First, it must be understood that we don’t know what we’re doing. Nothing wonderful can come from this unless this is made perfectly clear.
Are you working from home? We are. Or we’re trying to.
Because of the Covid Pandemic, we can’t film together in studio. So we’re finding things to work on that we can do solo, like our website Socratica.com and our new podcast Socratica Reads.
We’re also doing our best to keep our spirits up by watching movies, reading books, playing games, and doing a little creative cooking.
Liliana and I made this video via video chat so you could get an idea of how we’re handling this very strange time.
Have your classes gone online? Because of the Covid19 pandemic, schools around the world are shutting down and sending their students home.
That’s not to say that education is coming to a halt. Most schools are scrambling to put classes online.
For many students AND teachers, this is their first experience with distance learning. It’s kind of a meta experience, in some sense – everyone has to learn HOW to learn in this way.
We’ve signed up for a few online classes over the years, but honestly, we’ve never actually completed a whole course this way. Did you know that the completion rate for online courses hovers around THREE PERCENT?
We put our minds to it and gathered all the best advice we could to put in this video. We were actually planning on releasing it in August/September, for the start of the school year, but we thought it might help people more now. Share it with all the teachers and students you know!
So how are we spending our time? We’re still writing scripts and editing videos. But we’re also taking time for cultural enrichment, thanks to a generous gift from the New York Metropolitan Opera.
Believe it or not, when I was a kid, most of grownups in my life loved and embraced opera. It wasn’t thought of as some kind of elite art form, only for the wealthy. It was easy to understand even as a kid, often bawdy and over-the-top. It was digested into simple acts, with well-known stories and musical themes. I defy anyone to watch “Marriage of Figaro” and say it is inaccessible.
But as I entered adulthood in the 90s, something started to change. People started to think opera was something fancy. Was it because of “Pretty Woman?” A wealthy man takes a prostitute to the opera and opens her eyes to refined culture. I prefer the depiction in Moonstruck – we see an everyman who lives for the opera.
Ticket prices started to rise uncomfortably. I still got to go to the opera a lot because when I was in grad school, Princeton would give poor grad students FREE tickets and a FREE ride to the glorious opera house in New York City, the Met. I saw everything they did for five years.
But when I moved back to LA in 2003, by then, ticket prices were out of control. Even with two of us working good jobs, we couldn’t, in good conscience, spend a couple of hundred dollars on two hours’ of entertainment. That’s more than two week’s groceries in our house.
Thankfully, the Met started streaming HD recordings of their operas. You can rent a gorgeous production for $5. They’re beautifully made videos – it’s like the best seat in the house, complete with subtitles. It’s really a wonderful resource. And now, during the pandemic, they’re making one of their operas free to stream each day. Thank you, sincerely. What a lovely, lovely gift.
If you’re hesitant – you don’t think opera is for you – we have a gift for you, too. When we first started our channel, we made a playlist to give an introduction to this incredible art form.
You can tell these are some of our earliest videos! The lighting is crazy hot (we were using powerful ARRI Fresnel lights). We were just learning how to edit using Adobe Premiere. But I look back on these early videos with great affection.
The Socratica Method 