A new blog has been added to the Third-Stream blogroll. Welcome to Joar Klæboe Henriksen, a high school student with an incredibly mature blog about clarinet technique, practice strategy, and music in general. We look forward to reading about Joar’s growth over the coming years.
Thanks to David Thomas over at The Buzzing Reed for the tip!
1 comment March 7th, 2010
The Music Education Blog Carnival is back!
Cruise on over to MusTech.net to read the finest writing and the freshest thinking in music education in the past month. The Music Education Blog Carnival is back with a passion, and today’s March Carnival is one of the best editions since the Carnival’s founding.
Check it out!
1 comment March 1st, 2010
Flyers, posters and other ads get deposited in the teachers’ lounge regularly. Training, coursework, jewelry, charity drives, puppies, continuing ed credits, seminars, “cute crafts” and more are all for sale. It is a bizarre bazaar of professional and non-professional (and sometimes arguably unprofessional) commerce. I ignore most of the paper parade, since I really have no use for coursework in K-3 Reading Strategies or Middle-Level Principal Certification.
But one ad caught my eye this week. It is a brochure for summer credit hours. The brochure promises to develop in participants “a new vision for…education” and bring them up to date with “best practices for…motivation, brain research [and] games” through the ability to “generate exciting new learning formats” and the ability to “empower your students to have meaningful conversations”. This is powerful stuff! “Particular attention”, the brochure asserts, “will be given to the important roles that music, art, language and play have in the development of the neural networks” and to the ways in which “written, spoken, artistic, and kinesthetic…techniques” can be used “in your classroom to raise student achievement”. Participating educators will learn the “Keys to Developing a Motivating Classroom” and will certainly spend time “Rethinking Classroom Management”.
But take a look at the cover of the brochure:
Do you see what I see? Of three pictures, two are scenes of classrooms organized in the Industrial Revolution plan: student-workers, arranged in straight rows, facing straight ahead at the teacher-boss, who is the giver of all knowledge and sole locus of control. It is the teacher’s job to ask questions in these scenes, and the students’ jobs to quietly raise their hands and wait to be called upon to speak. But the classrooms are productive, and the proof of productivity is right in front of us: chalk on a green slate board, right where the knowledge-giver has placed it for the dutiful student-workers to copy it into their paper notebooks. And the classroom atmosphere in these scenes is positive, with smiles and eager raised hands. But is it the forward-thinking “new vision for what…education may look like” as touted by the content of the brochure? Where are the cooperative learning groups? Where are the innovative methods? Which of these images represents “Creative Science Instruction Through Inquiry”? Which image shows a divergent symphony of artistic, musical and kinesthetic learning styles? (Oh, I see the kinesthetic - it’s all of those young’uns raising and lowering their arms from their desks all day.) The pictures of silicon-powered “new learning formats” must be waiting on the organization’s website, with the course descriptions for technology courses.
And speaking of technology, why is the lady in the leftmost picture (whom I assume to be an educator reading in the grass on a sunny summer day) learning by old-fashioned book, rather than via internet or through dynamic hands-on activities? If the tech coursework offered at this seminar includes the creation of “exciting new learning formats” and attention to social, artistic and kinesthetic classroom methods, then is it not counterindicative for the cover of the brochure to promise cutting-edge 20th Century educators their PD via “familiar and effective text-based course formats”?
In all fairness, I must emphasize that it is the brochure, not the program itself, of which I am poking fun. The organization probably runs a well-respected and highly effective program, for all I know (I fully admit that I don’t know). It is certainly a forward-looking collection of course descriptions.
The staff who created this brochure are professional graphic designers, not professional educators. The design professionals who created the brochure were educated in the 20th Century system. They have never seen the classrooms of the edgy teachers who founded Learner’s Edge Inc., much less the wire-free, inquiry-rich techno-zone of James Frankel’s imagination. The graphic designers dug deep into their own 20th Century experiences to find the traditional mental image of “happy school”: creamy faces, pearly smiles, straight desks, raised hands, and nubs of chalk scratching across well-attended chalkboards. I wouldn’t be surprised if the images came from a stock photo service such as BigStockPhoto.com, Shutterstock.com or Fotosearch.com - or perhaps I would be surprised if the pics didn’t come from a stock photo service. I don’t blame the graphic designers; they were doing what any graphic designer would do. And the vast majority of the American public shares their Industrial Age paradigm.
But that is the point: despite calls (and some impressive funding) for educational reform from outside the profession and the leadership of brave and innovative pioneers within the profession, the vast majority of the American public shares the Industrial Age paradigm inherent in the photos on this brochure. Let me say that again: Even the brochure selling vanguard techniques to the front-line teachers “in the trenches” shows the old vision of what school should be. Do schools kill creativity? Yes. Does it have to be that way? Only in a 19th Century school.
One of my favorite education quotes of all time comes from a clinician, whose name I never caught, who gave the keynote address at summer inservice in a small, rural district in which I used to teach. She was a great speaker and an energetic motivator, and I have long wished that I had written down her name next to the sizeable list of one-liners on my notepad that day. Among the golden nuggets that morning, she said that
Learning is noisy. Death is quiet.
Wow. That idea resonated (no pun intended) with much of the audience, and so much more for a percussionist and band nerd like myself. Having dedicated my life to Varèse and Coltrane indoors and to DCI outdoors, chaos and noise felt like home to me. (Anyone who has taught a full-time year will agree with that chaos and noise are the natural state of both kindergarten and high-school seniors.) That was the beginning of my understanding of the need for the American education industry to break free of the Victorian-era model of school. And does it not describe what we, as music educators, do? Does it not describe our goals, methods and motivation, all in one quip? Learning is not quiet; nor is personal growth; nor the solving of unique and asymmetrical problems in the real world; nor teamwork, creativity, sports, business, family vacations, fun parties, tasty food, hot sex or anything else on this planet that makes life worth living.
The third law of thermodynamics applies to humans of all ages. Why fight it? Let’s stir those kids up and see just how far they can go! Excellent teaching is not like operating a factory, it’s like herding cats at a higher pace with higher stakes.
To close - and this is a post in serious need of closing at this point - I hereby put out the call to arms: Educators of the world, unite! We are on the leading edge of a revolution in education - nay, all of American culture - in which creativity, problem solving and interpersonal skills become the core of intellectual training for adult life in a real world where success requires - say it with me - creativity, problem solving and interpersonal skills. Music and movement are to the software of the mind what oxygen and glucose are to the hardware of the brain. Onward, pioneers! The wagon trains of American culture are pushing their way across the vast territory of “a new vision for…education”, slowed by the bumpy trail of politics and funding, but striving unstoppably towards the manifest destiny of “generat[ing] exciting new learning formats”. But the first step is for us, the educators, to bravely rip the old vision from our heads and hammer in its place a blank slate (or iSlate, or iPad or iTablet or whatever) on which the future can paint itself. Music in every classroom! Every student into music! Let’s “Blast!” apart the brick walls of traditional definitions of theater, art, science and history are. Let’s pull those desks out of those clean, straight lines and get our hands dirty. And at the vanguard of the revolution will be the band, choir and orchestra directors who teach real-life success skills through the study of the most beautiful - yet asymmetrical and undefinable and unfathomable - discipline in the school: music.
2 comments February 23rd, 2010
“ThirdStream2009″ image courtesy of www.wordle.net by Jonathan Feinberg.
What’s at the center of your professional world? Hopefully students are, with either “band”, “choir” or “orchestra” playing a large but not central role. We don’t teach music, after all….we teach students. Better yet, we teach future professionals and happy, self actualizing adults. An easy but important resolution for the new year: Make that state sweepstakes trophy the method, not the objective. Makes smiles, interpersonal growth and student ownership the goals.
1 comment January 9th, 2010
<Snicker>
Following the advice of this New Year’s Resolution Song, I have set these achievable and attainable resolutions for my teaching in the new year:
Play music in class.
Perform a couple of concerts every year.
Plan my lessons in advance…..at least once a month.
Insert a Band grade and comment into the report card of each and every Band student.
Miss the housing deadline for the state music teachers’ conference, then complete it online a week later in a tizzy at 1:00 a.m. only to see that my favorite hotels are full. A day or two after the charge hits my credit card, have a buddy volunteer to share his room in my favorite hotel.
Delete, without reading, any e-mail from the school secretary, of which the title begins with “IMPORTANT!!!!” or “Today’s Attendance” or “Weather”.
Delete, without reading, any e-mail from the Community Service Coordinator, AP Coordinator, Grade 6 Homeroom Coordinator, or Faculty Sunshine Committee Coordinator.
Listen to Miles while planning and grading.
Write a daily post on Third Stream….at least once a month.
Add comment January 5th, 2010
Excellent post by Doug Butchy over at Confessions of a Band Director. Cruise on over and have a look…this is how third-stream music educators build personal, lifelong connections between students and their music. Congratulations, Doug, on a major victory!
1 comment December 17th, 2009
The Third-Stream blogroll has been updated, and the overhaul is long overdue. The new lineup focuses more tightly on ensemble development, wind and percussion technique, conducting, perfect practice, advocacy, music assessment and music curriculum; in short, all the things and only the things which form the core interests of a practicing high-school band or orchestra director. I have not included an emphasis on music technology blogs, but I have left in some of the music tech blogs which I find to be more pertinent to band/orchestra/choir on a regular basis. There are many excellent technology blogs of a more general nature, not to mention piano, guitar and elementary music blogs, which I have not included simply to keep the focus here on secondary-level performing ensembles. You can find all the best blogs in these categories on the 100 Music Education Blogs list. I have left out instrument and conducting blogs which are focused more on industry gossip and less on classroom pedagogy. I have also not included some of my favorite band blogs which have been inactive; I will keep an eye on them and let you know when they resume publication.
