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.
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