Hello everybody, in my best Super Grover voice, from Alejandro! But you can call me Alex, if you’d like. Many do so. If you are a fan of the old lady Gaga song, then call me Alejandro. And if you like the even older Paul Simon hit, then you can just call me Al. I stumbled upon Justin Sandercoe almost 20 years ago, but besides a tut or two, I haven’t set the time to learn from him fully. I can follow along in a some songs, patterns and progressions and can play the major and relative minor chords scales diatonically in all 12 scales on the guitar, but I’m limited to about the fifth fret with my chords and fretboard knowledge. This time and season I’m diving right in !
I am, either by fortuitous happenstance or by divine intervention, a Church of God minister (Church of God “Cleveland”, i.e. , not from the Armstrong guy) and I’m also a philologist…but isn’t everyone in here for the love of learning? I live in Fall River, MA, USA with my wife who is a phenomenal singer, and my oldest and adult son who plays the keyboard and is passionate about music production, my teenage daughter who plays the violin and sings at church and school, and my middle school boy who plays the trumpet at school, the acoustic drums at church and the electric drum set with the headphones on at home…as much as I can keep it that way. And we come together as a collective for the church band. Did I say that I love music?
But more than music, if there is such a thing, my passion is to learn new things and to communicate them. I am a unlikely technologist and, as far as money can afford, an early adopter, through setbacks such as ADHD and a stuttering problem for years, and through my own struggle. I believe in Jesus, in faith in oneself, in instructional media tech, and in its power to shortcut the learning process. I’m that odious character who likes all subjects in school. I have about one more course to finish my MBA and to infinity and beyond!
In middle school in Puerto Rico at the age of 10, I had a teacher who was too passionate about communicating what he knew when I was too young and too low a grade level to study music, so he would give me lessons during his lunch hour and after school when it was just him, me and the rats who died at his precise rock-throwing hands from a distance when coming in for the pig slop that was bound to go to the nearby farms. That is what makes me so gung-ho about music, instruction, youth and technology. I have taught hundreds of young’ns how to play piano and most of them have ended up better musicians than I am. That’s fine with me! But I’m getting tired of talking about me here, I want to hear from you all and what stokes your flames!
