when working with a pedagogy of inquiry. As Moss says, ‘Such learning is also more likely to happen and be welcomed when wonder or amazement are valued’ (Moss 2019, p. 74).
Rich learning opportunities can happen when you include these dispositions in your daily practice. This is not a closed-off, linear way of working but rather one that allows you to remain open to the ideas of children, their families and your colleagues.
When you work with dispositions of wonder and uncertainty, it encourages a flexible way of thinking and working in which hypotheses might be made but are also subject to change. This is not an approach that has pre-determined outcomes.

Top tips for working with a pedagogy of inquiry

• Read, listen or watch something that might shift your thinking or that supports you to develop a growth mindset. Learn something new to bring back into your work with children. This does not need to be related to early learning. Learn something that fires up your neural pathways. An educator’s area of interest or enthusiasm can have an inherent trickle-down positive impact on children.
• Adults can often anticipate difficulties and resolve them for children, and this does not give children the opportunity to think for themselves and provide solutions. Educators should aim to create a culture of ideas rather than a culture that provides all of the answers.
• Design your environments carefully, with attention paid to the intentional use of resources, materials and provocations, and provide children with extended periods of time to re-visit these.
• Educators need to follow children’s footprints – that is, the directions of their learning. This is only possible through a process of reviewing and reflecting on your documentation materials. It can be useful to consider what you know, what you don’t yet know and what you would like to find out more about. Gathering clues about children and then asking rich, deep questions adds great value to the development of any inquiry project.
• Give children time to be curious, to wonder, and to discuss and adjust or change their opinions.

This fact sheet was developed by the Early Years Unit at VCAA

This fact sheet was developed by the Early Years Unit at the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) and supports information presented in the VCAA on-demand webinar ‘A pedagogy of inquiry to support integrated teaching and learning approaches’. Watch A pedagogy of inquiry to support integrated teaching and learning approaches webinar video.

References

Duckworth, E 1996, The having of wonderful ideas and other essays on teaching and learning, Teachers College Press, New York
Edwards, C, Gandini, L and Forman, G (eds.) 2012, The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation, 3rd edn, Praeger, Santa Barbera
Moss, P 2019, Alternative Narratives in Early Childhood, Routledge, Oxfordshire
Touhill, L 2012, ‘Inquiry-based Learning’, NQS PLP e-Newsletter, No. 45

Using the VEYLDF to inform your practice

As part of the Education and Care Services National Law (National Law) and the National Quality Standards, the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF) is an approved learning framework. As an approved learning framework, it has the potential to make you a better educator and your practice more contemporary.
The VEYLDF allows us to reflect on learning and development outcomes for children. As educators, we can reflect on our own practice in supporting all children by considering if our work aligns with the Practice Principles. The VEYLDF provides us opportunities to inform our pedagogical decisions and to critique or challenge our existing practices.
The VEYLDF also provides a shared language and understanding for all early childhood professionals and can inform conversations with families, colleagues and other professionals working with young children.

Additional resources that might be useful

Download copies of VCAA early years resources.
Keep up to date with new resources and professional learning opportunities by subscribing to the VCAA Early Years Alert.
A pedagogy of inquiry to support integrated teaching and learning approaches
Download the fact sheet

‘The hands lead us to learning’: Enhancing and extending children’s fine motor development through playful learning experiences

This fact sheet is for educators who want to better understand:

• how educators can think more broadly and deeply about fine motor development in infants and children
• the interplay between fine motor development occurring in play and in relationships with adults, caregivers and peers
• the importance of routines as learning experiences with embedded fine motor learning opportunities.

Introduction

Children’s fine motor skill development – that is, their ability to use their hands – is strongly connected to their play.
Infants’ efforts at motor control commence early. An example of this is the infant who actively reaches towards the face of a person who is physically close to them and engaged in a responsive and attuned relationship with them; the adult, carer or older sibling is perhaps smiling and ‘cooing’ while they are focusing their gaze on the face of the child, who reaches out towards their face.
We understand, in general terms, that the progression of motor development occurs from the centre of the body to the periphery, known as proximodistal progression, or from larger motor control to finer movements. However, over time we have gained a more balanced and nuanced understanding of motor development and we can now see early fine motor development before trunk control is consolidated. Gross motor development leading to core stability and support remains foundational, but earlier attention is now given to fine motor endeavours of infants, with an appreciation that ‘the hands lead us to to learning’.
We understand that gross motor development and fine motor development occur simultaneously and in the context of responsive relationships and purposeful learning spaces. Adults engaging in contingent and attuned interactions with infants provide ‘serve and return’ opportunities and rich responsive learning experiences. Children actively engage, using their growing fine motor dexterity and strength alongside their learning in other developmental domains such as language and cognitive capabilities. It is the interplay between these supportive relationships and children’s growing capabilities that fosters children’s wellbeing. This is now understood to increase the likelihood that infants will confidently explore their world and this exploration is in large part through their hands.

Can you explain the relationship between gross motor skill development and fine motor skill development? How does one support the other?

When we consider that gross motor skill development and fine motor skill development occur simultaneously, we can see the importance of early childhood professionals providing positive and responsive interactions and relationships throughout the day. The way the early childhood professional engages with the infant or young child provides opportunities to progress development.
The early childhood professional who ensures regular ‘tummy time’ is providing opportunity for infants to strengthen muscles, leading to greater core stability. This core stability is foundational to the later skills of sitting up, crawling and walking. These are important skills indeed, however, there is a need to balance this ‘tummy time’ with opportunities for the infant to be positioned on their back, or in a supported sitting position, where they are freely able to explore with their hands.
Thinking of fine motor development at its beginning stages helps us to actively create opportunities for children to explore with their hands. This in turn promotes children’s sense of agency and wellbeing, which is often associated with using their hands. The more children actively do, the more they feel that they can build, create, explore and express themselves.
We are often quite mindful of assessing children’s physical skills progression. Learning experiences, including playful routine times, provide golden opportunities to assess children’s sequential fine motor development from reaching and releasing, from palmer grasping to pincer gripping and so on. Progression along trajectories of learning (including motor skill learning) becomes apparent and provides the basis for tailored learning experiences.
It is important to consider children who require additional support with gross and fine motor skills. Thoughtful planning ensures we set up environments in which all children can feel confident in developing their gross and fine motor skills and feel a sense of agency and control. As we delight in their endeavours, with thoughtful planning we can build children’s sense of wellbeing, identity and connection to their world. Children become able to confidently explore and engage with social and physical environments through relationships and play.

