Letter to my students

Dear Students,

            Literacy is one of the most important things you can learn in life.  To be literate involves not only the ability to read, but the ability to understand the world around you.  Today in the digital age so much information comes written, whether formally or not, you will need to be able to read and interpret that.  Literacy is not only reading, but the knowledge required to apply what you learn and what you read to the world around you.  It is the ability to parse out lessons about the society that we live in and how we must try to change it.

            While the music classroom is primarily a performance-based classroom, you will still need good reading and writing skills to be able to read and write intelligently about music.  To do any serious study in music you will have to read and write about music at a deep and scholarly level.  Most of the articles you will be required to read will be tedious and boring, but it is necessary to be successful.

            In this class you will have to read many things that you will not understand the first time you read through them, but I will teach you how to go back through the article and how to get the most out of what you read. Not every author is correct, and sometimes even the most learned of people write things that just are not true.  You will learn how to look deeper into what you are reading and to decide whether or not you agree with what the author is trying to say. 

            This class will challenge your writing as well encouraging you to try and write scholarly papers about music.  Too often students like you are not challenged to write papers in any class other than English while you are in high school, but I will challenge you to write critically about the music you hear.  I want you to make connections between what you learn about music history and what you learn in your history classes and to show these connections in your writing.  Music is after all a very politically driven art form, and I want you to understand that and to be able to discuss that in your writings.

The Skills you will learn in this class will not only help you in this class, but they will also help you greatly as you continue your education.  You will learn how to effectively read articles that you may not fully understand, you will learn how to use context clues to understand vocabulary that may be unfamiliar to you, and you will learn how to write critically about the subjects you learn about in school.  The overall goal of the literacy focus in this class is to get you to be able to make transfers of all the skills that I teach you to the other classes you take throughout your career.  I want you to be successful in life, and so you will learn how to look more critically at the world around you and to be able to always question what you hear.

Your Teacher,

Mr. Luke Arno

Strategy 10: Retelling

This encourages to think critically about what they read by having them to tell what they read as close as they can to the original without reading directly from the story.  Thus this encourages students to imprint as much as they can of what they read into their memory.  Then the students are able to make the text into their own and are able to make their own interpretations of what they have read, allowing them to truly internalize the text.  I would incorporate this by very informally asking the students to describe what they have read in class.  If I could tell that they were able to fully describe the text then I would know that they completed the assignment.

Strategy 9: It says, I say, And so

This strategy involves having the students list things stated in the article and having them use their own logic and judgment to decide whether or not that makes sense.  This would be good as it would help students to make sense of what they read without as much help from the teacher.  When I would go over this in class it would demonstrate for my students how to think through what they read.  I would demonstrate this and then require the students to do this for many of the articles that they read for a short period of time.  After I was confident that the students were showing good enough abilities at reading the articles critically then I would have them read articles without them having to do the assignment.

Text 10: Ode

O'Shaughnessy, A. (1874). Ode. Music and Moonlight London: Chatto and Windus.

Ode is a poem that begins by describe the power of music.  It metaphorically describes the creative process.  It references the sadness brought about in the lives of many people by not having music in their lives.  This is a poem that the students who truly appreciate music in my classroom will relate to and will understand.

I could use this poem to help my students better understand poetry and its relation to the metrical rhythmic patterns of music.  I could also coordinate this lesson with the english teachers in my school and see if we could not both teach the poem in our lessons.

Text 9: Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

Britten, B. (Composer). (2006). The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra [Recorded by London Symphony Orchestra]. On Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge [Medium of recording: Record] Hong Kond: Naxos. (2006)

 Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is an educational piece of music that introduces listeners to the different instruments in the symphony orchestra.  The instruments are introduced according to section and each instrument is introduced on its own with a small excerpt for the instrument to play by itself.  The piece is narrated with descriptions of each instrument as the piece goes along.

This piece could be used to encourage students to read aloud during class as I could have the students take  turns reading the narration.  I could also have the students read the narration quietly and then have discussion to ensure comprehension.

Text 8: Music History 102

Sherrane, Robert. "Music History 102." Internet Public Library. Internet Public Library, n.d. Web. 26 Jul 2011. <http://www.ipl.org/div/mushist/middle/index.html>.

This is a website about all of music history.  On the main menu it groups music into historical periods and provides a brief description of the period as well as a brief synopsis of the history.  On the page for each musical period there is an overall description of the music of the period and the website also has biographies for notable composers of the period.  There are many very important composers not listed on this website, but it has a good overview.

This website would serve as a good place for students to research and read about music history.  This would not work for a source that students could use for their papers, but it would be a good starting place for students to get a good idea what they should be looking up.  Also the fact that this is an electronic resource is good because too often nowadays students are able to pay more attention to things they view electronically rather than in paper form.

Strategy 8: Rereading

Music related texts can often seem very foreign, even to the most advanced students, due to the large amount of jargon utilized in the texts.  Even the most advanced students have to read the text over and over again to understand many parts, but struggling readers would not recognize the need to reread as readily as more advanced readers.

I would implement this strategy in my classroom by first demonstrating to the students why there is a need to reread the text and how to go about doing that for maximum learning.  I would then supervise the students reading an article in class and make sure that they were fully practicing what I had taught them.  I would then assign a reading for them to do at home that would require them to use this strategy to read it and would assess their learning when they returned the next day.