March Break is going by far too fast and of course I have almost nothing done and am already thinking of Monday as it fast approaches. I know this because I had a bizarre teaching dream (the first one!) last night. I'm used to having tree planting dreams, but this was entirely different and bizarre. There were a bunch of kids in my class that I had never seen before and I was handing back assignments that had mostly been done on torn up corners of paper. It was weird.
Anyways, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to teach and am leaning more and more towards a core class at the grade 7 / 8 levels. I love music and have enjoyed my own music education, but honestly believe that these preteens need to be able to formulate proper sentences / paragraphs / papers more then they need to play an instrument. These students need to read more and need to discover their own voice in their writing a lot more then they need to play an instrument or sing. I know I'm betraying four years of my undergraduate in music education, but we seemed to spend so much time convincing ourselves that what we were doing was important and relevant and a priority. It just isn't.
Music has its place, and I support active music programs in schools. They build community, give students a creative outlet and offer an alternative way of learning, but I gotta be honest: reading and writing are more important and more vital to preparing students to the real world. I think I'd rather keep my musical life seperate from my career... thoughts? Am I wrong? Is this just a phase?
Completely wrong Mack.
ReplyDeleteAnd Frankly I'm getting pretty sick of midtown people giving up on their dreams.
Everything is required. And people have different balances that suit them.
Language is undeniable in a world where power is based on words. But those words, or symbols of ideas, are also used to express nummber/proportion/motion. That's the REAL stuff that words are merely expressing, suggesting, coordinating in the mind.
So it's tempting to say that words are used to express, but the truth is the numbers.
wrong again, the truth is the physical action that those numbers count and that the words express. that's called music...or dance...or the raw material of the universe that we observe.
words alone are the province of lawyers. and if you aren't naturally at ease with words then words alone don't give you any "in" to themselves. you need rhythm, as Gershwin's lyric says he's got.
music isn't just about a transcendent aesthetic experience where you sit back and dream, taking a break from life, or perform it so that others can dream, as if drugged and wasting their time.
that's one way to use it but it has nothing to do with how music is all around us. a car crash, a conversation, trying to predict what some person or institution or machine is going to do to you next, based on the rhythms of movement and decision making they've displayed, THAT'S music too...everywhere.
when people persuade you, they use music and dance. the tone of voice, the choice of appeals to your interests, the facial expression when they're on tv or a personal friend on the spot, all of these are musical art that you have to understand, if you're going to take a cold, critical eye to the world around you.
my kids can spell and do the sentence writing and the math. but it doesn't make them independent or free. they have so little art and music that there's no sense of the greater world.
when you sit at a desk just doing lang/mat, as the curriculum mainly stresses now, you forget that there's anything to apply these skills to.
you can TELL them and practice, "these math skills let you build things, manage money, plan and keep notes; these lang skills let you relate ideas, get people's attention, analyse motivation and concepts, and hold people to account".
But without music, without some SENSUAL/SENSORY DESIRE, nothing is going to happen.
you have to have some music within you to want to use skills, to be inspired.
we assume far too much that people can just dredge through every day and they'll be fine. that inspiration is something just to make nice paintings and symphonies.
i think you need inspiration every day or you'll be operating at a very low level. that's not a useful, secure existence.
The kind of pressure that exists to cover curriculum, with its hyperfocus on the so called basics of langmat at the expense of all others, is very effective at making everybody throw their imagination in the air and just give up.
if you're teaching arts, you get no respect, no respect at all, as rodney dangerfield used to say. that means you think it's not where the action is.
and other teachers aren't naturally creative or confident trying to put music/art into their class activities. so it just doesn't get done, marginalizing it ever more.
it's a spiral drain you have to fight against, in your mind.
The way the pressure of this system gets to you midtowners and breaks you down really surprises me.
a core class gives you more control but that doesn't mean it makes you more effective. or more relaxed.
ReplyDelete10 more days of your practicum. then you can regroup and reflect.
really, midtowners talking of how they've learned so much in teaching, they've discovered themselves, they've found a place, and , cocomitantly, that's why they've lost interest in their former interests, is a very bleak picture.
"be a teacher! you'll finally make a difference, all by denying your passions, it's great!"
sounds like 1984.
My practicum is about as nice as it can be...and I still find it dispiriting.
The idea that you can't, or it's irresponsible, to use the classroom as a source of ideas for what interests you or as practice time,
is exactly what makes me not want to be a teacher.