What kind of playful fine motor learning experiences should educators consider when setting up early learning environments for children three to five years old? What are some effective playful strategies for supporting fine motor development?

Three to five years is a fabulous age for more complex play scenarios, with children using multiple learning domains simultaneously and in increasingly sophisticated ways. Again, ‘the hands lead us to learning’ and this is expressed in so much more than just writing and drawing. Indeed, children are extending and consolidating an increasing range of skills at this age.
The work of researchers Susan Knox (2008), and Karen Stagnitti and Louise Jellie (2006), can be used here to consider planning for play in reference to four elements: Space management, Materials management, Pretend play and Participation. This research, while based in occupational therapy, aligns well with the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF) and places children’s wellbeing at the centre of play. Practitioners are encouraged to consider how to promote participation by all children, inclusive of all abilities, through careful consideration of the environment, materials and pretend-play opportunities. This research provides a thorough and holistic view of children’s learning, recognising that children bring increasing cognition, language, social skills, fine motor development, creativity and agency to their play. Child-led play is key, but the educator must also consider how to promote play opportunities that take children beyond their most frequented play spaces. This requires a more creative use of learning environments, inviting children to participate in spaces and skills they may not have previously sought out independently.
One example is to set up a restaurant, where children are invited to navigate the space and engage with a variety of fine motor skills during a complex pretend-play scenario. This embeds learning in meaningful ways, with multiple learning areas at play. Children can take on various characters while engaging, negotiating and problem-solving. Fine motor skills are practised purposefully as children take written orders, write or draw a menu, cut up paper to make money, set up a cash register, dress up as waiters, pour drinks, prepare food and set up tables. The opportunities are endless and can be tailored to children’s interest and skills to provide challenge, practice and delight. For example, bi-manual skills are promoted in this scenario when opening containers and stirring bowls of food, where hands undertake different tasks at once – one hand holding and stabilising while the other hand turns or stirs.
Educators need only a creative mind in planning for all four elements, and the learning opportunities are endless (‘Early childhood professionals … use intentional teaching strategies that are always purposeful and may be pre-planned or spontaneous, to support achievement of well considered and identified goals’ [VEYLDF p. 15]). Inclusive thinking may see this play space provided outdoors, inviting in children who may be less likely to engage indoors (intentional support strategies also promote equitable participation in play for all children and meaningful ways to demonstrate learning [VEYLDF p. 12]).
A creative and inclusive approach asks us to consider the environment in numerous ways, offering a wide variety of materials, setting up play spaces that invite self-management and challenge, and following the increasingly complex play scripts or pretend-play scenarios of young children.

What are some everyday routines for children that might provide opportunities for supporting fine motor development?

Routines and transition times offer a wealth of fine motor experience and abundant opportunities for promoting children’s agency and self-responsibility. Additionally, they are highly repetitive daily experiences – treasures for practising fine motor skills. Encouraging independent skill development during these times, with warmth and high expectations for children, can turn a range of daily tasks into important learning rituals.
These rituals connect children to their peers and to their space, building confidence, connection and wellbeing. Children’s active participation provides many and varied fine motor movements at different times, such as taking care of their belongings at entry and departure times, dressing and undressing, setting up for meals, toileting and setting up play or rest areas.
Regular communication with families allows the progression in children’s skills to be shared between educators and families. This can reveal collaborative opportunities across home and the early years setting, and align our expectations for children. Playful and routine practice opportunities abound, with partnership between educators and families building children’s confidence and capacities (VEYLDF p. 9).

‘To play or not to play’: The role of the adult in understanding and collaborating in children’s play

This fact sheet is for educators who want to better understand:

• the role of the adult in supporting children’s learning and development through play
• how to build reciprocal relationships where children and adults are co-contributors to the creative process.

When we think about play within the early learning context, we often think of it as being ‘fun’ and occurring naturally – it is often referred to as being universally understood. Is this the case, or is it more complicated than that?

Children’s play encompasses many ways of being and becoming. Play is linked to fun, but this is just one way of being and does not speak to the complexity of play. Fun is fleeting. Parts of play can be joyful, frustrating, exciting, annoying, challenging, hilarious and, at times, uncomfortable. Play includes many emotions and experiences. Sometimes children are excluded from other children’s play – is this fun? What children are doing in play is complex – navigating limbs, expressing ideas, listening to others, creating novel worlds and negotiating with peers. Therefore, the emotions and feelings that children experience are varied.
Children are experimenting with and expressing their worlds, and the collaborative activity of play requires many skills. Ebbeck and Waniganayake (2016) tell us that in play ‘children are constructing an identity – who they are, what they know and what their joys and fears are, as well as their sense of belonging to a family and a community’ (p. 3). This understanding captures the richness of play, which is not limited to one way of being. Seeing children’s play as multifaceted allows educators to holistically understand children in the early childhood context.
Play is a universal activity that children engage in, as reflected in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989). But while there are similarities that occur in children’s play across the world, when we look at and hear what children are doing and expressing in their play, we see that it is also informed by their culture. For example, in dramatic play, being ‘Bluey’ or making cakes in the sand pit are activities that are directly taken from the child’s day-to-day culture. The people, places, objects, practices and rituals in the child’s culture fuel their play, and play is thus an expression that reflects the culture the play is taking place within.
Children bring into the early childhood setting individual, family and community experiences that reflect their culture, giving educators a rich tapestry to understand the child’s perspective of their world. Roopnarine’s (2011) quote is helpful to understand the links between play and culture: ‘A fundamental problem with universal claims about play is that they basically ignore contrasting realities of childhood experiences and cultural forces that may help shape caregivers ideas about play and early learning, and children’s role in their own play.’ (p. 20)

Given that there are many different theories that inform our approaches to children’s learning and development, does the role of the adult vary in supporting children’s development in play?

