Your academic standards (objectives, benchmarks, goals, curriculum) most likely calls for students to demonstrate some level of proficiency in describing, analyzing and evaluating music and musical performances. This is a very important standard in a young person’s growth as an artist and as a member of civilized society. The cocktail party, for example, is founded on the principle of intelligent discussion between worldly people. And considering how many business deals in the world are made or lost at cocktail parties, I consider constructive musical critiques to be part of the holistic education our schools strives to provide.
However, adolescents often focus on negativity, and often approach the “conversational tone” of a diplomatic critique a little too conversationally. The paragraph below is real feedback to a real student following a real self-evaluation of a real playing quiz.
Dear (Student): The self-evaluations on this blog are intended to be academic in nature. As such, the success of your blog would be augmented by retaining words of an academic character during the thesis and conclusion statements of each blog entry, for example “poor”, “mediocre” and “need to improve”, while simultaneously excluding words of a vulgar and unconstructive nature, for example “sucks”, “blows”, and all references to bathrooms. Furthermore, you can improve your overall critique by focusing on specific elements of music such as intonation, rhythmic accuracy and timbre rather than broad generalizations. In the future, please compose your self-evaluations in a more productive, academic tone. Thank you.
March 24th, 2009
A colleague at a nearby international school sent out a request for assistance composing a proposal to purchase a piano. He works at a for-profit school, where the goal of upper administration is to cut costs and maximize profits. His school and its sister campuses, in a half-dozen countries, are known for their shiny new buildings and their flashy marketing brochures but a lack of deep commitment to student learning. His predicament, however, is not unique to for-profit schools. Certainly every music, art and drama teacher in North America can empathize with the predicament. This month in California, faculty and parents are writing similar letters, but instead of purchasing pianos are clamoring just to keep their teachers.
Here is the meager advice I was able to give him. The first paragraph is for his written proposal. The second paragraph is not intended to be written in the formal proposal!
Because for your accompanying and for students who are pianists in their own right, the weighted touch and dynamic sensitivity of an acoustic piano is impossible to duplicate through electronic means, no matter how sophisticated. Because your curriculum standard–which have been approved by the higher ups–specify that students must learn to identify, describe and produce good tone quality. Because there are properties of sound, such as sympathetic vibration and ‘beats’ during the tuning process, that cannot be replicated with synthesized sounds, no matter how sophisticated.
Because if you want students to make music, then let’s make music; they bought the P.E. department real basketballs and baskets, not plastic balls and plastic children’s hoops from the Wal-mart toy section. When your boss and your boss’s boss sit at folding card tables instead of proper office furniture and build their budget spreadsheets on electric typewriters rather than computers, then you’ll be happy to just go ahead and save the money for that electric piano.
March 14th, 2009
First, read this post on Edutopia about recent gains in Arts Education funding.
On one hand, I can recognize what a Herculean feat it must be to give every student on every campus in a large district (with a large portion of “inner-city” campuses) forty-five minutes of music and art per week. To have been a leader in this transformation, to look back on the amount of politicking and consensus building and fundraising and budgeting and politicking, must induce a healthy sense of pride of accomplishment. Congratulations to the leaders who took on that task, and hooray for a step in the right direction.
On the other hand, what does it say about our broken system that 45 minutes per week of music and art (or, to be exact, 45 minutes of “Musicandart”) is considered a victory? Forty-five minutes once per week is not enough to build vocabulary in any subject, much less usable performance skills. What if we gave students 45 minutes of exposure to reading once per week? What kind of reading skills, much less love of books and reading for pleasure, could we expect from them? If we gave students 45 minutes of math per week, would we ever have another engineer or architect graduate from our schools? What’s more, to think that “Musicandart” gives either half of that time to music per week and half that time to visual art per week or, worse, one music class every other week is simply laughable. Research in music education, skills acquisition, expertise theory, etc. all points to the fact that frequency of practice is an immutable component in the acquisition of new skills.
Kudos to Dallas ISD, Big Thought, and the Wallace Foundation for winning an important game. Now let’s focus on our strategy for the rest of the games of the season.
March 1st, 2009