HERE'S AN IDEA.
Try to plan your remaining days to alternate between lessons that are as musical as you can make them and
lessons that are as meat and potatoes, stripped down hard core basics,
as you can keep them.
then observe how it felt and what worked better for the students and what worked better for you.
a science experiment. exploiting your job, as a research opportunity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_a_better_effect_on_the_teacher
ReplyDelete"is an English sentence used to demonstrate lexical ambiguity and the necessity of punctuation,[1] which serves as a substitute for the intonation,[2] stress, and pauses found in human speech.[3] In human information processing research, the sentence has been used to show how readers depend on punctuation to give sentences meaning, especially in the context of scanning across lines of text.[4] The sentence is sometimes presented as a puzzle, where the solver must add the punctuation."
Just one example.
I really wouldn't say I'm giving up on my dreams, that's a bit harsh. I used to be a passionate reader and now I don't do it at all, so I'm rediscovering a part of myself and want to inspire these kids to become passionate about reading and writing in general. I've attended an arts high school, I've attended four years of arts undergraduate- I'm convinced music is valuable and I love it. But I'm just a lot more satisfied teaching kids about reading and thinking and talking.
ReplyDeleteI don't see what an extremely musical lesson vs. extremely boring lesson is going to do for anybody. It's all about integration and that's what I've been doing this practicum with quite a bit of success. My practicum isn't a chance for a research project, its to learn how to effectively manage and teach a classroom my own way: successfully in a way that works for me personally. And that's way more fun anyways.
What would an extremely musical class look like anyways? Just curious.
Thanks for asking. I'm working on this question myself.
ReplyDeletepoetry: add music to verses to make the relationship of parallel rhythms and rhymes and metaphors more physically immediate.
(uses instruments)
lang: likewise. with debate rhetoric having a faster pace to consider questions of content and form.
(instruments or choral music isn't required but an optional minds on, the music is in the patterns of argumentation. a set of phrase structures and questions to ask, repeatedly. dance like)
spelling games to build rhymes and poems.
instead of spelling tests and instead of just identifying poetic form.
math: music that focuses on rhythm for measurement. sound volume/amplitude for capacity or mass (gives another sensory experience instead of just visualizing volume)
data mgmt: picking out notes from a song.
geometry I'm not so sure, maybe more of a visual art integration.
probability: melody as prediction. visual art as shapes of distribution of possible outcomes.
sci: much more hands on work, relates to dance as it gets the body moving. that's not to say you have to do a symbolic dance of every science experiment...but given the challenges people have engaging with concepts, it wouldn't hurt, so long as the right forms of dance are chosen as similar to movements required for an experiment or similar to structures under study.
relegating your own goals as after school projects seems possible but dubious/challenging. there is very little energy left at the end of the day to work on something fresh, if you haven't been able to think about it during the day.
but if you've been integrating it, then so you have been.
but then if you believe in integrating, it doesn't sound like you think music "has its place". it sounds like you think it's pretty critical to the learning experience.
I take your point that they don't have enough verbalization skill, that's undeniable to anyone in a class.
the question is what would get them those skills. is music valuable in itself, alone, or does it provide a way to understand language and so offer a more intuitive, successful path to language skills than direct instruction that focuses solely on words to teach words.
I'm saying it's not a choice. music and art, integrated, are valuable because they are a better way to teach kids about formal structures of language (grammar, rhetoric) and math (number and shape).
for all the talk of integration, it's very hard not to feel that it's a little silly to see things this way. that, after all, you can teach the seemingly more pure intellectual subjects (langmat history geog) in isolation and it'll work just fine.
It's research whether you like it or not.
ReplyDeleteNobody will reward you for doing that research. What's demanded is performance, despite the fact that you're just learning it.
But the truth is, when you're learning...everything is just research.
Another erosion of the freedom to think your own way in the class, is the way in which research is completely neglected. It's a near total absence of professional development. at least, it's barely encouraged aside from standardized testing school committees and review.
One could also say this is a difference in philosophical outlook.
ReplyDeleteYou are exploring your rational side. Symbols, logical argumentation. After spending years swimming through sensual, sensory, physical empiricism, focusing on music.
Whereas I've spent an awful lot of time on the rational side and have a mad itch for empiricism.
Naturally we'll clash on all related points.