Theories can inform teaching practice, as being able to hold other ideas and perspectives allows us to see things differently. Theory is helpful for understanding the world around us, and in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) context, theories can inform and change our practice.
Developmental theories are varied and vast, and contemporary framings have become quite different from the more foundational knowledge, reflecting the diversity of our societies. The field is not stuck on linear and fixed stages. Practitioners work with the children in their care, taking into consideration their contexts, environments and families, and using various theories and research to inform their practice.
Teaching practice varies, and theory and research can assist educators’ practice. For example, contemporary theories remind us that children’s play is not simply something that happens naturally; these theories consider group dynamics, equity, social justice, advantage and disadvantage, and the way power moves between the players. They also explore the ways that understanding children’s lives outside the early childhood setting can inform teaching and program planning. Contemporary theories can open us up to other views, and while many of these have existed for a very long time, they haven’t always been prioritised to think about children, context, difference and learning.

How can we ensure that the play opportunities we create for children help build collaborative and reciprocal relationships between adult and child?

The following diagram from page 15 of the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF) shows the three aspects of integrated teaching and learning, and holds great clues about the educator’s role in children’s play.
📷
This diagram can be used by educators and teams to reflect on their practice. Guided play and learning prioritise the educator responding to spontaneous learning opportunities. Reciprocal two-way exchanges create a balance of children guiding adults, and adults guiding children in dialogue and action. This becomes an improvisation that follows unknown paths, opening up opportunities to collaborate by creating something that did not exist before. When adults are playful with children, multiple perspectives are valued in the collaborative space.
Thinking of educators as co-contributors to the creative process of play speaks to the notion of responding to children’s interests. However, it is useful to adapt this slightly to instead think about responding to the child’s learning. Interests can be transient and surface-level; focusing on children’s learning is more expansive and process-orientated, as learning involves both thinking and enacting through play. This way of working asks educators to respond to spontaneous opportunities that arise, and play affords this responsive practice. Play is a relational activity between children and place, children and objects, children and children, and between children and adults.
Educators are respectfully cognisant of not wanting to take over too much control of children’s play, and when they improvise with children, finding a balance of following and leading, they can incorporate multiple children’s ideas and wonderings in the embodied play narratives. When teachers make use of children’s expertise, it supports children’s agency as their decisions influence the current events within the play. The playful interactions between the educator and children are fluid and unpredictable, mirroring drama pedagogue’s use of an improvised inquiry. Of course, we would not advocate that the educator enters children’s play all the time; this does not align philosophically with play and the ECEC context. However, at times, being a co-player with children speaks to a responsive pedagogy where creative collaborations can occur in play.

What is the relationship between play and learning?

When adults engage in play with children, they can incorporate formative assessment to develop their understandings of the children and inform their planning. Socio-dramatic play is one way children express their imagination. When educators are with children, they are hearing and seeing children’s imaginations enacted, giving rich information about their learning. In play, children are also blocking out other distractions to problem-solve in the moment, and taking on other perspectives, both from other players and in their own role-play. These are all skills that are linked to our executive function, which is the ‘process of how we learn’ (Yogman et al. 2018, p. 6).
When educators are respectfully engaging with children in play, they are part of the collaboration, co-creating something that is novel and only exists between the people in this activity. If educators are only observing from the outside, how can they understand this process? When educators are part of children’s play, they are in the heart of the learning, and it can open up opportunities for understanding children’s working theories and learning processes. What the educator notes when they engage in the play can be documented as part of the planning cycle, and analysed so that understanding the child’s learning within play is extended through planning.

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• According to experts, having nearsightedness as a youngster may indicate a higher likelihood of having high myopia later in life.
• Myopia may be delayed or prevented in youngsters who take low-dose atropine eyedrops on a daily basis, according to research.
• The results are intriguing, according to experts, but more studies are required to ascertain how well these eyedrops work to cure and prevent myopia.

Nearsightedness, often known as myopia, is the condition in which a person can see up close objects clearly while far ones are blurry.
When the cornea is overly curved or the eyeball is too long, myopia results. Nearsightedness affects roughly 30% of Americans, according to the American Optometric Association.
An early onset of myopia may be a warning sign.Eventually having excessive myopia: Reliable SourceWhen a person needs a spherical correction of -5 dioptres or more, Trusted Source is frequently used as a definition. High myopia patients are more likely to develop vision-threatening conditions such glaucoma, retinal tears, and cataracts.
"It's pretty rare when they happen, but when they do, they're devastating," said Dr. Jeffrey Walline, associate dean for research at The Ohio State University College of Optometry, to Medical News Today.
According to experts, myopia is becoming more common everywhere. By 2050, it is predicted that myopia would affect roughly 50% of the global population.
According to a study by Chinese University of Hong Kong researchers that was published in the journal JAMA, children who take low-dose atropine eyedrops every night may postpone or perhaps avoid the beginning of myopia.
In East Asian nations, myopia is more common in youngsters.
According to Dr. Evan Silverstein, a paediatric ophthalmologist at Children's Hospital of Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University, "we're seeing some increases in the U.S. population as well." However, the frequency is not as high as it is in East Asia, which is why many of these studies on myopia are coming from this region.

rom July 1, 2023, authorised psychiatrists will be able to prescribe products containing MDMA or psilocybin for specific mental health conditions in Australia. MDMA’s ability to facilitate open communication through inducing a state of openness, safety, trust, social connection, and increased empathy suggests it may be useful for couples therapy, especially given that many couples are not successful in therapy or do not see their gains made last over time.
We want to gain a deeper understanding of the perceived effects of MDMA on a romantic relationship from the perspective of the couple. If you have taken MDMA with a current or ex-partner in the last five years in a private, we would like to hear about how you felt the experience affected your relationship.
Stephanie Freitas is conducting this research towards a Master of Professional Psychology degree at the Australian College of Applied Professions (ACAP), supervised by Dr. Fiona Ann Papps, an associate professor in Psychological Science.
Inclusion criteria are that participants:
​

• be aged 18 years or older.
• have taken MDMA with their current or ex-partner in the last five years in a private setting.
• of any sexual orientation.
• Read and understand English well enough by their own assessment to complete an e-interview in English.
• have no prior relationship with researcher or her supervisor.

