Teacher/Student Relationships

Seattle Times: Legislation would crack down on teacher-student sex

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008644620_teachersex19m.html

 

It is clear that our culture finds it horrible that a teacher would have sexual – or any romantic relationship with a student, so the recent ruling that it is legal in WA naturally will raise such an outcry that the laws are going to be changed.  The law had up to this point followed the distinction between adults and minors, which does not correspond with the intuitive distinction that defines the public school system. 

The ethical premises behind the common public opinion are quite complex, however.  But the fact is, most of the reaction comes from entirely intuitive disgust at the ‘unnatural’ nature of the relationships, without any clear explanation of why it is bad. But I think there is an explanation, it just has to be unpacked a little bit.

First, consider two situations: a 23-year-old single teacher (entry-level age) and an 18-year-old student fall in love: a five-year difference, both legal adults (I don’t know the age of the teacher in Hoquiam…); or a 30 year old teacher and a 16 year old fall in love.  Is there an ethical difference here?  If we say yes, I think that there is still a basic ethical problem with the first, legal, relationship.  There is some aspect of age here, but the specific power relations in a high school are what make it complicated.   

The following situations are “obviously” unethical for more basic reasons:

–A relationship between student and teacher that destroys previous relationships is bad (three of the situations I know of, it was the case that the teacher’s life was completely ruined and a family was broken apart).  In this situation, the age is almost a secondary problem from the dishonesty required.

–A non-consensual relationship, or a relationship based on fear, bribery, or physical force (not really a ‘relationship’ I suppose)

But what of the consenting relationship between two legal adults – where one is a student and one is a teacher?  I think this is wrong, as well:

The problem of power in this specific issue is complicated. It lies in the function of the high school teacher in the life of a student.  The teacher functions as a source and origin for the systems of evaluation that define an adolescent’s self-identity.  Even the smart and charming high school students are in the end completely delusional about themselves and their place in the world.  This is actually a necessary consequence of the nature of high school as an almost hermetic field of self-cultivation, and serves its purpose if controlled.  In many places this is not accomplished on a self-conscious level by teachers, parents, and administrators.  But in the end, the achievements and reinforced behaviors of the good and mature students: academic, social, athletic, artistic, etc., has little capital outside of school.  College is, in many ways, is structured so that highly achieving high school kids have enough time to adjust to more “real world” systems of evaluation: economic, specialist-evaluated, and situated within national and international competitive fields.  The student must realize his or her insignificance at some point in order to engender the next level of growth.

The teacher who fails to take control of the hermetic and virtual nature of high school culture and its capital fails to escape the albeit necessary delusion it perpetuates.  The achievement and world of youth remains for this person a traumatic event that cannot be escaped: this is a classic image in US culture: the sons in Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the uncle in Napoleon Dynamite, that guy in Dazed and Confused: “I keep getting older, but high school girls stay the same age!”  But these are archetypes for all of us: the high school experience in US culture is necessarily traumatic: it allows youth to create themselves in a safe but virtual environment, and perpetuate this self-identity within its borders.  Those who remained satisfied with their virtual identity will only find it in the past.  A teacher living in the delusion that high school culture is an authentic world of self-cultivation will think it acceptable to participate and buy into this culture.  But they will do so not as a student, since they still have to fulfill their role in that culture.   Instead, they will interpret their role from within that adolescent world: as one who has gained the most achievement in a certain field, and now can bestow it onto others, a figure legitimized by the outside world.

To be sure, there are other cultural forces at work:  insert human sexuality into this scenario.  We can see that one of the value systems not controlled by high school culture is sexuality, and we all participate in certain fundamental premises: youth is beauty, and from adolescence, individuals (both male and female) define themselves sexually.  Sexual capital is a market unto itself, and the failure of public education to regulate this aspect of their culture is becoming increasingly apparent.

(Cultural values perpetuated by other sectors of society (industry, family, etc) also function in this way, and quite well.  But economic forces, for example, strategically work within the supplied institutions, and manage the division better (niche/age marketing) than school culture could.)  

