What motivated/inspired you to pursue music as a career?
My parents enrolled me in piano lessons at the age of 5 and I absolutely loved piano. It was only when they forced me to practice every day for an hour that I started to think otherwise. What I didn’t realize though, was that the piano lessons weren’t just teaching me how to play the piano and read music. They were teaching me discipline, patience, and how to set goals. The piano lessons also gave me an edge in high school and I managed to pick up instruments really quickly because of the strong music theory background. With so many years of piano experience already under my belt before I entered high school, it wasn’t a surprise that I had a natural affinity for music (I also thought the material was easier to understand than science).
Believe it or not, I tried to drop music on more than one occasion. Remember, I didn’t like the piano because of all the forced practice sessions, and so I thought music in high school would be something similar and I wanted to avoid it with a 9 foot pole. It was only when my friends asked me to try and audition to get into grade 10 that I finally got back into the subject. Grades 10 to 12 were fantastic years and I’m pretty sure my whole high school experience would have been different had I not taken music. In university, I dropped music for 2 years, thinking I would love the sciences and end up finding a career in the science field. This obviously didn’t bode well for me because I struggled to maintain motivation in my studies. What happened? I ended up turning to music, but this time around, it wasn’t just a switch back into music. I felt like it was a calling. No matter how many times I dropped the subject, I would always end up going back to studying music. That’s how I decided that I needed to do something in music, regardless of what career path I needed to take. As cliché as this sounds, music was a huge and integral part of my life and I don’t really know what else I would have done with my passion for the arts.
How is teaching music different than science?
There is a sense of family and community in the music classroom. The band becomes/is an entity, a being with a life and mind of its own. Each band/year has a different sound, a different character, a different kind of bond amongst its members and the band stays together throughout 4 years of high school. There isn’t anything remotely like this in a science classroom. Everyone takes sciences at one point or another and everyone has a common goal in the class: to get the highest mark possible. In the sciences, you’ll have group assignments/projects and you’ll have CPTs (Culminating performance tasks) which encourage student collaboration. If the collaboration doesn’t happen, one or two of the group members will pick up the slack and the project gets done. This obviously isn’t encouraged, but we all know it happens and try to correct for this kind of behaviour. In the music classroom however, you NEED and REQUIRE student collaboration to learn and succeed. The band can’t have one or two people pick up the slack of 30 other people. It just doesn’t work that way and the band wouldn’t sound like a band at that point in time. These are just some of the biggest differences between the two subject areas. I can go into the nitty gritty of the material within the subject, but I’m sure the question is asking about classroom dynamics and how students interact with each other.
How would you confront students who are new to music? What steps would you take?
I assume you mean engage/encourage, rather than confront (no one is forcing students in my class haha). I encourage them to join our community and our music program by showing them that hard work in the subject area pays off. Music has an interesting type of “pay-off”. The marks are only a small portion of this reward. In the years of my teaching, I’ve noticed that students tend to succeed when they feel that they have accomplished something. At some points in time, their number mark doesn’t even matter. There’s no other feeling in the world you get when you’re finally able to play a scale (in this case, new students finally able to play the Bb concert scale on the clarinet.)
Our music program is much different than other boards and schools. Most boards start music in grade 4 or 5 with band instruments, while our board doesn’t start with these instruments until high school in grade 9. To combat this problem, we assume that everyone has no experience and we teach everything from ground up, just so we can fill in any gaps that may be missing or start a student from scratch. There will be students with experience and others without, so one of the strategies I employ is to get the students with experience and have them be leaders to help out with sectionals or help others that are struggling to get a sound out of their instrument.
What does music mean to you and how do you incorporate music in your teaching? (Regardless if its music, science, English, etc.)
Once again, this will be a bit of a cliché answer, but music is the end all and be all of my being. I eat, breathe, sleep, workout to music. It calms my soul when I get fired up, and fires me up when I need to wake up. I personally can’t stand the silence and I always need something playing in the background (except when I score study, that’s when I need complete silence). With my science classes that I’ve taught in the past, I had students create a jingle or song to help them memorize the Kreb cycle (cellular respiration unit). Using melody and rhythm, students are able to understand and encode the information into their brain faster than conventional methods of memorization.
What strategies or techniques do you use when you teach music?
These are all tricks of the trade that I’ve been learning from different symposiums and conferences. A lot of them come from OMEA (Ontario music educators association) and all their clinics that they hold. I’m always thinking of ways to put in differentiated instruction and to keep my classes engaged. An example is when I teach a rhythm unit or if there’s a rhythm issue in one of the pieces that students are struggling with. I usually have students clap out rhythms while I tap the rhythm. This helps the kinesthetic learner with understanding rhythm. If that doesn’t work, I try and use phrases with fruits, food, or anything that interests them and say it in the rhythm of the part in question. This now helps the oral learner. For the students that are visual learners, I will write the rhythm on the board and subdivide all the beats so they understand where all the beats are supposed to be played. Most musicians are aural learners anyway, so a lot of times, when I play the challenging part on an instrument, students understand. This is JUST rhythm. I haven’t even gotten to all the other fun aspects of music making. There are many other strategies that I employ, but these are just small examples of what I do in the classroom.
