Blog Post 7
Music education provides students much more than the ability to play an instrument. As a music education student I grew being very active in the musical community in my rural town. I attended band camps, honour bands, Festivals, and I started a jazz band at my school. Music teaches students how to become strong leader and team work. A band is only as good as its weakest player. It also activates every part of the brain at once, since you are reading, moving your fingers, and listening to the music and those around you. Music gives you so many skills, problem solving, moving on after a mistake, improvisation etc. This article bring out all the good parts about music education and it lovely to see in an Education class, since music educators usually get left out.
The article brings up that music is great at bring cultures into the class room, which is very true. We play all kinds of styles and tunes. “The Crown of Castile” by Johnnie Vinson which is a Spanish march. There are many pieces out there that bring in different cultures. Like the article says “allowing students to be in culture, rather than learning about culture” Music is also a universal language, so you can play with anybody from anywhere in the world. In my opinion music brings people together and brings out the best in people.
My band teacher would put on remembrance day performances and play for the town and those who wanted to attend the concert and somebody would talk and we would march down, Yes march, with a snare drum and a bass drum to walk those who wanted to down to the memorial we have and a student would play the last post. This would happen every year and the town would participate. The only down side to this, is it is very cold in November and walking through the down with just a band uniform was not fun, but it will be something myself and the community will never forget.
Hi Robyn
I can’t remember if i’ve commented on one of your blogs i’m, assuming i have but to that I shrug!
I was also very involved with everything music related in high school but I never did do anything quite like starting my own but I would expect that from you because you’re amazing (for anyone else reading we met a few years ago and we both play percussion so we know each other very well). While I do agree we do play music from many cultures in my blog post I was talking about how it is easy to just teach “white music”- thankfully us as percussionists default to learning african (+other) styles of music because the marimba is a percussion instrument of african origin which I dont need to tell you but more knowledge for other people! I’m really sad I never got to do any of the things you were talking about in terms of building place-based education. It sounded like lots of fun even in the super cold as we know very well.
Awesome post Robyn!
Hi Robyn, I agree that “Music education provides students much more than the ability to play an instrument.” according to my personal learning experience. I had not learning any guitar before 2020, but I made it to play out a song after a semester learning, which increased my confidence to learn a music instrument and other unfamiliar things. However, even if “music is great at bring cultures into the class room”, people still need to learn their original background includes the culture, tradition, and sometimes languages so that be more accurate to understand the music. And yes, that “music brings people together and brings out the best in people.”, so it makes the world beautiful and lovely.