The Parable of the Hammer

In which I try my hand as a cartoonist!

Proud Music

I spent much of this evening at the Ann Arbor Open winter band and orchestra concert. For middle schoolers, they sounded pretty good! The improvement between the intermediate and advanced groups is very noticeable. It's so nice to really see the difference, and understand that they are really learning!

As a parent, it is always a "kvell moment" when your child is performing, and there are not enough opportunities for performance in many types of school work. (Kvell--a Yiddish word that roughly translates to "swell up with pride.")

While I was sitting there in the audience, I was thinking about a couple of conversations I had with my sister and sister-in-law over the past few months. They both have middle-school-age kids, and they all go to "very good public schools" (in other words, comparable to Ann Arbor). But do their kids play instruments? Not anymore. "She tried it for a week..." "After two weeks she decided she didn't like it..." "She wanted to play the flute but she could barely get a sound out of it."

Two things stand out here. First, in the Ann Arbor schools, nobody tries instrumental music for a week. Everybody has to try it for at least a year! Second, students spend a few weeks at the beginning of fifth grade trying out different instruments, and if it's hard for a student to get a sound out of a flute, the teacher will probably not assign flute to that student.

So those conversations--and tonight's concert--really made me appreciate the Ann Arbor Public Schools music scene...especially in the elementary and middle schools, before it gets super competitive. The start that AAPS gives kids in music is awesome!

Or perhaps I should say that the AAPS music program...

Is jazzy.

It's snazzy.

It rocks and 

it rolls.

It's classy and

it's brassy!

It boogies and

it bounces!

Thanks, music teachers!

P.S. I would put in a plug here for Horns for the Holidays, but I'm not sure it still exists. Does anybody know? If you have an instrument in good condition, many of our local school districts would probably welcome the donation.

Halloween Windows

I grew up in a town with a vibrant downtown. Every October, the local merchants would give up their window space so that elementary and middle school students could paint Halloween-ish figures on a 3'x5' (or so) piece of glass real estate. Of course there were prizes for the best paintings--which I never won. But it was fun anyway, and it brought a lot of people downtown. I've never seen this anywhere else.

Anyway, it turns out that they are still doing this, and last year I was in town a few weeks after Halloween. I took a picture and--can you believe it--I'm actually remembering to post this a year later!

And I was thinking. . . Ypsilanti. . . Saline. . . Dexter. . . Chelsea. . . Manchester. . . Milan. . . even Ann Arbor. . . maybe you would like to adopt this tradition?

Send me a private message if you want the name of the town so you can find out the details regarding how the project is run.

Happy Halloween!

Awesomely Beautiful Murals

While looking up the information about high school theater productions this fall, I came across this little note on the Lincoln Schools web site:

During the Depression years as part of a WPA project three large murals were painted by brothers Leon and Bronislaw Makielski. The murals depict the development of our rural community from the pioneer days to the industrial days of the 1930’s. The murals are still present in the rooms above the Senior Citizens Center. (November 2010)

I'm pretty sure that the high school I went to was built by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration,  so I was curious. And I found this web site. (You can read about the Chelsea murals there as well.)


Boy are these murals beautiful. I'm inserting one of them here--photographs by Einar Einarsson Kvaran. Go to the web site to see the rest of them.

Music

Let's start with this interesting comment that I got the other day on my Cui Bono (Who Benefits?) post:

Speaking of Who Benefits, Pioneer has just won another award for their music program. I would love to see an expose of this program and who is benefitting. The orchestra is basically a public school forum for private music students. It has nothing to do with the school program that starts in 5th grade and doesn't teach enough for kids to suceed in high school. The teacher simply cherry picks the top students that have been privately studying music since a very young age, devotes all the resources to them, and literally leaves everyone else behind. The kids that can't play at a level well beyond high school are in a basic technique class where they can either accept their 2nd class status or quit. You never hear about them because they don't go anywhere beyond the school auditorium! The whole program is focused on winning and they are not about to let anyone in who can't do that.

I have mixed feelings about this comment.
On the one hand--point well taken. The top levels of the orchestra/band are very exclusive. At least one acquaintance has told me that the majority of the kids in it are taking lessons, outside of school, for at least an hour a week, from the very best teachers in town--no college music majors for them! I don't have personal experience of this because none of my kids has played past 9th grade (at least, not yet). But I believe the commenter when s/he says that many of the kids experience the lower levels of the orchestra/band as "second rate." And one of the reasons that I am happy about the presence of Skyline is that I believe this will make more room in those top bands (and Varsity athletic teams) for kids who are good, but not the very best.

On the other hand--this charge could be leveled not only at Pioneer but at other schools as well. They all use their music programs to attract students. I have seen articles about Huron, Ypsilanti, Lincoln, Willow Run, Community High, and even Stone School's music program. I think this is natural--although everyone thinks "basics" are important, it is the extras that draw people in to schools. And generally music is perceived as, and should be perceived as, value added.

And on the third hand (if I had one)--a friend of mine went, several years ago, to the NAACP annual dinner. She (a white woman, and a teacher) was seated at a table with several middle class African-American couples. The talk turned to school, and to the achievement gap. [And I would say that both my friend and I, as white women concerned with education, have been concerned with the achievement gap as a problem, but not as a problem that personally affected us. These families felt it affected them.] My friend reported to me later that the other parents were discussing their strategies for keeping their kids out of trouble and in with the top-performing kids. Universally, their favorite strategy--even for kids who weren't in advanced classes--was to keep their kids in the music program. So many of the advanced students are in Orchestra, Band, or Choir, that those classes end up driving a lot of class schedules. In effect: stick with Orchestra, and your kids end up being with hard-working students for the rest of the day.

Last, but not least--I really believe that when you learn music, you are also learning math (think rhythm, notes, spatial awareness) and arts (besides the beauty of music, it really is like learning another language). So I think it's important, despite the fact that my (older two) kids' interest in music peaked in 6th or 7th grade, and I want the schools to have good music programs.

Finally--I don't have much experience with the local music programs, and I would be interested in yours. Are they elite and snobby, or open? Does everyone benefit, or just a select few?