Teaching with music in mind.

At one point in this week’s reading Aaron Copland explains that a gifted listener is a “listener who intends to retain his amateur status.”   He goes on to say that he, as a composer, is excited by the thought of someone listening to his music and will react to it in a completely spontaneous and unpredictable manner.  This, to me, sounds much like the payoff teachers receive from their students and that wonderful moment when the metaphorical light bulb of cognitive discovery lights up.  If we approach our teaching content as music, as something meant to invoke imagination and creation then we might be able to draw students to subjects such as biology or algebra with the same zeal as most humans are drawn to one type of music or another. 

Can you imagine a lesson in History constructed in a musical form?  Think of the depth of music, the layers of new experiences overlapping redundant rhythms and circular scales.  The Rhythm is what you really want your students to learn; you bang on it over and over and over again.  On top of that you lay exciting details that push the learning process forward while keeping the listener on their toes.  As a person lacking musical knowledge it is a hard idea to put into words, but if I close my eyes and listen to a piece of music, then imagine a lesson structure in the same form, it starts to make sense to me.

DUB STEP.....WHY?

DUB STEP  SHOWS I’M GETTING OLD

I have read all of the twilight books, subscribe to people magazine, and listened to more Skrillex than is advisable for any single human being , all for the sake of staying connected to my students and building trust through mutual experiences. 

For many of my students music is a large part of who they are.  In fact, I am convinced that some of them will eventually have to have their iPods surgically removed from their ear canals.  There is perhaps one form of music that my students love but I personally cannot wrap my head around.  This, as the above title implies, is dub step.  Dub step is defined by wikipedia as:

“a genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London, United Kingdom. Its overall sound has been described as "tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals"^[

This is how I define it, “crap.”  I know that this seems like a closed minded and harsh interpretation but I view it more as a rite of passage, it is the same definition my father gave to hip hop and his father gave to rock and roll.  After reading the  assigned passages I now have a new arsenal of knowledge with which to attempt to understand this type of music.  It is my sincere hope that I’ll be able to engage my students in evaluating the nuances of their favorite music because in my experience, when I’m open minded to what they are telling me, they are more likely to be more open minded to what I’m teaching them.  I don’t have to like dub step to understand it, all I have to do is figure out what makes it so compelling.