Footprints on the Ceiling
Save reading, bless the teachers, top music of 2024.
Happy New Year, and welcome to Mia’s Queue, a free newsletter for “humans in the loop” who care about conscious culture in a tech-driven world. I love exploring how taste and curation facilitate self-discovery and create deeper connections with others. When I’m not exploring what that means in my own life, I chat with an undercover tastemaker infusing creativity and wonder into the world. This edition is an homage to a teacher whose impact I’m only starting to understand.
The first thing to contain my byline was a music review of Joy Division’s “Substance” for my high school newspaper. The article now reads to me as laughably fluffy — it is a word salad of trying-too-hard language and emo posturing.
But I remember that my journalism teacher, Mr. Jagust, made me feel like I had a gift. I can’t recall exactly what he said, I just remember it made me want to keep going. He just wanted me to write. To this day, I appreciate him so much for that.
I can see it with my own kids: A good teacher makes the difference between loving a subject and despising it. And how can that impact someone’s life! Mr. Jagust’s encouragement made me believe in myself and want to pursue more hits of this brand of dopamine. Seeing a creation of mine out in the world, with my name on it, is such a high.
I continued to write music reviews in high school, and in college, I was the music editor of Penn’s arts and culture publication, 34th Street. From there, it was a hop, skip, and jump to a first job at MTV Networks, which led to a career in digital media and tech. None of this would have happened had my dad not exposed me to journalism, followed by Mr. Jagust’s enthusiasm for my work.
Did you ever have a teacher like this? Someone who made a big impact on your life that you’d like to honor today? I want to hear about them!
After listening to Flea’s “Acid for the Children” memoir (recommend), and seeing how a high school music teacher got him into the trumpet, which sparked his love of music and set the course of his life, I am obsessed with stories of teachers who make outsized impacts on people’s lives. I dream of being this for someone one day.
I looked up Mr. Jagust recently and saw that he passed away in August. Tributes hit me hard because I could finally see his global impact. In a cute newspaper made for his 87th birthday, students at Far Rockaway High School (where he taught before coming to my school, UNIS) talked about how he changed their worlds. He helped them read, write, think, and develop a sense of agency.
He was also a fencing coach and thus agile in the classroom. By all accounts, he parkoured on radiators and furniture for maximum dramatic flair, tricking kids into paying attention to his lessons. He was notorious for putting his shoes on a pole so he could mark the ceiling with footprints and declare: “There, there’s a story for you.”
He believed that if you looked for it, there’s always a story to tell.
One student who didn’t realize she had dyslexia — who didn’t even have a name for it until 50 years later! — said his reading Shakespeare out loud while standing on a desk saved her. “The time, effort, and most of all kindness that Mr. Jagust showed me inspired me to work out a solution to a problem that I might have taken to my grave,” she wrote. “I can now say, with great joy, I CAN READ!”
The paper contains a piece Mr Jagust wrote about what teaching meant to him. Here’s a choice excerpt:
“More than some daily chore, teaching was really a place to encounter life and to help others meet it with some understanding. Too many people today seem to be willing to accept all kinds of outrageous statements and beliefs like those of [Sarah] Palin, [Glenn] Beck, the Channel 5 [Fox News] ‘pundits.’ I can only grieve for their lack of thought and wish that they had had real teachers in the past. True learning, I believe, should have resulted later in real thought about the world.”
Here we are, decades later, and the situation feels even more dire.
Recently, the article “For Gen Alpha, Learning to Read Is Becoming a Privilege” completely freaked me out. It’s behind a paywall but the gist is this: Across the U.S., kids are struggling to read; some do not even know the right way to hold a physical book. Schools have become political battlegrounds, parents with means are paying for tutoring, and the ripple effects of who has these skills will be profound. For example, when voting, it helps to be able to read and comprehend complex material.
Mr. Jagust would be rolling in his grave to know that we’re deeper in this trench now than ever before. I’m grieving about it too. I feel angry and scared, but I know we can’t stay in this state for long. We — parents, teachers, students — are going to have to move like a fencing English teacher to get our footprints on the ceiling and then be able to tell a story about why they’re there.
In my queue:
I had big dreams for elaborate year-end lists but life got too busy. Instead, I’m warming up my atrophied music-writing muscle with a few quick and dirty notes about nine albums I loved in 2024:
Helado Negro, “Phasor” - My most listened-to album from top to bottom. Electric fuzz and warm hugs.
Vegyn, “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions” - Looped “A Dream Goes on Forever,” my song of the year. (Fun fact: Vegyn is the son of The Cure’s Phil Thornalley.)
Floating Points, “Cascade” - My Year of Floating Points: he was my first concert of 2024, I loved the performance he scored for the SF Ballet, and I devoured this beaut nonstop.
Kiasmos, “II” - Olafur Arnalds’ electronic project is spaciousness as sound.
Moin, “You Never End” - Anytime Pitchfork gives an album 8+ I perk up. Entropic and hypnotic, Moin’s genre-defying offering confirmed I’m in my experimental music era.
Ariel Kalma, “The Closest Thing to Silence” - cosmic East-meets-West soundscapes with earthy edges. I was also an ambient fiend this year.
Arushi Jain, “Delight” - Most spiritual album of 2024? Textured electronic infused with Indian classical traditions. Put on your headphones, close your eyes, and get lost.
Two Shell, “Two Shell” - Glitchy hyperpop, reinventing club music for the XCX generation.
Jamie xx, “In Waves” - Some critics said this album didn’t push boundaries, but that’s because the bar is so high. The man can do no wrong in my eyes. Blissful bangers and rave poetry.
Look again at that dancer
That's you
You're here
That's us
With open arms
Falling into a deep dark blue abyss
Through time and space and regret
Privilege and denial
And dance
And dance
And dance
Arch up
Look up
To where we were
Where we are
Nothing to do
But to treat and be treated with kindness
Preserve one another
And cherish
Cherish the pale blue dot
— From “Falling Together”
I could not live this more:
“ But I remember that my journalism teacher, Mr. Jagust, made me feel like I had a gift. I can’t recall exactly what he said, I just remember it made me want to keep going. He just wanted me to write. To this day, I appreciate him so much for that. “
There are so many English teachers whose fingerprints are still all over my brain stem, but the one that sticks out the most was a particularly strict and difficult English teacher in my junior year of high school who rarely complimented anyone’s work. I had written an essay about the senior quad where all the different cliché groups of kids hung out, but I wrote it in the style of Animal Farm. We had peer grading where the first pass was one of your classmates. A boy named Adam read my essay, wrote some terrible comments, and gave it a poor grade, but Mr. Turner crossed it out, gave me an A+ and then wrote below it “Adam misses much.”
I love this article, Mia! I think so many of us can reflect on a teacher who really ruined a subject for us or the many teachers who ramped us up to a level of performance that we didn’t know we could achieve. Thank you for sharing!