Assuming the immorality of a purely sexual relationship (one that consciously disregards the larger personal identity of the partner) is somewhat ideological, so let me situate it within a stronger contradiction.  For a teacher, it is not possible to have a purely sexual relationship with a student since the teacher as teacher is invested in the broader human cultivation of the student.  In order to have an intimate relationship with a student, a teacher must either step out of their role, (which is quite difficult and permanent, since they are part of a bureaucratic apparatus) or have a relationship with a student in which the teacher can participate in the virtual identity of the student.  In the latter situation, the teacher activates his or her own delusional identity vis a vis the student: the one who has achieved more, both in the realm of human cultivation and in the realm of sexuality. 

This situation would seem to do a number of things: reinforce the virtual identities so strongly that neither person could function in a larger culture, stunting real human growth;  reinforce  their real sexual identities so that this aspect of their life remains the controlling one; or perpetuate an unequal relationship within which neither partner could grow. 

I am just speculating on the consequences – it would need some study.  But I do think that in the end, a teacher falling for a high school kid, to say nothing of a younger child, reveals a particular emotional weakness that contradicts the aims of education.  I also think this carries over in a more general way to relationships between individuals who have an age difference that spans over the late teens and early 20s.  As with corporate media or state ideology, any one particularly powerful influence on self-cultivation stifles a needed time of growth, and therefore should be counterbalanced by other social forces.    

Musicology

Compared with fields like Meteorology, Counter-insurgency or Physics, Musicology has no pressing need for radical epistemological shifts.  This is because Music is tossed about by much stronger winds than theoretical frameworks, unlike weather, which demands a continual and primary emphasis on the alteration of thinking.

The sociological, physical, psychological and economic aspects of music take care of themselves, because little can be done about them, and as empirical studies they are not primarily musical questions.

The central musicological question, then, is much more difficult to articulate since its sole topic is Music, and not specific examples of music making, or of musical examples of sociology or economy.  To be sure, the construction and perpetuation of knowledge about music history, theory, and other empirical musical studies is the main professional focus of most people in the field.  But unlike some topics, Music centralizes its study, allows relations to be made across very divergent spaces, and deals with proliferating worlds of complexity that cannot be reduced to other discussions.  For this reason, a separate area of research (so to speak) is needed, one that can deal with the ‘excess,’ and indeed, preserve the excess.

Since Music is not static or bounded, and yet requires some amount of explication, it shares the need that other fields have to continually re-work the structural principals of the topic in order to better accommodate it.  In the grand scheme of things, this is not so important.  But few other fields are allowed to have remainders over beyond the topics reducible to the broader epistemic paradigm, if those remainders are not causing too much havoc.

For this reason, musicology does serve a larger purpose: to allow music to be a test case for systems and frameworks for thought.  However, there is a challenge inherent to this, in that the excess is very easily cut off from music.  Unlike global warming, political conflict, technology, or even biology, nothing much comes from moments of music that don’t quite fit in anywhere.  This is why the task of preservation and construction of knowledge about music (including the technical means to create it) is significant. 

Correlatively, musicology needs (though often fails) to recognize and grapple with the fundamental epistemological issues at play within the field itself, while at the same time keeping to its more archival tasks.  Such recognition comes from having worked through more general work in philosophy while simultaneously working from music itself.  Although this may require specialization within the field, it also requires an equal force of ‘generalization’ of expertise.         

   

 

Names we will not be using

Still working on baby names, though it is narrowed down.  I got a little too creative at one point, so here are some good names that I will probably not be allowed to name any child of mine, but still have a ring to them.  

Drexel Rrok

Grice Parker

Brennevin Lessing

Manifold Belson

Therse Hoyt

Zarlin Maies

Delegate Sage

Wellpinit Anders

Luxor Blake

Mosen Redden

Turnage Marker

Cagens Villaert

Fortune Maciunas

Obrecht Thexis

Peconic Leclerc

Tractis Bergson

Castan Senghor

Renfortz Meyer

Madoff Rawls

Alban Timaeus

Lakeson Odegny

Emerson Delancey

Arezzo Javitz

Marcellus Pierce

Mauro Windham

Feldman Hinder

Cotto Marsch

UAAHC

UAAHC

The New York City public education system is somewhat complicated, which is natural for its task.   The last decade the DOE has seen a large amount of re-structuring, which makes it even more complex.  I think this was due to some significant experiments, such as Central Park East and its MacArthur grant Principal Deborah Meier, who showed that smaller schools were more effective in many ways.  The idea of having smaller themed schools took off, and so the large public school campuses over the city now have up to five or six different schools, all with separate administrations that only work together on larger logistics.

