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the trees without the forest

well i made it…

as i’m starting to wade through the piles of paperwork i have to grade i’m slowing down enough to finally start to reflecting and assessing this fall.  as semesters go it was one for my record books: 3 schools, 19 units, and 2 new classes.

its not that i haven’t been here before. i had 11 preps (separate classes) that met over a 6 day schedule at during my first two years teaching 5-12 instrumental music at a private school.  i almost forgotten what it felt like, but now i clearly now remember that feeling of controlled insanity so that i’m ok with a normal class load for quite some time.

one of the things that i really try and stress with my young teachers is that we should always self-assess and reflect when the memories are still fresh. taking a break and waiting until we are rested or even the week before school starts can dull the our highs and lows. so as i’m grading papers and reading stacks of student reflections i figure its time to give it a go. (especially to remind me that now matter how good the money is 19 units is too much)

music 111 (music theory, level 1)

i think its my 3rd or 4th semester in a row teaching this class of enthusiastic freshman who have always have a wide range of skills coming into college. unfortunately at least a third have any experience with any music fundamentals (i’d say half class has problems reading clefs outside their primary instrument). we call this class music theory, but its really music fundamentals in which the goals are pretty simple: know all your clefs, keys, intervals, and chords. be able to do basic part writing and analize short musical examples.

overall i have been pretty happy with my teaching,  but my main problem is that the low students really don’t seem to improve.  my main strategy to combat this has been much repetition through worksheets, daily drills and speed tests (where they are required to give answers and explanations), but i’m not really comfortable seeing the slower students in my class (who attend pretty regularly) not improve and seem to be guessing in the final exam.  i’m also not really happy with the overall curriculum and textbooks (which i clearly see the results with my music ed students who cannot really analyze a score or discuss its musical elements, but i’ll get to this in another post when i talk about my mused classes).

conceptually i’m know what the problem is. we are teaching music theory like they used to teach phonics in elementary school.

2/3 of the students do fine with this pedagogy and i’m sure they would figure out how to regurgitate anything we ask them to. the main skills we want our students to learn are fine (voice leading, score analysis), but our strategies of teaching them about the trees without the forest (by endless manipulation of exceprts because they fit easily into classroom pedagogy) has resulted in many of our students knowing how to resolve a 7th chord and and write a secondary dominant but have little or no idea about how music ‘works’

all i know is that after four years of trying to build a better moustrap inside the most common theory pedagogy  its time for me to head out on that lonely journey (well not so lonely, michael rodgers discusses these problems in great detail in his book; teaching approaches in music theory) of trial and error that he calls  “synthesis of comprehenisve musicianship, eartraining and analysis”

next up; music educaiton classses, music in early childhood and my instrumental music practicum class

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 6:12 pm. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with music education, music theory, score, teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.