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Art and Music
Today is a big day here at school. It's our first day back from Thanksgiving vacation, and for the fine arts teachers, this means new students for the Fine Arts department. We have an introductory class that's required of all students in their freshman or sophomore year. They take art, drama, and music for one trimester each. And so, today, we change classes.
It's always a rather strange day, because we teachers suddenly have a brand new class, but the students are still together in the same group they've been in from the beginning of the year. So they all know each other, but they're new to me. Except, of course, that I have gotten the chance to know some of them, through sports or my choir, for instance. It's just odd, all in all.
Also odd... they give us a roster of the students we'll be getting, but rather than a real roster, we get the roster from the last part of the class they were in with that teacher's name scratched out and the new teacher written in. So Kapoo got my rosters with my name crossed off and his written in, while I got the art teacher's. Oddly enough, I not only got the two sections of the Fine Arts class, I also got three sections of Advanced Studio Art. I'm fairly certain that I'm not qualified to teach that. :) Clearly someone wasn't paying much attention to what he/she was doing.
And just to make the class change more strange, I'm trying to change the nature of my class. When I first started teaching here, I experimented with a number of approaches, and I ended up settling into teaching it as a basic "music appreciation" class, with a bit of music fundamentals to start with and then music history focussing on the Western "Art" music tradition--your Mozart and Beethoven etc. And there was a lot about this that I liked. I like that music and I try to help students appreciate this music that's generally unfamiliar to them. It's also very... comfortable. It's comfortable because I've taken classes that were similar in content, it's comfortable because it has the weight of tradition behind it, it's comfortable because there are all sorts of text books set up that way, and it's comfortable because I've taught it this same way something like 6 or 7 times already.
And yet, I haven't quite been satisfied with it. I worry that I'm not really building an appreciation of music. I worry that they're just memorizing the stuff that I force them to memorize and then forgetting and never really caring one way or the other. If that's the case then I don't really feel like I'm doing what I should be. Change, of course, is relatively easy. The difficult thing is changing for the better. Now, if I knew a better way, I'd already be doing it. So I'm trying to change my approach to teaching this without a really clear idea of how I'm going to do it. I've got some ideas, but I'm still developing them.
For class today, we spent a lot of time talking. I tried to talk about how I was changing the class and just about music in general and its place in our culture. We talked about different ideas about music, for instance why Rock is held in higher esteem in our culture than Pop, and a bit about where that comes from historically. We talked about the ways that music is used by them personally and by our culture at large. We talked about how we use music to shape our identities. We talked about what kind of music they personally like and what experience they've had performing. Being freshmen and sophomores, they're not all that great at talking in class. We'll work on it, because I definitely want this to be a contemplative class. I want them to think about music.
I also want to find ways to get them doing music. Heck, I want to find ways to get them writing music. I want them to think about how music is created and what choices a composer makes. I want them to understand what a performer does and what choices they make. I want to make them producers of music and active consumers of music. Wish me luck.