Music Exploration

Often times, especially at the high-school level, teachers will encounter students enrolling in general music classes just because there was "nothing else available".  The environments in these classes can be pretty mixed and matched.  You may have students who are familiar with performing and/or reading notation, and you might have students who just want to hide in the back of the classroom with their arms folded across their chests because Woodshop was all filled out when they registered for classes this semester.  In these cases, you may have a class with a wider range of overall assets and abilities.  This means you have to find something that everyone is capable of doing that is simple enough so students without a strong musical background feel comfortable doing it and something that won't bore those in the  class who are already well acquainted with music. Of course teaching musical history is always an option for these courses.  And world drumming can also be fun a accessible to everybody, but this is where technology can really come into play.  Not all students can easily match pitch or automatically know how to play an instrument, but most students are capable of using computers.  So, for general music classes with diverse ranges of musical ability, you can let them play around with music software.
Exploring concepts in music doesn't need to require  performance experience or even literacy in musical notation.  Music is first and foremost a kind of language and a kind of feeling and if you can't get students engaged in analyzing Bach chorales, you can at least let them explore different musical tools and resources found on the internet.  There are several different resources that students of all different skill-levels can use to explore music.  Many people are already aware of software like Garage Band and Audacity, but if you search the web, there are so many cool sites out there that can let students explore the world of composition by way of manipulating tonality, meter and style with just the touch of a button.  this kind of music exploration allows students to discover how different elements of music fit together and lets them create something in the process.  Music is something that people can create and play, and sometimes an entire lesson of just creating and playing music can be beneficial to an education in music.

Some fun sites to share with students:
http://www.incredibox.com/
http://www.seaquence.org/

Teaching the "Boring" Stuff...

The best way to teach students the “boring” stuff is to make them care.

 Just like in other subjects, music has elements that students shy away from and avoid for various reasons.  Sometimes these things are labeled “too hard”, “unnecessary” or “boring” by students because something about these subjects keeps students from wanting to work at learning it.  The trick to getting students motivated to learn things like theory, and history is to make them relevant to your students.

 Just for example, out of context, maybe pounding out rhythms or learning about Beethoven, could seem like pointless tasks when given to a thirteen year-old who is far more concerned about themselves than a couple tricky 16^th note runs written by some dead guy who wore wigs and wrote a bunch music.  But maybe if those notes came from a passage in a song they are working on, or if the hardest song your students were performing was written by Beethoven, you could get students to care, by giving them a way to connect to the information you are giving them.

 Maybe trying to practice and play that Beethoven piece is really frustrating for your students.  Well, how would they feel if they had to write music while their mother was dying, their father had turned to alcohol, they suddenly had the responsibility of looking after their younger siblings, and all the while they were starting to go deaf?  Wouldn't that be just a little bit frustrating?  People care about things when they can relate to them and when you give reasons and explanations. Students are no different.  And if they think this music is frustrating, what would they think of the music Beethoven wrote when his heart was breaking from unrequited love?  What does it sound like to feel heartbroken? You can show them the pieces Beethoven wrote, like Moonlight Sonata, or the Pathetique Sonata.  They can hear what it sounded like in Beethoven’s head to love someone and not have that love returned.  Beethoven was composing music at a time when it was popular to let your own emotions show in your compositions.  Students can relate to these emotions and understand why the music is the way that it is written.  Being able to put the piece of music into context, would not only let the students relate and connect to the music, but it allows them to see into history, into the life of a composer, and how things were in the 1700’s.

 You could ask students to find a current piece to compare and contrast with the Beethoven one.  Perhaps a current song about frustration or unrequited love.  You can make a theory lesson out of marking the different and similar elements that conveyed emotion in the 1700’s versus the 2000’s.  You could discuss the structure of the songs, the tonality, the use of rhythm and repetition.  If your students are more advanced, you can use these pieces as practice for things like macro, micro and roman numeral analysis, and the analyses can serve to help you compare and contrast the two pieces.   There will undoubtedly be at least one element from either one or both of the songs that is new to the students that you can teach and discuss and explain the purpose of during the lesson.

Learning things like theory and history, completely out of context can be a little dry and sometimes difficult for students of all ages.  But if you are capable of making these elements and lessons relevant to your students, they will be much more willing to explore them. 

People never really get sick of asking “why?”.  Students always want to know why they should care or why they should learn something, so give them reasons.  Make the “boring” stuff relevant to them and perhaps it won’t seem so “boring” after all.

My Technology Experience in the Classroom

If my lack of aptitude for technology didn't already give it away, my experience with integrating technology into school, was not very successful. In elementary school, computers were sparse and used for playing, rather than learning.  I can remember being in fourth grade thinking that being able to use the computers was THE COOLEST thing, reserved for the students who did well and finished early.  The extent of its educational purpose was teaching students how to type, so we could transform handwritten assignments to typed ones.

  In middle school, we were introduced to laptops, but we only ever used them for the standard visit-this-website-and-do-some-research or type-up-this-paper assignments. In this school, there was a whole room for computers, rather than just one computer per room, but the computers were still mainly used for the same purpose: typing.  There was some very basic training in the standard Microsoft office applications, but nothing too wild or fancy.  There is not much I remember about the one computer class I had to take in middle school (a 5^th grade level class). The thing I remember the most is that everyone was excited to sit in the “wheely-chairs” for a whole class period.  The lab was mostly just used for that one class and the remaining grades (6^th, 7^th and 8^th) occasionally used laptops which were brought to classrooms in a large cart which was charmingly named the ”COW” which I believe stood for computers-on-wheels.

High school was similar in that only one basic skills course was required and then students could pick another computer-oriented course as an elective.  The difference between my high school and middle school computer experience was the number of classes offered. Since I was the type to shy away from technology rather than embrace it, I only ever took the basic level course and then a “Graphic Arts” course to fill the other computer-elective requirement. 

As a future educator, I hope to be able to apply technology to my lessons in an easy productive, relevant way.  I want to be able to offer students multiple resources to help them learn and discover new things. I want students to be able to use technology for more than just typing up papers and looking up facts. Teaching music is a lot about creating and exploring and I hope to be able to incorporate technology into my lessons in the same way.

Learning with Technology....

So, what brought me to SNHU? Well, the main reason I am at SNHU is not just because it is close to the town I grew up in, but it is also one of the schools that offered me the most in scholarship money.  I have a twin sister Megan, who is going to college with me and an older sister Abby, attending grad-school, so money was an important consideration for me and my family when choosing schools.  

I am majoring in Music Education here at SNHU, and so far, it's been going well.  The music program here is good despite it's youth and  the heavy course-load that comes along with it. One of the courses required for my major happens to be EDU 235: Learning with Technology, which is exactly what brings me here.  I have always been technologically impaired, but hopefully, by the end of this course, I will be a little less clueless, so that in the future, I have the necessary skills to integrate technology into my teaching.