If you choose to participate, you will complete an anonymous 45-minute e-interview about your experience of the effects of a joint MDMA experience on your romantic relationship.
The e-interview would be conducted online, and we collect no identifying information.
If you are interested, please click on the following link to complete the e-interview.
https://acap.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_24RocOsyTxmCJw2
This research has been approved by the ACAP Human Research Ethics Committee (EC00447) (Approval Number: 817250423)
For concerns about ethical aspects of this research, please contact the ACAP HREC: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
ACAP in no way endorses engagement in any behaviour deemed illegal.

We just got home from the opening San Diego show and I thought I’d share how VIP worked for those who were curious! The VIP is on the LEFT side of the stage (Phoebe’s side) and it has private and nicer bathrooms as well as a private bar. The VIP section fit maybe 100-200 people? It did not feel like a lot of space compared to the rest of the venue. If you cannot afford VIP like me, you may be in luck! If you are at a show that is not sold out, there is a chance you will randomly get chose by workers for VIP. We were walking away after buying merch when a worker walked by and randomly asked if we wanted to upgrade to vip and handed us wristbands. It looked like she had a handful and was handing them out to people walking around! We got there at 5:30 pm and still got to be right in front of the stage….don’t lose hope if you are running late!! Best concert I’ve ever been to!!

So I had receive a “courtesy notice” out of the San Diego field office to send in my medical exam and supporting evidence for proof of marriage. I sent it in May29 and it was delivered May 31st. Now my processing time went from 5 months to 1 weeks after it was received. Could this be accurate or correct? I just feel like it’s not true

Overall, had a really fantastic experience at the San Diego leg of the Re:SET concert series.
Cons/Things that could be improved:
1) there were plenty of Porto-potties but they were all in one area. I mean, the space itself isn’t that big so I guess this wasn’t that big of a deal but having bathrooms on the west side as well would have been nice.
2) more food options please. The food to bar ratio was like 1:7. There were 5 different food vendors and a plethora of bars.
3) the stage could have benefited from having some side screens like the Mojave Tent but this is more of a “would be nice to have” as I had a really good view. boygenius used the available production really well meanwhile Clairo started with the some visuals but then they kind fizzled towards the end. Would have like to see a tiny bit more effort with the visual production.
Pros/Things I Loved:
1) im not a major audiophile and maybe someone who is would disagree but I thought the sound and acoustics were great. Could hear all the vocals and all the instruments. I was about 30 feet to the right of the sound booth and could see and hear clearly. I don’t think there was really a bad spot in the crowd.
2) getting in and out was super easy. I took a Lyft in and was dropped off around 6:30. Security was chill and no line to get in. I didn’t have a bag or anything and didn’t get a pat down. Just standard metal detectors. Today, I wore sterling silver jewelry and if that didn’t set on the metal detectors, I don’t think a vape pen will either (didn’t have one on me and I’m sure that’s what others are most concerned with). Left a little early to beat the crowd and I was pretty hungry. Took the trolley out to Mission Valley, got food, then lyfted home. If you’re driving, I highly recommend the trolley. Park at a nearby station that has park and ride and trolley in. Super convenient, save yourself the stadium parking rate
3) the overall vibe and atmosphere today was pretty fantastic. A lot of that may have to do with boygenius being today’s headliner and I think tomorrow will be way busier and more crowded but all in all, the crowd was great. I skipped boygenius at Coachella because I already had tickets for this and even though I’m not a huge fan (i like them for sure but I wouldn’t say I’m a stan by any means) I loved hearing their fans sing along to every word. It was really special. I didn’t encounter one rude person whatsoever. Everyone was super polite and used their words when navigating the crowd. Didn’t encounter excessive talking.
4) the stage being in the south side, facing north, made for a truly picturesque scene with the nearly full moon rising overhead. Truly was a breathtaking view.
Overall rating: 4/5. And really the only reason it’s not a 5 is that it still feels like the price is steep for what we got. A 3 day pass should have been about $200-$250 not $300. But I think they did a really good job overall with the set up and sound. And I really hope Re:SET continues in the future past this month. I think it really is a great concept and I hope people continue to support these endeavors
Other tip: it got a little chilly in the valley there. I didn’t find myself shivering or anything but I wouldn’t have minded a jacket or flannel. And I wasn’t paying $70+tax for the Re:SET jacket.
If you’re in or near SD and don’t have plans tomorrow, definitely recommend coming out for tomorrow’s lineup.

I came upon a lesser-known volume by Alfred Mann, The Great Composer as Teacher and Student: Theory and Practice of Composition, and thought it contained some interesting history and interpretation. Maybe some of you will find it informative. I've reproduced the first chapter below.

I. The Rise of Conventional Theory

During one of the opening scenes of Faust, Goethe merges the drama's principal characters: Mephistopheles poses as Faust. In a brief farce, the false teacher lectures a young student on theory and practice. Dismissing in turn logic, metaphysics, law, and theology, the conversation moves to medicine whose blunt advantages in meeting the fair sex are stressed by the master and readily grasped by the novice. Here the latter can see, as he says, the "wo und wie"—the "where and how," and Mephistopheles answers with the famous words, "Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie"—"Gray, my dear friend, is all theory."
A new attitude is caricatured in these lines, a criticism of theory that arose from the Age of Enlightenment. In an aside, the devil gives up "the dry tone" and with it the essence of his disguise—he turns from theory to practice. This attitude, so characteristic of the era, also began to play a major role in the teaching of musical composition. Commenting on this father's method of instruction, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote to the Bach biographer Johann Nicolaus Forkel on January 13, 1775:

In composition he started his pupils right in with what was practical, and omitted all the dry species of counterpoint that are given in Fux and others.

