From Teacher to Table

One of my assignments, as I near the end of student teaching, was to answer a common interview question in the format of a 90-second video.  I went a few seconds over, but I’m proud of my answer.

While I have dabbled with song writing in the past, I have never pursued it seriously.  I love writing poetry, which is part of the process, but a song is more than just words that flow together well.  The kind of song I want to write for this project is a lullaby.  My cousin has two kids now.  His daughter is two years old, and his son is two months.  I want something I can sing to and with them that will be our own.  Something I can sing to my own kids in the future.

To write a lullaby of my own, I'll need to understand the form and structure of lullabies, as well as how to construct a melody, and set text for a lullaby.  The content of my lyrics will be important, especially if I want to make it personal to my family.  Outlined below is the information I will need to write this song, and examples of what this particular genre of song can sound like.

Writing a Lullaby:

To write my own lullaby, the first thing I should do is listen to examples.  I grew up in a household filled with singing.  My parents and my grandparents sang to me from the day I was born, and now we often sing together.  It's still a good idea to have a few things I can turn to, in order to guide my own writing.

-You Are My Sunshine

-Love Makes the World Go Round

-Hush Little Baby

-Toora-Loora-Looral

-Au Claire de la Lune

Next is the history, function, form and style components of the genre.  Below are resources with information about these topics.

-History

-Function

-Form and Style

Guitar is one of the classic accompaniment and solo instruments. From rock bands to folk tunes, and traditional dance melodies to concertos played with a full orchestra, the guitar is an incredibly versatile instrument.  A fretted string instrument, the guitar is strummed or plucked, and can be used to simply play chords while you or someone else sings a song, or can be used to play melody lines, as well as accompaniment.  You can also do percussion riffs on the body, so it can be a bit of a one-man-band.  For my purposes, however, I will focus on standard sounds created using the strings.

Below is a list of resources and information I will need to help me learn this instrument, something I am happy to make available to those of you reading this.  As I have never learned to play a string instrument before, I will need to become familiar with the basics of the way stringed instruments are held and played, as well as those basics particular to the acoustic guitar.

Learning the Guitar:

Some knowledge of the instrument and it's history is a good place to start.  The resources in this section pertain to the history of the instrument, the different types of acoustic guitar available, the most common and best quality brands, as well as what pitches to tune the strings to and the names of the parts.

-Some of the history

-Guide to buying a guitar (includes part names)

-How to tune the strings

-Online tuner

-Top beginner guitars

Since the acoustic guitar plays such a diverse range of music, below are a few examples of what it sounds like in different genres.

-Folk Music - Battle of Aughrim

-Rock - Roll Away Your Stone, Mumford and Sons

-Indie - Eight Dollar Engagement Rings, Chase Coy

-Classical - Joseph Haydn Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra in C Major

-Flamenco - Don Cortes Maya

-Buster Voodoo, Rodrigo y Gabriela

It also requires the use of both hands, doing different things at the same time.  I need to be familiar with how to shape my left hand around the frets, and how to shape my hand to strum or pluck the strings.

-Left Hand

-Right Hand - Strumming

-Right Hand - Finger picking

Finally, there's the notation involved.  I can read standard western music notation, which is used in some guitar music, and I can read lead sheets somewhat well from experience in my theory classes, but I am entirely unfamiliar with guitar tabs.  I will need to become more comfortable with lead sheets, and learn about guitar tabs, and how to read them.

-Guitar Lead Sheets

-Guitar Tabs

Question:  What is my teaching philosophy?

Sir Ken Robinson believes that the global education system as it is now kills creativity in kids. Having now taken my first education class, I agree with him. We live in a world where the future is unknown. The jobs our kids will have are ones built in innovation, and some of them don't even exist yet. They will need to be able to think critically, and to feel comfortable experimenting at the risk of being wrong.

As a music educator, and more broadly as an arts educator, I feel that saving that creativity and explorative quality children start out with is a big part of my job. The arts are subjects founded in creativity. A big part of music education is taking advantage of that and letting our kids build their own ideas with what we have to give them. It's about expanding their minds and how they think. Teaching is about turning your students into lifelong learners, whether they continue to pursue your subject or not. For music teachers, it's the idea that everyone is musical on some level. Some people may have more interest in it than others, but everyone can, on some level, create and enjoy music.

While it would be nice if every student who passed through my classroom continued to have a hunger for learning about music, the way I do, for the rest of their life, I know that just isn't going to happen, and that's okay. The world needs doctors and lawyers and engineers and research scientists. It needs historians of all kinds, and writers and mathematicians. My hope, though, is that my students remain life-long musicians. That they continue to enjoy listening to and creating music in any way they can.