The most notable new inclusions are of a half-dozen instrument-specific blogs covering clarinet, trumpet, and percussion. I hope to add another half-dozen instrument-specific blogs to the blogroll in the next two weeks to bring more high-quality technical information to you and me.
Visit the sites on the Third-Stream blogroll. Leave a comment here to let me know what you found useful. Better yet, start your own blog and share your wisdom with the music ed community!
Add comment November 14th, 2009
Alex Ross, the indomitable and unignorable music critic for New Yorker Magazine and author of The Rest is Noise, is moving his blogging activity from The Rest is Noise to Unquiet Thoughts on the New Yorker’s online blogs site. His book and his blogs are always interesting. Plus, they are often focused on music we rarely get to hear about in today’s mass media: cutting edge works by living composers, sometimes challenging to listen to but always relevant to here and now. If your students - and your students’ parents - think that ‘classical’ music is dead, then you need to let Alex Ross keep you on your toes so that you can be prepared to keep your audience on its toes.
Add comment October 16th, 2009
This description of brain activity, from This is Your Brain on Music by Dr. Dan Levitan, caught my interest this week.
When I hear Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3, the hair cells in my cochlea parse the incoming sound into different frequency bands, sending electrical signals to my primary auditory cortex - area A1 - telling it what frequencies are present in the signal. Additional regions in the temporal lobe, including the superior temporal sulcus and the superior temporal gyrus on both sides of the brain, help to distinguish the different timbres I’m hearing. If I want to label those timbres, the hippocampus helps to retrieve the memory of similar sounds I’ve heard before, and then I’ll need to access my mental dictionary - which will require using structures found at the junction between the temporal, occipital, and parietal lobes. So far, these regions are the same ones, although activated in different ways and with different populations of neurons, that I would use to process the [sound of a] car horn. Whole new populations of neurons will become active, however, as I attend to pitch sequences (dorsalateral prefrontal cortex, and Brodmann areas 44 and 47), rhythms (the lateral cerebellum and the cerebellar vermis), and emotion (frontal lobes, cerebellum, the amygdala, and the nucleus accumbens - part of a network of structures involved in feelings of pleasure and reward, whether it is through eating, having sex, or listening to pleasurable music).
Also this week, I caught a lecture podcast from the Big Ideas podcasts by the eminent neurologist and music/brain expert Dr. Oliver Sacks. Dr. Sacks’ comment on amusia really caught my attention. He discussed a patient who had suffered from amusia, or medically-substantiated tone deafness, who was told by doctors in Montreal that she (and other amusic patients) had “a slight abnormality in the right frontal lobe” of her brain. She explained to Sacks that, to her, the sounds of any piece of music sounded just as random and unorganized as the sound of pans being thrown on a kitchen floor. I know from my music psychology coursework that tone deafness is a cultural construct, created artificially in people’s minds, which only occurs in Western culture (Levitin covers this, as do other texts…overcoming that public misconception is one of the biggest challenges facing Band and Choir directors in our recruiting and advocacy efforts, but that’s for a different post). But clinically-substantiated amusia piques my interest as a band director; even with a philosophy that all children are able to learn and a briefcase full of idealism, I think we’ve all encountered one student who, despite their good attitude, could not follow a steady beat nor distinguish pitches after a year or more of our best group and individual instruction.
Thus, my question today is, “Will neurological mapping of brain function someday merge with the trend for continuously improving metrics of music assessment (vis-a-vis SmartMusic, Coda Intonation Trainer, and similar software) and eventually result in methods to ’screen’ young people for clinical amusia? Even further in the future, will we someday have medical treatments for improving pitch and tempo perception? Would we want to?”
What do you think? What interesting bits have you read in the field where music and brain science meet?
Add comment October 2nd, 2009
I added a list of links to relevant music organizations to my “for-students” website today. Perhaps your students would find them interesting, too. Please feel free to copy and paste the following list of links (hopefully they will copy and paste with the embedded URLs still embedded) into your own website. It may be the most relevant website addition you could achieve in 30 seconds!
International Double Reed Society
International Clarinet Association
North American Saxophone Alliance
International Trombone Association
International Tuba Euphonium Association
World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles
These organizations were chosen for being (1) the largest membership of their target instrument, (2) international, and (3) non-profit. And of course, if there is a more valuable or viable organization than I have listed, please leave a comment to let me know. I would also like to add more wind band organizations and a jazz musicians’ association to my list; but as I am currently targeting student players (not music teachers) I intentionally left off educational organizations such as MENC and Jazz Education Network.
What organizations might be useful or important to your students?
1 comment September 24th, 2009
