I’m not so much of a crazy fan towards blogging, to be honest. Every time, you’d have to go back to see if anybody’s responded to your post, and it can turn out to be a real strain if you’re trying to multitask while doing something important. Least I can do, in my case, is look back towards my previous blog posts since I did post plenty of interesting ideas that might be handy for me. However, since the future class I’m planning to make involves the study of music via scientific means, which has virtually never been done before, I’m expecting that the students enrolled in that course will come up with a heap of questions about what they’re supposed to be doing. Thus, I might consider using a blog like this as an extra means for us to communicate with each other, apart from whatever online system we might be using otherwise for that course’s assignments and discussion forum. Heck, in the midst of teaching that potential future course, I might even come up with some sort of revelation that may be extremely useful for not only my students, but for everyone else out in the world who’s so crazy towards music and the scientific arts. At the very least, this particular blog system that I made up gave me the chance to let everyone who participated in this course about what I myself had in mind when it comes to envisioning what teaching is all about.

There’s this TED-Ed animated lesson by Michelle Brown titled “What is a butt tuba and why is it in medieval art?”, yet it immediately goes on to describe various common oddities seen in medieval art. The objectives of this particular lesson include addressing what each visual detail that sticks out in the works of art symbolizes in accordance with the norms of society at the time they were made. The lesson starts with a written quote by an anonymous monk saying “Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.”, then goes on to reveal the illustrations to have a second meaning behind them that is just as important as whatever’s written on the respective materials that they’re found in. According to the lesson, the illustrations are intended to reinforce the religious message that their source materials are trying to convey, which makes a great deal of sense considering that the majority of authors during that time consisted of monks and nuns. It should be noted that in the Middle Ages, religion and law played such an inseparable role in daily society that authors and scribes found it necessary for each illustration established to bear a double meaning as to remind people what was tolerable or intolerable, both socially and religiously. That aside, the lesson shows three examples: a rabbit working an organ, a knight versus a giant snail, and a naked guy sticking a trumpet in his butt, hence the eponymous title of this lesson. Brown’s mention of the butt tuba in his lesson’s title can be explained with the notion that the image of the naked guy with the trumped sticking out his butt can be readily pointed out as the most obscene illustration ever made in the Middle Ages, yet Brown recognizes that it was drawn for some reasonable purpose, which is why he brings up “butt tuba” as part of the lesson’s title to get the audience riled up as to find out why in the world something like that would ever be drawn in the first place. Brown states in the lesson that the butt tuba represents disapproval or irony of a certain action in the text that it’s placed alongside; this clearly reinforces the notion that the butt tuba, like all the other medieval illustrations, possesses a double meaning behind its very appearance for itself as well as for whatever text it ends up getting placed right next to.

The lesson goes on to state that most of the manuscripts were copies of religious and classic works, just with varying illustrations. In one instance, it briefly mentions the segment in the “Smithfield Decretals” that details the church’s laws and punishments but then reveals the margins to show a fox being hanged by a party of geese, which may represent the people’s urge to overthrow their oppressors. This suggests that whoever established that particular illustration within the margins of the Decretals may have recognized what the public was dealing with and put it there on purpose to spread the message to other fellow readers in the most discreet manner possible. The lesson mentions more examples of illustrations that fall in a very similar vein to what the hanged fox illustration implies, being that their respective drawers had their own interpretation about what they were supposed to document and couldn’t help but address their own piece of mind to the ones reading whatever they ended up writing in the process. Again, this is a reinforcement of how the illustrations serve a double meaning, seeing as how they are an offshoot of their respective makers’ piece of mind and at the same time, they also a bear a political or religious meaning in general as according to the source material they hail from; it is at this particular point that Brown does an intricate job in maintaining that the illustrations have a double meaning no matter how they’re viewed. The lesson ends by noting that the practice with those illustrations spanned over a millennium, and that the manuscripts served a multitude of purposes, ranging from private prayer aids to protective charms for war. This exemplifies the notion that “We often find expressions, characteristic traits, and methods passed from one generation to the next… whether we are aware of it or not,” as Matthew O. Richardson puts it in Peer Observation: Learning From One Another. Due to the frequent mentions of religion and social norms in medieval society in lieu with what certain images represented, the central focus of Brown’s lesson is clearly for the audience to recognize that the butt tuba and its fellow medieval illustrations each serve a wider multitude of purposes than their readers may have assumed all this time.