This puts the power in the hands of principals, which is great if these people are up to it.  I substituted for a Spring and Fall, mostly in the Bronx, and got to see a few different schools.  The ones that really sucked, where the kids were out of control and the teachers hated their job, had principals and office staff that you could immediately tell were burnt out and had no vision or losers to begin with, but mostly the former.

I spent most of my time at the Urban Assembly Academy of History and Citizenship for Young Men, or UAAHC.  The Urban Assembly system, as far as I could tell, is a mid-level bureaucratic structure that assists with a number of different schools in different areas of the city, seemingly in poorer areas.  The school is situated in the large penitentiary-like campus on 172^nd St and Grand Concourse.  This is not quite the South Bronx, and the kids were not all ‘inner-city,’ but there was certainly a large low-income population, and it was all Black and Latino.  The principal Jonathan Foy and program director Kamua Ptah were interesting individuals and very visionary, which made the school atmosphere the best one I experienced by far.  The teachers were mostly very good and very committed, and I had the chance to cover long-term absences most the time I was there.  I failed miserably at my job, but learned a lot about education.

The school philosophy is interesting in a number of respects.  Most notably, it is an all-male school, with a strict shirt and tie dress code, both to the chagrin of its students.  These aspects polarize the students: many constantly and perpetually made issue with these things, while others end up doing well in the environment.  Another interesting dynamic is that it is not so much instilled with a ‘civil rights’ philosophy, but much more of a black power tradition, with Ptah and other supportive figures devoutly Muslim, and the character education and values of personal cultivation instilled with images of survival, warrior-roles, (one elective class was subtitled ‘sonic jihad’) alongside the ‘scholar’ environment reminiscent of mid-20^th century Ivy League schools. 

The director, Brother Ptah, once told me in a discussion that theorizing is great (which I was trying to do with him) but when it came down to it, decisions have to be made and we have to actually act.  These actions may be somewhat eclectic and diverse, and may not be productive or consistent beyond this moment, but for his here and now, the young men at UAAHC, the many philosophical approaches contained in the school’ s ideals and practices all had potential for creating an atmosphere that could lead to the student’s success.

I see this school as an example of the most productive method for large-scale social change.  Teaching math depends on math teachers, who depend on money and administration support.  But different populations of students are going to need more specific school atmospheres to counter the specific hegemonic forces that perpetuate their immediate social inequality.  Schools like UAAHC are aware of this and for that I hope they are successful.

 As for their current level:        

http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2007-08/ProgressReport_HS_X239.pdf

http://www.uaahc.org/   

Two Cents on Palestine

I am no expert, but it seems like the recent invasion of Gaza is in a classic form: Palestinian militants slowly piss of Israel over a series of months with rocket attacks, etc, then Israel makes a more unified gesture of assassinations or invasions that lead to an internationally called-for cease fire, which calms things down until someone on either side tries to make another slight strategic move which begins another escalation.

So, what does Hamas thinks it accomplishes when it randomly lobs rockets into Israel? This seems to be an incredibly shortsighted gesture of pure anger. It only solicits much more decisive responses by Israel. If Hamas were really concerned about the resolution of the Palestinian conflict, they would not provoke Israel without having something like an “exit strategy.”

And what does Israel think it accomplishes by military operations in Gaza and other places? This is also relatively shortsighted, since they ought to know that these poor ghettos are going to be hotbeds for anti-Israeli sentiment, and military actions just perpetuate this, making more enemies than they kill. It has not worked in the past, and it divides international opinion even more than it was already.

The problem is, if Palestinian militants just stop fighting, they know they are going to lose. Israel wants peace on their terms, and the Palestinians have no other leverage than annoying guerrilla moves. Israel cannot stop fighting, because they need to maintain the precedent that they will respond to attacks by anyone, and show that they have the ability to do so – and, in the short term, a military gesture does solve their immediate problems of the attacks.

Another problem is, even if Hamas is not good for Palestinians, they are good for the anti-Israel Middle East. Palestinians are being used as pawns by surrounding countries to make Israel look bad, for their own self-justification and for their international leverage. And the recent invasion did make Israel look pretty bad: this can be seen in how defensive everyone, even US sympathizers, got.

