Who: Dr. Jason Kihle, Associate Professor of Percussion/Marching Band Director, Texas A&M-Kingsville
Dr. Kihle (key-lee)
Location: Marriott Courtyard Hotel, San Antonio
Device: USB Microphone onto computer
Length of interview: 2 hours
When recorded: May 15, 2016
Analysis: a fun, relaxing conversation with a good friend and colleague and an intervening air conditioning unit that wouldn’t shut the hell up.
I AM NOT INTERVIEWING YOU! GET IN LINE!!!
Pregame: He was up for the interview. We had time to practice (finally) on our piece. We're a good performance duo! He was up for interviewing later in the day.
Setup: worked pretty well.
Interview: Went pretty well. Had quite the backstory, with stops all over the country, both growing up and for work. Met (fake) John Elway.
Probably looked like the dude on the right (approximation).
Dispenser of great advice. For example:
After I made a side comment regarding him being “a good actor” for his job interview, he took the question seriously. To sum Jason’s comment up: if you feel confident in your ability to teach, you can just about teach anything. Jason could teach marching band even though he didn’t have any marching band experience. He made a great point when he showed his students what was missing from his C.V., and whether it really mattered at this point in his career. He "acted" the part but did the work to get better.
It was helpful for me to hear this again, because I had some of the same feelings about my own experiences, where I’ve taught classes outside of my primary area (Percussion) and felt (generally) successful because I was confident in my own ability to teach (Instrumental Conducting, Instrumental Music Ed, Sacred Music History, Music Appreciation etc). And with changes afoot at Lincoln University, this has been especially helpful to re-hear.
In addition, Jason took some personal leaps of faith to travel to parts of the country he’d never been to to get teaching experience.
And then there was the story of getting stuck in the flood. Holy crap.
Post-Interview: The next morning, Jason sees a stack of books I’ve got with me on the trip, as I usually travel:
Actual set of books I'm currently reading.
Jason: HEY! HAVE YOU READ THE POWER BROKER?
Me: Not yet.
Still haven't read it. Book hasn't gotten any smaller.
But this leads to our dinner conversation: ONLY books. Ones we like. Authors we like. Authors we should read. Doorstops. Small books. It was fantastic. Jason’s a voracious reader. It’s pretty cool to discover these facets of your friends…it’ll make future visits and opportunities with them more fun as we go along.
Pete's analysis of Pete: getting a little better. Not as much down time…more interjections. Intros are getting a little more interesting. I realized how boring I was on previous intros (no energy). I went into Game Show Host mode…it takes more effort but I actually now want to listen to myself.
Having a personality AND using it? It just might be a winning combination.
(Be this in audio form.)