Meet Shahruz Ghaemi
Transcriber: Jessica Ruby
Reviewer: Bedirhan Cinar
I’m 16 years old, and my name is Shahruz Ghaemi.
My father came from Iran,
and my mother came from China.
I speak some Chinese,
I understand some Farsi,
and, recently, I’ve started to study Spanish.
I attend one of the most competitive schools in the city,
if not the country.
The educational system is validly criticized
as being broken and dysfunctional.
The primary goal should be,
like the internet,
as a great leveler.
It ought to be able to provide everybody
in America with opportunity,
but an administrative culture that focuses on
standardized testing does us no good at all
because there is a difference
between knowledge and understanding.
My jazz piano teacher has really shown me
new ways of thinking about learning.
Jazz really required me
to use a different set of skills
than I’d been using for classical piano
because I had to infuse music with my own touches.
It’s one thing to regurgitate
a fancy maneuver you’ve learned,
but it’s another thing to be able to improvise
a harmonically stable piece by yourself.
And, if you truly understand something,
it’s far more important to you,
it’s more likely to be retained,
it’s far more likely to have some sort of meaning to you.