So for Palestinians I suggest:

1) Start/keep throwing rocks. Relatively less harmful, organized riots and marches directed against Israel will accomplish the same thing on an international level, but without military retribution. And if retribution does come, it will make Israel look even worse. Get more media attention than you do now, during times when you can’t be lumped in with ‘terrorists’. This might take some outside assistance, but this is more realistic than trying to blow Israel up.
2) Make more ties with the Europe and US. You already have nominal support from the rest of the Middle East, but that support will only perpetuate your situation. Look for aid from people who have invested interest in a stable region.
3) Try to curb the non-strategic violence. Military moves should be aimed at realistic targets.

For Israel I suggest:
1) Take on more of the responsibility for aid in Palestinian areas. In fact, seek to replace aid coming from other parts of Middle East that you are blocking anyway. Invest more in the creation of infrastructure than military operations in the regions where the violence is coming from. Work for stability in areas that are feasibly ready for permanent infrastructure. I bet this is cheaper than periodic and unending military response. Or, fund other groups to do this for you.
2) Curb the conservative forces that build housing settlements in places like the West Bank. Acknowledge your military and financial upperhand, and be willing to concede things for the sake of peace.
3) Altering expected peace conditions and negotiation strategy in recognition of the extremely non-centralized nature of Palestine.

Of course, the fallacy in all this is to see Israel as one body and Palestine as one body, where in fact there are many different forces and views at play, none of which have much control over the other. Also, the human emotions and irrationality of the whole thing, the historical impossibility of a win-win situation, the international investments in all aspects of it, prevent a clear answer. People who think there are clear answers prevent clear answers. In this context, I guess the realistic answers really are the people sitting at the negotiation tables, waiting for everyone to calm down for a second. I had thought that this method always seemed ineffective, but it is not as if there were another way to do things…

Metaphysics of Bach

Sacred and secular music do not simply refer to different functions of music in the European heritage, but to specific styles and genres of music that are products of long histories.  The distinction became confusing in the 19^th century, since the Romantics were all for the mystical nature of music, but wanted to distance themselves from the historically Christian religious content of ‘sacred’ music.

More precisely, the appropriation of Christian music for whatever ‘more real’ Romantic metaphysics was being peddled required that the religious content be suspended as naïve, and the musical truth content be found in the sublimity of the music itself, and not the textual or stylistic references to Christian ideas.

The problem is that the dichotomy between sacred religious content and metaphysical truth content that the last 200 years has relied on is way too broad and muddy to be useful.  Consider what J.S. Bach writes about thorough-bass realization: …”so the ultimate end of all music and therefore also of the thorough-bass is nothing other than the praise of God and the recreation of the soul.” (Cambridge Companion to Bach, 53).

Bach, who wrote profound music in both secular and sacred genres, saw no metaphysical distinction in the two.  That means that in 1829, at Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the distinction was already decided: even if you take out the ceremonial elements of the Passion, the music is still religious.  Taking the piece out of the church and into the concert hall does nothing, just as taking out the Christian and putting in the Romantic does nothing in itself: the change occurs entirely in the presiding metaphysics of the era.

This makes some things easier and some things more complicated.  On one hand, you have the Romantics, Bach, and the Medievals and Pythagoras who claim that music is connected with the absolute in a significant way.  On the other hand, the complication comes in pinning down the historical connections that were made between music and the absolute.  This must be given over to the philosophers: what are the possible connections music could have? 

In this context, Bach is in fact the most metaphysically conservative of them all, since music itself is nothing but praise.  He accepts its sacred nature, but sees music as an entirely human action, independent from metaphysical or magical forces.  As a Lutheran composer, Bach would not even have put a stake in any metaphysical occurrences in the masses and services he prepared.  The Reformation in the 18^th century Lutheran view would have already transcended the last mythical ideas about music.  The only metaphysical move left would be simple subtraction.  

Berg’s Violin Concerto

Annotations to a draft of some program notes.  ( sorry for its awkward appearance)

Alban Berg was born in 1885 in Vienna and died[1]there 50 years later in December of 1935. 
The Violin Concerto, written the last year of his life, was premiered the April after his death, and not in Vienna, but Barcelona.[2]  The Vienna premier occurred the following October of 1936 by an uncooperative Vienna Philharmonic, who left the stage immediately after the completion of the performance,[3]leaving only the concertmaster, conductor and soloist on the stage for the applause.   The forced irony that this masterpiece of the Second Viennese School and its composer were unwelcome in their own city[4]reveals the complexity of the historical moment of this music’s origins.

