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