I'm reminded of something my grandfather brings up frequently. He's a retired dentist, and he's done a lot of amazing things with his dental degree, and has learned a lot from his experiences. One thing he told me is that when dental schools look at applicants, if they have two equally qualified candidates, but one of them is a musician, they will take the musician. They know that the focus and skills required for learning an instrument, or learning to sing well translate to the things you need as a dentist. A question my grandfather asks: Who would you rather have sticking their hands in your mouth, to work on your teeth? Someone who has had years of time building the discipline necessary to practice something over and over again, and who won't let you know when they make a mistake, or someone who has not necessarily had this training in self-control?

I've always known that teaching is a complicated occupation, but teaching music is particularly fraught with trials, not the least of which is funding. Budgeting in schools is all about numbers. How many kids are participating in your extracurricular activity? In your elective? I understand the reasoning behind calling music classes and art classes electives; as students get older, going into middle and high school, these classes are taken by choice, not requirement. But what if they were required? I know that to graduate from my high school you needed at least one credit of “fine arts.” It could be a visual art class, or a music class, and a lot of people just took the one year of art and then stopped. What if instead of just one credit of fine arts, students were required to take at least one class in the arts each year? Perhaps students would stay in band or chorus, or find a general music class they loved. Unfortunately, the American school system seems to put no emphasis on students learning anything unless there is a great amount of student interest or a governmental requirement.

That being said, there is a vicious cycle many music departments are stuck in. Student involvement won't go up because the program is not varied and relevant enough to hold student interest. The fix for that problem is a bigger budget, to diversify the classes offered, but the only way most departments are able to get more funding is through increased student involvement. Thus, the wheels are spinning but gain no traction. This is part of what makes teaching music so hard. Not only do you have to find ways to get your students to learn the subject matter, you have to always be looking for ways to make that content relevant to their lives. A lot of the music taught in schools is not what's on the radio right now. There's a lot of Bach and Brahms, but no Bastille or Billy Joel. Music education needs to be relevant to what's happening in the world. We need more band and choral arrangements of Lady GaGa and Lorde. We need to analyze the Beatles. I know from personal experience that analyzing Yesterday, by the Beatles, made learning harmonization rules and techniques not only a lot more fun, but also a lot easier to remember. It's definitely still important to teach students about the old composers, like Mozart and Beethoven, but we need to show them that the people writing today's songs and symphonies are doing the same thing. They're creating new music.

Looking at the way we present information to our students, there are a lot of ways we can do it. Some require higher levels of thinking than others, and we can check our lessons against Bloom's Taxonomy. Benjamin Bloom headed a committee that created this taxonomy, which organizes different levels of thinking, and an outline of what kind of activity the student is doing in order to use each specific level. As you move up the taxonomy, the cognitive difficulty of the task increases. The lowest deals with wrote fact, and the highest has the students taking what they're learning and creating something new with it. So, if you want what you're teaching students to really stick, your goal should be to get through all six levels of the taxonomy, or as many as you can. This goes for all subjects, but it could be argued that music is one of the subjects where it is easier to move up these levels, because creation is inherent to the material. That being said, it is still entirely possible to get stuck in one place. When teaching rhythms, you could simply do call and response, and the students will clap, sing or play the right rhythms, but they won't understand why they're the right rhythms, or how to generate new rhythms using pieces of the ones you taught. Having them look at subdivisions and analyze the rhythms themselves makes them think about it on a higher level, and then if you challenge them to take pieces of the rhythms and rearrange them into a new order, they reach that highest level of thinking, where they create something new to them.

What do I know about teaching music? It's a very important question, and one that is at the same time very easy and very difficult to answer. There are so many things I've observed, being a student, but it's hard to put them into words. I'll break it down into more sizable chunks.

The first bit is teaching. You obviously need to know what you're teaching. If you don't know the subject, why are you trying to impart knowledge you don't have onto your students? Now, there are some instances in which not knowing is a good thing, like a research project. Having your students pick a song or a composer or a musician, and having them find out everything they can about what or whomever they pick. Then it's okay not to know all the answers. Then it's particularly good to explore with your students, do the project with them. Find a song you've always loved, but maybe don't know much about, and explore who wrote it, why they wrote it, what key it's in, etc.

There's also your attitude. If you approach teaching music like you're forced to, your kids will never learn anything substantial from you besides the fact that you either resent teaching, or resent music, or both. If you are enthusiastic about what you're doing, and act like you love teaching them, chances are your kids will pick up on that energy and join in on it.

Another thing is to just make music. Teach notation and rudimentary theory, or whatever level of theory is necessary, but make music. Especially if you've got young kids, they're not going to want to sit and learn about who wrote what, or be able to understand what a Picardy third is, and why it exists. They're going to want to sing and dance and play music. I know I did. And if they don't like one aspect of making music, have other options for them to participate. For example, if they don't like singing, give them a drum and a rhythm to play on that while the rest of the class sings. And if you've got students with a more in depth musical background, give them something more complicated to do. Have them sing harmonies over the rest of the class. Give them more difficult exercises to work on outside of class. And for those who struggle with things, find ways to help them improve, and keep them engaged.