Bach himself was reported to have used the same word, calling the fugues "of an old and hard-working contrapuntist dry and wooden."¹ But the fundamental distinction inherent in the son's remark is absent from the words of the father. Bach knew no theory of music, only practice, and the maligned species of counterpoint were presented in Johann Joseph Fux's celebrated Gradus ad Parnassum of 1725 as "musica activa"; the complementary term, "musica speculativa," was reserved by the author for the mathematical computations used to elucidate the nature of intervals.
"Speculation" is the equivalent of "theory." Derivatives from Latin and Greek, the two words designated the act of viewing, contemplating; and both "speculum" and "theoria" had served in earlier times as titles for musical treatises. Yet "music theory" in the sense that modern convention has given the term was not associated with instruction in the art of musical composition until the late eighteenth century; in fact, Mozart was not entirely conversant with this meaning of the term, whereas in Beethoven's studies it had gained importance.
What separated Bach and Handel from the masters of Viennese Classicism in their teaching of the craft was their exclusive commitment and individual orientation toward musical practice. Thus, C.P. E. Bach's judgment was based on a misconception. The four-part chorale harmonizations with which his father commenced the teaching of composition represented in fact a practice of musical performance conducted by the keyboard player, while the counterpoint species Fux devised for his students represented a purely vocal practice. Less well known than the Gradus ad Parnassum but closely related to its exercises is Fux's Singfundament, a collection of short motet studies, written without text and intended for the young musician in somewhat the same manner as Bach's Two-Part Inventions.
The concept of musical practice was in itself subjected to a radical division during the century preceding Bach and Handel. Attacked for his bold use of dissonance, Monteverdi declared his style of composition a "second practice" as opposed to the "first practice" of guarded dissonance treatment that marked the works of sixteenth-century composers. One might say that the two practices were eventually codified in the disciplines of harmony and counterpoint, but it took more than a century to arrive at precise didactic categories.
The seventeenth century witnessed a proliferation of musical styles, a widening of musical experience, that resulted from the rise of opera, accompanied solo song, and instrumental music. The first composer to be concerned not only with the clarification of styles but with their implications for the student of musical composition seems to have been Heinrich Schütz. In 1648, the aging composer published his Geistliche Chormusik, i.e. music in the old a cappella style, a series of motets to be performed, as he wrote, "without bassum continuum" (although by a stroke of curious irony his publisher, in the attempt to make the work more accessible, had a continuo part added in the printed score). As Schütz's preface indicated, the work was written with a decidedly pedagogical intent.
Continuo accompaniment had become the hallmark of the new style. Its use signalled the progressive tendencies of music drama, and an estrangement from firm contrapuntal control and the "requirements of a well-regulated composition," namely strict, free, and retrograde imitation, melodic inversion, invertible part-writing, and the simultaneous use of different themes.Schütz, who as a younger man had been one of the initiations of the "second" practice in the North, now found himself surrounded by a new generation of musicians well versed in the modern style. Unlike Schütz who had studied in Italy where the "first practice" remained a living tradition, the young practicioners of the art, working in a Germany physically and culturally exhausted by the Thirty Years War, lacked the "fundamenta" of their profession. Though it might seem like "heavenly harmony," music not founded in solid polyphonic technique was judged by Schütz to be no more than "an empty nutsehell," an he admonished the beginner to "bite open that hard nut whose real substance is the foundation of good composition."
His words represent a prophetic confrontation of the two terms. For a long time, "harmony" continued to be the word used to describe a fabric of independent part-writing. It was not until the publication of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Traite d'harmonie in 1722 that the modern meaning was introduced. Three years later, Fux's Gradus established the modern didactic tradition of counterpoint. Yet this was also the decade in which Handel published his first set of harpsichord lessons, and in which Bach wrote the Inventions and the Clavier Books for his son Wilhelm Friedemann and his wife Anna Magdalena—the decade in which the last two great Baroque composers undertook a systematic exposition of instruction in composition. Though they both made their point of departure the highly-developed execution of figured bass, the technique remained, in their hands, inseparable from polyphonic practice. It did not serve to illustrate how voices are placed but how the move within a harmonic texture. And the balanced blending of harmony and counterpoint was to become the foremost challenge of conventional theory.
The new meaning of the word "theory" entered the study of music largely through the influence of a work which, despite its mixed reception, attained epochal significance: Johann Georg Sulzer's General Theory of the Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 1771–1774). The author, director of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, was guided by the ideals of Rousseau in his thesis that the arts must both express and enhance nature. In an approach typical of his time, he attempted to define all artistic terms and concepts that would serve this purpose and gathered them in an encyclopedic dictionary. His musical advisors, Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Kirnberger's student Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, represented a lineage of Bach's teaching. The system of musical theory they devised, however, came under immediate attack; it was questioned above all because Sulzer's basic axiom, namely that music is a "sequence of tones guided by the passions of sentiments," resisted his own scheme of standardization. In the second volume of an Essay for the Instruction in Composition (Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 1782–1793), Heinrich Chrisoph Koch, one of the eminent writers of the period, formulated the critical argument:

The young composer's endeavors in letting his soul form beautiful melodies can never be truly aided by theory.