Complex, too, are the stories and narratives that are weaved into the Violin Concerto itself. 
Berg dedicated the piece “to the memory of an angel,” the daughter of Alma Mahler and her second husband Walter Gropius,[5] Manon Gropius, who died[6] at the age of 18 in April of 1935.  Though the dedication was given only after work began on the Concerto, there are clear programmatic connections to its function as a requiem for the girl.  The final section of the piece is a theme and variations[7] on J.S. Bach’s chorale Es ist genug[8]: It is enough! Lord, when it pleases you, relieve me of my yoke… The memory of her youth is presented earlier in the piece with a folk song[9] from Carinthia, the southern Austrian region where Berg had his country home where he was most productive.  But thefolk song has also been considered as an autobiographical reference to an affair Berg had in his own youth[10]—opening up other possible interpretations for the piece that are reinforced by instances of certain numerical symbols[11]
often used by Berg in his work, and of course the Concerto’s poetic place as the last[12] of Berg’s completed works.

 If all the intriguing ciphers and secret messages[13] that lay lurking in the details of the piece were not enough, the Violin Concerto is a feat of stylistic combination that has made it good ammunition for the subsequent rhetorical battles[14] over music.  It would be misleading to say that the Concerto juxtaposes or synthesizes[15] dissonant atonal material with consonant moments of tonality, though its unique tone row allows for an interestingly consistent tonal interpretation.[16]  Tonality and atonality never did really make a good dialectical pair, since they are both nominalistic stand-ins for myriad styles and aesthetic values. In many ways it is the opposite for this Concerto: the crystalline beauty of Berg’s serial techniques gives a haunting quality to the overall texture, while the quotation of Bach’s[17] 1723 harmonization of the chorale uses 10 of the 12 chromatic pitches in its first four chords in order to accommodate the strange whole-tone ascending augmented fourth in the melody. 

Formally, the Concerto is divided into two movements, each with two sections, unlike Berg’s usual[18] tripartite  compositions.  The first movement is made up of an Andante prelude[19]-like section followed by an Allegretto containing the folk song as well as a Waltz reference.  The second movement’s allegro first section is a fascinating transformation of the cadenza idea, where the ensemble violins join with the soloist on improvisatory-like runs.  The final Adagio section is the chorale variations, with Bach in an organ-like statement in the clarinets.  Though divided clearly enough, the chorale, the folk song, the opening figure of the piece, and other important patters occur all throughout the work, swirling out of the main texture like rings of turbulence[20].

With the secrets of the piece already revealed or forever hidden, with the political, theoretical and social battles that gave the Concerto its first meanings solidly in the past, we are left with a sublime work of art that has outlived the old demands of theoretical or programmatic consistency, while at the same time preserving all of these meanings in a nexus[21] of styles, stories, and icons that are today only given life by the music itself.       

       

 

 

---

 

[Back] He died of complications with an insect bite. 
Webern was shot by an American GI when he went out to smoke a cigar
after curfew.  Schoenberg died in LA, according to Wikipedia, from the number 13.  There is something classically 20^th century about all this. 

[Back] This is not so remarkable as it sounds, since Barcelona was the 1936 site of the
festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, which was the big
show that year.

[Back] According to Kransner’s (the violinist who commissioned the work) account.  This is all the more remarkable since it would seem that after playing the third section, where all the violins play in
unison with the soloist, this would be the ultimate in bonding experiences.  But that is the thing with Nazis.  They always surprise us with their complete lack of conscience.

[Back] It is understandable the extreme alienation a German must have felt to be forced to leave.  Otherwise, it would be
sort of surprising that so many Jews only left later, and people like Adorno and the composers were so unwilling to leave.

 [Back] The same architect she had been having her affair with in her marriage to Mahler.

[Back] Polio

[Back] More complicated than this, but this is the easiest way to put it.  Theme and Variations actually has a
strict formal definition, which the concerto simply references.

[Back] This is actually a chorale tune from before Bach, as are most chorale tunes.  It is a very strange melody.  More below.

[Back] Ein Vogel auf’a Zwetschgenbaum: A bird on the plum tree has wakened
me/Otherwise I would have overslept in Mizzi’s bed/If everybody wants a
rich and handsome girl/Where ought the devil take the ugly one?/The girl is
Catholic and I am Protestant/She will surely put away the rosary in bed!

[Back] Mizzi in the song sounds like Mutzi, the nickname of Manon, but also Marie, a servant
with whom Berg fathered an illegitimate child with when he was 17. 

[Back] Berg is the number 23, women are allegedly 28, AB is his initials, and HF is the
initials of another woman he had an affair with. 

[Back] Lulu remained unfinished

[Back] The secret program for Berg’s Lyric Suite was found in the ‘70s, and
contained the explanation of all the little details for his lover. 

[Back] This is the most obvious, but least interesting aspect.  Who would have guessed Boulez, Adorno,
Copeland, and everyone else had an opinion about it.

[Back] This dangerous word is used quite often. 
I don’t know of a better one, since eclectic, a close second, is
not quite correct either.

[Back] The row offers triads and seventh chords. 
But in serialism, these can be transposed at will, so there is no guarantee
of harmonic relations at the level of the tone row.  The few chord progressions that are
clear, however, do remain in closely related keys of Bb Maj/g min, so Berg was thinking
about tonality to some extent.

[Back] Bach as a rhetorical icon is all about consonance and strict tonality.  But he wrote some crazy stuff.  As did Monteverdi and others.  There is no ‘progress’ towards complete chromaticism unless you start in the middle of the 18^th century, when music was at its most boring. 

[Back] More than anything suggests some secret program beyond the normal. This also
prevents him from doing any palindromic stuff, which he did often, although it
does end with the figure from the very beginning, so there actually might be
some notable palindromic suggestions if one was to look for them

[Back] Prelude, Scherzo, Cadenza, and Chorale Variations are Berg’s description in a
letter to Schoenberg.   

[Back] That is, the swirls of air or water turbulence, a reference to chaos theory.  However, what chaos theory would explain chaotically, (the placement of these swirls) are dictated by the secret
numerological system that Berg used.

[Back] Not to be too self conscious, but a Deleuzian framework does seem to work better
than a Hegelian framework for examining a piece like this.  There are no ’syntheses’ in a
dialectical sense, but the methods of reference and the creation of meaning
comes about in a much different way. People who don’t like this work for its “lack of theoretical
consistency” as someone on NewMusicBox said, are coming at it from
incorrect, though dominant epistemic assumptions about the nature of music and
its relation to the webs of meaning that it spins and inhabits

A day in the city

 

Bought $1.00 cheese and $5.00 crackers at Zabars after looking at their pots and pans. 

 

Sitting in a gazebo in Central Park, four French youth come in out of the rain.  I take their picture.  Very polite, impeccable English, smoked, and dressed like gangstas.

 

Tried to eat in Washington Square Park, but was accosted by the biggest, meanest squirrel I have ever seen, who drove me away.

 

Went to a coffee shop and listened to two unkempt guys talk loudly about Marx and Lenin.

 

Eating pizza in a small pizza place, I see a Hispanic delivery guy walking up 1^st Ave confused.  He walks into the pizza shop and asks directions from the Hispanic pizza delivery guy.  Walks back down 1^st Ave.  

 

Went to The Stone, a “space” for avant-garde jazz.  Right before the set, a drunk homeless guy walks in and starts a ruckus, asking where his girl went.  Then realizing he was the center of attention, kept it up, asking, all I want is the truth!  The man who I think was John Zorn says, ‘the truth is outside.’  Realized he was beat, he sits down and tells the poor kid taking money that he will leave when he hears some music.  He finally leaves after everyone in the room just stares at him and says nothing.  Good set.

 

And of course, the train ride back with a loud girl having an unending conversation about things I did not want to know about.  Embarrassed the old couple next to me, but got off before Huntington.  

A change of scenery

Since I have enjoyed my hobby of web-logging, I thought it might be nice to try a different format.  For those who did not know, I have been writing on Myspace for some time.  Many a profound thought has been shared, of which you are free to read at www.myspace.com/aaronahayes.