My parents enrolled me in piano lessons at the age of 5 and I absolutely loved piano. It was only when they forced me to practice every day for an hour that I started to think otherwise. What I didn’t realize though, was that the piano lessons weren’t just teaching me how to play the piano and read music. They were teaching me discipline, patience, and how to set goals. The piano lessons also gave me an edge in high school and I managed to pick up instruments really quickly because of the strong music theory background. With so many years of piano experience already under my belt before I entered high school, it wasn’t a surprise that I had a natural affinity for music (I also thought the material was easier to understand than science).
Believe it or not, I tried to drop music on more than one occasion. Remember, I didn’t like the piano because of all the forced practice sessions, and so I thought music in high school would be something similar and I wanted to avoid it with a 9 foot pole. It was only when my friends asked me to try and audition to get into grade 10 that I finally got back into the subject. Grades 10 to 12 were fantastic years and I’m pretty sure my whole high school experience would have been different had I not taken music. In university, I dropped music for 2 years, thinking I would love the sciences and end up finding a career in the science field. This obviously didn’t bode well for me because I struggled to maintain motivation in my studies. What happened? I ended up turning to music, but this time around, it wasn’t just a switch back into music. I felt like it was a calling. No matter how many times I dropped the subject, I would always end up going back to studying music. That’s how I decided that I needed to do something in music, regardless of what career path I needed to take. As cliché as this sounds, music was a huge and integral part of my life and I don’t really know what else I would have done with my passion for the arts.
How is teaching music different than science?
There is a sense of family and community in the music classroom. The band becomes/is an entity, a being with a life and mind of its own. Each band/year has a different sound, a different character, a different kind of bond amongst its members and the band stays together throughout 4 years of high school. There isn’t anything remotely like this in a science classroom. Everyone takes sciences at one point or another and everyone has a common goal in the class: to get the highest mark possible. In the sciences, you’ll have group assignments/projects and you’ll have CPTs (Culminating performance tasks) which encourage student collaboration. If the collaboration doesn’t happen, one or two of the group members will pick up the slack and the project gets done. This obviously isn’t encouraged, but we all know it happens and try to correct for this kind of behaviour. In the music classroom however, you NEED and REQUIRE student collaboration to learn and succeed. The band can’t have one or two people pick up the slack of 30 other people. It just doesn’t work that way and the band wouldn’t sound like a band at that point in time. These are just some of the biggest differences between the two subject areas. I can go into the nitty gritty of the material within the subject, but I’m sure the question is asking about classroom dynamics and how students interact with each other.
How would you confront students who are new to music? What steps would you take?
I assume you mean engage/encourage, rather than confront (no one is forcing students in my class haha). I encourage them to join our community and our music program by showing them that hard work in the subject area pays off. Music has an interesting type of “pay-off”. The marks are only a small portion of this reward. In the years of my teaching, I’ve noticed that students tend to succeed when they feel that they have accomplished something. At some points in time, their number mark doesn’t even matter. There’s no other feeling in the world you get when you’re finally able to play a scale (in this case, new students finally able to play the Bb concert scale on the clarinet.)
Our music program is much different than other boards and schools. Most boards start music in grade 4 or 5 with band instruments, while our board doesn’t start with these instruments until high school in grade 9. To combat this problem, we assume that everyone has no experience and we teach everything from ground up, just so we can fill in any gaps that may be missing or start a student from scratch. There will be students with experience and others without, so one of the strategies I employ is to get the students with experience and have them be leaders to help out with sectionals or help others that are struggling to get a sound out of their instrument.
What does music mean to you and how do you incorporate music in your teaching? (Regardless if its music, science, English, etc.)
Once again, this will be a bit of a cliché answer, but music is the end all and be all of my being. I eat, breathe, sleep, workout to music. It calms my soul when I get fired up, and fires me up when I need to wake up. I personally can’t stand the silence and I always need something playing in the background (except when I score study, that’s when I need complete silence). With my science classes that I’ve taught in the past, I had students create a jingle or song to help them memorize the Kreb cycle (cellular respiration unit). Using melody and rhythm, students are able to understand and encode the information into their brain faster than conventional methods of memorization.
What strategies or techniques do you use when you teach music?
These are all tricks of the trade that I’ve been learning from different symposiums and conferences. A lot of them come from OMEA (Ontario music educators association) and all their clinics that they hold. I’m always thinking of ways to put in differentiated instruction and to keep my classes engaged. An example is when I teach a rhythm unit or if there’s a rhythm issue in one of the pieces that students are struggling with. I usually have students clap out rhythms while I tap the rhythm. This helps the kinesthetic learner with understanding rhythm. If that doesn’t work, I try and use phrases with fruits, food, or anything that interests them and say it in the rhythm of the part in question. This now helps the oral learner. For the students that are visual learners, I will write the rhythm on the board and subdivide all the beats so they understand where all the beats are supposed to be played. Most musicians are aural learners anyway, so a lot of times, when I play the challenging part on an instrument, students understand. This is JUST rhythm. I haven’t even gotten to all the other fun aspects of music making. There are many other strategies that I employ, but these are just small examples of what I do in the classroom.