| The one thing that I never liked was "Scale Test". I'm perfectly fine with learning all the scales and what not, I was just never a beliver of testing on them. It wasn't untill my senior year of highschool that our assistant directior (he worked mostly with the 'middle band' at our school) started teaching us scales in a more fun way. He turned it into a game, not a test. Not even a competition, although, you could look at it as a competition for bragging rights, but our chair placement was not based on it. Every day we would try a new excersize dealing with scales, not really just a scale, but more like just playing around within the key and every now and then a scale would be tossed in there and we would all play it with no problem.
What I liked about this way of teaching scales, was that it wasn't mandatory. If you just wanted to be in band for fun, then you can sit out while we work on scales if you want. It started out with only 4 or 5 of us that played these "scale games" each day, but the other students started to realize that it was fun, we wern't really working on scales, we were just having fun with them. So within a couple weeks everyone was playing and learning their scales.
I honestly hadn't memorized my 12 major scales untill my senior year. I just never really thought it was that important because I could play all my music fine, but it really did come back to bite me in the butt when it came to regional and all-state auditions. But now, I know them all, and I don't even remember actualy "learning" them, and "memorizing" them. We just played these little games with them so much, its just natural now.
I know I'm still young, and havn't even started any college in music education, but I think thats the key to teaching music. Just keep it fun. I don't think music can really be "learned" or "taught", its just something you do. And the more you do it, the more fun you have with it, the more you're going to improve at it. I start college in 2 weeks, and maybe when I take my music ed classes I'll find out I'm compleatly wrong, but I really think the job of a music teacher is more to encourage the kids to play more and to get better, and they will learn everything as they go on their own. The teacher is more of a coach.
Ok, I'll stop writting now because I feel that I'm just sort of blabbeling, but maybe that makes sence to someone....
__________________
-David Jacques |