Nevertheless, music theory—no longer in the old sense of the "science" of music but as the subject of college and conservatory courses—became an established abstraction that was to dominate the teaching of musical composition in succeeding generations. This is all the more understandable since vital musical styles and techniques were changing swiftly to meet the demands of taste and musical imagination. When thoroughbass and fugue no longer represented current practice, they were relegated to the realm of theory. They were perpetuated in didactics though much as the "stile antico" had been retained in the age of the second practice, but with a difference: the very terms "prima prattica" and "seconda prattica" implied that the old style had stayed alive, that it continued to be practicable and valid as an artistic expression. Counterpoint and fugue, as branches of modern theory, became "a metier, not an art."²
The dichotomy thus produced had more complex ramifications than this comparison might suggest. Beethoven, though he defied Johann Georg Albrechtsberger's teaching of fugue as an "art of creating musical skeletons,"³ had been his attentive and dedicated student, and the Beethoven biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer gives a description, authenticated by contemporary accounts, of Beethoven's daily sessions with a colleague and neighbor in which "the conversation usually turned upon musical theory and composition."⁴
Theory must here still be understood in rather general terms as the study of eighteenth-century writers on various subjects, not in the sense of a more-or-less fixed course of studies in different techniques. Mozart seems to have arrived at the conventional sequence of harmony and counterpoint in his pedagogical experience empirically—this sequence, although practiced at the time, had not been fully established. In teaching the young composer Thomas Attwood during the years 1785 and 1786, he became increasingly aware of a lack of linear skill in his student's harmonizations and—apparently under the influence of Haydn—decided to direct the twenty-one-year-old back to the beginning of contrapuntal studies.⁵
The most striking case of a composer's awareness of the increasing importance of conventional theory is Schubert's legendary lesson, two weeks before his death, with the respected Viennese theorist Simon Sechter. In a letter responding to a request for biographical information, Sechter mentioned this lesson but we had no knowledge of its contents until the manuscript pages on which both Schubert and Sechter had worked were recently brought to light.⁶ Schubert turned to Sechter for advice because he was puzzled by certain technical details of fugal practice with which his generation was no longer conversant. The documentation of his lesson is all the more arresting since it shows that Schubert obtained the answers he sought. Sechter corrected the samples of fugal expositions that Schubert had submitted and added a clear exposition of the principles involved. The lesson was concluded with the assignment of a three-part fugue on which Schubert was no longer able to work. It is a touching postlude to this remarkable encounter that Sechter carried out the assignment and published it, nine days after Schubert's death, in homage to the illustrious student—doubly touching because the mediocre quality of Sechter's work shows that teacher and student met merely as theorist and composer, but not on equal terms.
What had been revealed to the dying composer was a certain historical perspective that the rapid development of the classical style had temporarily obscured, and it was this historical perspective that gave to nineteenth-century theory its most valuable contributions. Albrechtsberger, Beethoven's teacher, had taken an important step in his teaching by adapting the modal technique of counterpoint to the modern tonalities of major and minor. This orientation was subsequently reversed by a historian, Heinrich Bellermann, who, in his manual Der Contrapunkt (1862), returned to the letter and spirit of Fux's Gradus. Bellermann, successor to Adolf Bernard Marx, the first professor of music at the University of Berlin and himself the author of a standard manual on composition, was followed in his restoration of modal counterpoint by several other writers, but his book was denounced as "obsolete at its very appearance" by his distinguished colleague Hugo Riemann—as obsolete, one might add, as Bach's conscious use of modes in Clavierübung III.
In the end, neither historical nor analytical studies could solve the problems inherent in the ascendancy of theory. It was the departure from practice that undermined the textbook literature of the nineteenth century. Composers of the Romantic age in their writings did not deal with the question of how to teach composition—only orchestration. Not until the twentieth century were teaching manuals again produced by prominent composers. That the element of creative thought had been missing in didactic literature is indicated in a treatise by Heinrich Schenker, foremost among twentieth-century theorists: Neue Musikalische Theorien und Fantasien (1910–1920). Schenker, who had been torn in his early years between the careers of composer and theorist, eventually decided that the theorist's profession was for him a greater challenge. Though his work lives up to its title by offering a highly imaginative exposition of harmony and counterpoint, it inevitably points to the crux of the dilemma: in essence, composition must be taught by the composer; the theorist can only teach theory, no matter how refined the method.
Unlike theoretical guidance, practical guidance in the composer's craft is committed to the master-artisan relationship that was abandoned in textbook instruction. The didactic literature of earlier ages, too, was addressed to the individual, not to classes. The following chapters will thus be concerned with documents that show the time-honored direct and special exchange between teacher and student in an age when individualism, though strengthened in so many other ways, was abrogated in the teaching of musical composition.
¹ Frierich Wilhem Marpurg, in a letter to Johann Mattheson, Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (Berlin, 1760), I, 266. Translated in The Bach Reader, Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, eds. (New York, 1966), p. 257.
² Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York, 1941), p. 974.
³ Letter to the publishers B. Schott's Söhne, January, 1825.
⁴ Thayer's Life of Beethoven. Rev. Elliot Forbes (Princeton, 1984), I. 262.
⁵ Cf. This writer's discussion of Haydn's and Mozart's contrapuntal teachings in Mozart-Jahrbuch 1978 / 79, pp. 197, ff.
⁶ The manuscript was discovered by the Schubert scholar Christa Landon; see her report "New Schubert Finds" in Music Review 31 (1970), pp. 215 ff.

I came upon a lesser-known volume by Alfred Mann, The Great Composer as Teacher and Student: Theory and Practice of Composition, and thought it contained some interesting history and interpretation. Maybe some of you will find it informative. I've reproduced the first chapter below.

I. The Rise of Conventional Theory

During one of the opening scenes of Faust, Goethe merges the drama's principal characters: Mephistopheles poses as Faust. In a brief farce, the false teacher lectures a young student on theory and practice. Dismissing in turn logic, metaphysics, law, and theology, the conversation moves to medicine whose blunt advantages in meeting the fair sex are stressed by the master and readily grasped by the novice. Here the latter can see, as he says, the "wo und wie"—the "where and how," and Mephistopheles answers with the famous words, "Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie"—"Gray, my dear friend, is all theory."
A new attitude is caricatured in these lines, a criticism of theory that arose from the Age of Enlightenment. In an aside, the devil gives up "the dry tone" and with it the essence of his disguise—he turns from theory to practice. This attitude, so characteristic of the era, also began to play a major role in the teaching of musical composition. Commenting on this father's method of instruction, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote to the Bach biographer Johann Nicolaus Forkel on January 13, 1775:

In composition he started his pupils right in with what was practical, and omitted all the dry species of counterpoint that are given in Fux and others.

Bach himself was reported to have used the same word, calling the fugues "of an old and hard-working contrapuntist dry and wooden."¹ But the fundamental distinction inherent in the son's remark is absent from the words of the father. Bach knew no theory of music, only practice, and the maligned species of counterpoint were presented in Johann Joseph Fux's celebrated Gradus ad Parnassum of 1725 as "musica activa"; the complementary term, "musica speculativa," was reserved by the author for the mathematical computations used to elucidate the nature of intervals.
"Speculation" is the equivalent of "theory." Derivatives from Latin and Greek, the two words designated the act of viewing, contemplating; and both "speculum" and "theoria" had served in earlier times as titles for musical treatises. Yet "music theory" in the sense that modern convention has given the term was not associated with instruction in the art of musical composition until the late eighteenth century; in fact, Mozart was not entirely conversant with this meaning of the term, whereas in Beethoven's studies it had gained importance.
What separated Bach and Handel from the masters of Viennese Classicism in their teaching of the craft was their exclusive commitment and individual orientation toward musical practice. Thus, C.P. E. Bach's judgment was based on a misconception. The four-part chorale harmonizations with which his father commenced the teaching of composition represented in fact a practice of musical performance conducted by the keyboard player, while the counterpoint species Fux devised for his students represented a purely vocal practice. Less well known than the Gradus ad Parnassum but closely related to its exercises is Fux's Singfundament, a collection of short motet studies, written without text and intended for the young musician in somewhat the same manner as Bach's Two-Part Inventions.
The concept of musical practice was in itself subjected to a radical division during the century preceding Bach and Handel. Attacked for his bold use of dissonance, Monteverdi declared his style of composition a "second practice" as opposed to the "first practice" of guarded dissonance treatment that marked the works of sixteenth-century composers. One might say that the two practices were eventually codified in the disciplines of harmony and counterpoint, but it took more than a century to arrive at precise didactic categories.
The seventeenth century witnessed a proliferation of musical styles, a widening of musical experience, that resulted from the rise of opera, accompanied solo song, and instrumental music. The first composer to be concerned not only with the clarification of styles but with their implications for the student of musical composition seems to have been Heinrich Schütz. In 1648, the aging composer published his Geistliche Chormusik, i.e. music in the old a cappella style, a series of motets to be performed, as he wrote, "without bassum continuum" (although by a stroke of curious irony his publisher, in the attempt to make the work more accessible, had a continuo part added in the printed score). As Schütz's preface indicated, the work was written with a decidedly pedagogical intent.
Continuo accompaniment had become the hallmark of the new style. Its use signalled the progressive tendencies of music drama, and an estrangement from firm contrapuntal control and the "requirements of a well-regulated composition," namely strict, free, and retrograde imitation, melodic inversion, invertible part-writing, and the simultaneous use of different themes.Schütz, who as a younger man had been one of the initiations of the "second" practice in the North, now found himself surrounded by a new generation of musicians well versed in the modern style. Unlike Schütz who had studied in Italy where the "first practice" remained a living tradition, the young practicioners of the art, working in a Germany physically and culturally exhausted by the Thirty Years War, lacked the "fundamenta" of their profession. Though it might seem like "heavenly harmony," music not founded in solid polyphonic technique was judged by Schütz to be no more than "an empty nutsehell," an he admonished the beginner to "bite open that hard nut whose real substance is the foundation of good composition."
His words represent a prophetic confrontation of the two terms. For a long time, "harmony" continued to be the word used to describe a fabric of independent part-writing. It was not until the publication of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Traite d'harmonie in 1722 that the modern meaning was introduced. Three years later, Fux's Gradus established the modern didactic tradition of counterpoint. Yet this was also the decade in which Handel published his first set of harpsichord lessons, and in which Bach wrote the Inventions and the Clavier Books for his son Wilhelm Friedemann and his wife Anna Magdalena—the decade in which the last two great Baroque composers undertook a systematic exposition of instruction in composition. Though they both made their point of departure the highly-developed execution of figured bass, the technique remained, in their hands, inseparable from polyphonic practice. It did not serve to illustrate how voices are placed but how the move within a harmonic texture. And the balanced blending of harmony and counterpoint was to become the foremost challenge of conventional theory.
The new meaning of the word "theory" entered the study of music largely through the influence of a work which, despite its mixed reception, attained epochal significance: Johann Georg Sulzer's General Theory of the Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 1771–1774). The author, director of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, was guided by the ideals of Rousseau in his thesis that the arts must both express and enhance nature. In an approach typical of his time, he attempted to define all artistic terms and concepts that would serve this purpose and gathered them in an encyclopedic dictionary. His musical advisors, Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Kirnberger's student Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, represented a lineage of Bach's teaching. The system of musical theory they devised, however, came under immediate attack; it was questioned above all because Sulzer's basic axiom, namely that music is a "sequence of tones guided by the passions of sentiments," resisted his own scheme of standardization. In the second volume of an Essay for the Instruction in Composition (Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 1782–1793), Heinrich Chrisoph Koch, one of the eminent writers of the period, formulated the critical argument:

The young composer's endeavors in letting his soul form beautiful melodies can never be truly aided by theory.

Nevertheless, music theory—no longer in the old sense of the "science" of music but as the subject of college and conservatory courses—became an established abstraction that was to dominate the teaching of musical composition in succeeding generations. This is all the more understandable since vital musical styles and techniques were changing swiftly to meet the demands of taste and musical imagination. When thoroughbass and fugue no longer represented current practice, they were relegated to the realm of theory. They were perpetuated in didactics though much as the "stile antico" had been retained in the age of the second practice, but with a difference: the very terms "prima prattica" and "seconda prattica" implied that the old style had stayed alive, that it continued to be practicable and valid as an artistic expression. Counterpoint and fugue, as branches of modern theory, became "a metier, not an art."²
The dichotomy thus produced had more complex ramifications than this comparison might suggest. Beethoven, though he defied Johann Georg Albrechtsberger's teaching of fugue as an "art of creating musical skeletons,"³ had been his attentive and dedicated student, and the Beethoven biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer gives a description, authenticated by contemporary accounts, of Beethoven's daily sessions with a colleague and neighbor in which "the conversation usually turned upon musical theory and composition."⁴
Theory must here still be understood in rather general terms as the study of eighteenth-century writers on various subjects, not in the sense of a more-or-less fixed course of studies in different techniques. Mozart seems to have arrived at the conventional sequence of harmony and counterpoint in his pedagogical experience empirically—this sequence, although practiced at the time, had not been fully established. In teaching the young composer Thomas Attwood during the years 1785 and 1786, he became increasingly aware of a lack of linear skill in his student's harmonizations and—apparently under the influence of Haydn—decided to direct the twenty-one-year-old back to the beginning of contrapuntal studies.⁵
The most striking case of a composer's awareness of the increasing importance of conventional theory is Schubert's legendary lesson, two weeks before his death, with the respected Viennese theorist Simon Sechter. In a letter responding to a request for biographical information, Sechter mentioned this lesson but we had no knowledge of its contents until the manuscript pages on which both Schubert and Sechter had worked were recently brought to light.⁶ Schubert turned to Sechter for advice because he was puzzled by certain technical details of fugal practice with which his generation was no longer conversant. The documentation of his lesson is all the more arresting since it shows that Schubert obtained the answers he sought. Sechter corrected the samples of fugal expositions that Schubert had submitted and added a clear exposition of the principles involved. The lesson was concluded with the assignment of a three-part fugue on which Schubert was no longer able to work. It is a touching postlude to this remarkable encounter that Sechter carried out the assignment and published it, nine days after Schubert's death, in homage to the illustrious student—doubly touching because the mediocre quality of Sechter's work shows that teacher and student met merely as theorist and composer, but not on equal terms.
What had been revealed to the dying composer was a certain historical perspective that the rapid development of the classical style had temporarily obscured, and it was this historical perspective that gave to nineteenth-century theory its most valuable contributions. Albrechtsberger, Beethoven's teacher, had taken an important step in his teaching by adapting the modal technique of counterpoint to the modern tonalities of major and minor. This orientation was subsequently reversed by a historian, Heinrich Bellermann, who, in his manual Der Contrapunkt (1862), returned to the letter and spirit of Fux's Gradus. Bellermann, successor to Adolf Bernard Marx, the first professor of music at the University of Berlin and himself the author of a standard manual on composition, was followed in his restoration of modal counterpoint by several other writers, but his book was denounced as "obsolete at its very appearance" by his distinguished colleague Hugo Riemann—as obsolete, one might add, as Bach's conscious use of modes in Clavierübung III.
In the end, neither historical nor analytical studies could solve the problems inherent in the ascendancy of theory. It was the departure from practice that undermined the textbook literature of the nineteenth century. Composers of the Romantic age in their writings did not deal with the question of how to teach composition—only orchestration. Not until the twentieth century were teaching manuals again produced by prominent composers. That the element of creative thought had been missing in didactic literature is indicated in a treatise by Heinrich Schenker, foremost among twentieth-century theorists: Neue Musikalische Theorien und Fantasien (1910–1920). Schenker, who had been torn in his early years between the careers of composer and theorist, eventually decided that the theorist's profession was for him a greater challenge. Though his work lives up to its title by offering a highly imaginative exposition of harmony and counterpoint, it inevitably points to the crux of the dilemma: in essence, composition must be taught by the composer; the theorist can only teach theory, no matter how refined the method.
Unlike theoretical guidance, practical guidance in the composer's craft is committed to the master-artisan relationship that was abandoned in textbook instruction. The didactic literature of earlier ages, too, was addressed to the individual, not to classes. The following chapters will thus be concerned with documents that show the time-honored direct and special exchange between teacher and student in an age when individualism, though strengthened in so many other ways, was abrogated in the teaching of musical composition.
¹ Frierich Wilhem Marpurg, in a letter to Johann Mattheson, Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (Berlin, 1760), I, 266. Translated in The Bach Reader, Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, eds. (New York, 1966), p. 257.
² Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York, 1941), p. 974.
³ Letter to the publishers B. Schott's Söhne, January, 1825.
⁴ Thayer's Life of Beethoven. Rev. Elliot Forbes (Princeton, 1984), I. 262.
⁵ Cf. This writer's discussion of Haydn's and Mozart's contrapuntal teachings in Mozart-Jahrbuch 1978 / 79, pp. 197, ff.
⁶ The manuscript was discovered by the Schubert scholar Christa Landon; see her report "New Schubert Finds" in Music Review 31 (1970), pp. 215 ff.

ever since i started dating my partner, we've been going on a lot of trips (joshua tree, big sur, new york, san diego, etc.). before him, i hadn't visited so many places, so of course, i'm excited to share these experiences and make new memories together.
however, back when my RJ was at an all time high, i used to browse my partner's ex's instagram frequently and a post revealed that they went on a trip to Zion National Park together.
i want to visit Zion someday and hike Angel's Landing with him but i can't seem to separate these feelings of RJ from the place. i feel like, because he's visited Zion with a previous longterm partner, i can't go with him anymore. i don't want him to be reminded of the memories he's had with his ex, nor do i want to be overshadowed by her. even when i see random instagram posts or tiktok videos about Zion, i immediately get a sinking feeling in my chest.
my partner reminds me very often that our relationship is so much better than his previous one, that he feels very understood by me and has never felt a love like this before. logically, i know that we can go to Zion together and we'll make new memories and have so much fun. emotionally, it's quite the opposite. sometimes i feel like i might not even deserve to go to Zion or that i'll never compare to his first relationship/love.
i've worked through a lot of my RJ this past year but this is the last piece i just can't get rid of. if you're still reading this, is there any advice or tips you can offer on how to separate your feelings of RJ from a present moment/place? i would appreciate any and all insight you may have.