Studying music theory through a scientific perspective has virtually never been done before, to say the least. Up to this time, people have approached music theory the same unilateral way, which involves all the stuff about notation, the harmonic keys and the commonly used musical terminology like cadences, themes and sequences. In the case with my future course, the approach that is being practiced is a completely different practice from what student musicians usually work with. As such, the students participating in this course may not be so accustomed to this new particular practice for the first three weeks or so. Therefore, for instance, I may talk about a basic science concept and how its big picture plays out, then give the students the chance to digress whatever I just lectured them about via discussions amongst each other; that way, they can better understand how that science concept works and use that outline to analyze a musical piece.

There certainly is a majority of the world’s entire population that has taken a gigantic favor to all those scientific discoveries and advances occurring lately, yet they don’t quite fully understand the processes involved, not to mention that some of them are experts at studying music. At the same time, there are countless people that are proficient in the sciences but haven’t had much experience in music. Since my future course is designated to suit these types of students and put them together, I was thinking of establishing a starter activity where student musicians are paired with students with expert knowledge on the sciences and they share and write down things that they know in their respective fields. Through this activity, students that bear musical expertise can learn some science-oriented things and vice versa. The only drawback to this activity is that some of the students may hail from a completely different major from music or the sciences, but I’m quite confident that everybody has watched enough science stuff from TV or high school to know how some of the most basic science concepts work. After all, as Kay K. Stephens puts it in Elements of the Lesson Plan, ” Connecting to the student’s own experience and prior learning is the best strategy”.

References

Elements of the Lesson Plan byKay K. Stephens.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/pte/lessonplan.htm

The course that I intend to teach is generally a music theory class, except for one thing. None of the analytical practices or methods that musicians rely on are ever applied, and science concepts are included instead, which is something that you would never typically see in any music class. We all know for sure that there are student musicians out who are completely into science and technology and yet don’t enroll as science majors. At the same time, there are so many people who just love to study music and attend concerts but haven’t really had that theory and harmony training that musicians usually go through, not to mention that that particular method is just a single unilateral direction in general. This particular approach has been hailed as the standard way of looking at music for so long that it has narrowed people’s perspectives about what else music can possibly be about. In that regard, the community found in most music schools nowadays can be described as a cesspool of “production-oriented education… …with students as throughput and graduates as the products”.

In any case, my future course would be designed so that it will be open to all non-music majors. In every semester that I teach my course, I may expect the students to have almost no idea about the brand-new approach towards music analysis that I’m trying to teach for the first three weeks or so. For that reason, the “community” that I create in my course will consist of discussions among the students participating in it as a necessary core element. I will devote the latter half of every class day to student discussions regarding whatever I discuss with them along with their personal ideas. I will assign class activities that involve students getting into groups and conducting their own research on whatever science concepts they want to choose, and at the same time looking at a short musical piece of my discretion, then reporting their findings in front of the class in a presentation-like format. As for the assignments, I will primarily have the students do online discussion posting on science concepts that they’re researched and how they can be connected to certain musical pieces. This, in essence, will expand the musical community by several degrees since my future course allows constant intermingling amongst music majors and non-music majors.

I looked over Corrigan’s interview with Carillo involving her most recent book, Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America, and I just have to say, she’s got a huge deal of legitimate comments regarding the way reading is currently treated in the United States nowadays.  According to her, teachers don’t seem to be doing enough of a job in educating students about the consequences of ethical and radical discourse, which could explain why she feels guilty “after the 2016 presidential election about the political situation ‘everyone’s’ in in the United States, unhinged from reason and civility”. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that high school teachers nowadays are finding improved methods for students to approach reading and literature, making a departure from what the Common Core suggests in accordance to her knowledge about just how flawed the Common Core has been up to this time.

I also went over the list of teaching methods established by SERC and it seems pretty impressive for a non-comprehensive compilation of the contributions made towards that particular library so far. They seem to have added much more to the Engaged Pedagogy section than in the other sections, which gives me the impression that the people who compiled this entire list prioritize pedagogical practices over everything else when it comes to their approach in teaching.  Come to think of it, it makes sense since there are always multiple students per classroom, which would mean that they benefit best by discussing amongst each other due to them being able to elevate their thinking skills that way as opposed to having to listen to a single instructor’s lecture, which usually provides only a single approach towards learning a topic. In essence, the members of SERC who helped contributed to this particular list have taken a favor towards instructors serving as mediators of discussions between students rather than lecturers.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton