Summary/Reflection of Three Journal Articles

These three articles combine to include an interesting combination of useful and useless information. I felt that the second article (“Teenagers and Music”) was fairly useless. Sure, some of what it said was accurate – I especially liked the comment that teenagers are “human bundles of contradictions” – but a lot of the article provided no information on practically how to deal with these contradictions. Similarly, some of it was simply way too broad to truly be useful.

The first article, “Teaching Middle School General Music,” was moderately informative. The sections that dealt with practical suggestions as to how an effective general music classroom should be run were excellent. As discussed in class, I find the subsection labeled “Achieves Results Quickly” to be controversial. Given my experiences teaching middle-school-aged children, I can definitely concur with the author as he states that these students “are an impatient lot.” However, I have a hard time making myself teach concepts in a way that I, in my logically-functioning mind, feel is out of order. Perhaps a certain level of incongruence is important, but I have yet to find that balance.

Lastly, the set of articles from the March 1989 MEJ (beginning with the Tim Gerber article entitled “Reaching All Students: The Ultimate Challenge”) was excellent. Dr. Gerber, who I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to see here at Ball State, sets forth a very solid (if not a little dated) foundation for secondary "The Band Director in a New Role”) had a lot of good ideas as to how I can take my instrumental ensemble experiences and abilities and apply them to an upper-secondary general music classroom.

To be honest, I would like to avoid a general music position. However, I am probably not in a minority of instrumental music education majors who feel that way. I do recognize that this is unfortunate. I do not want to have a negative attitude toward general music, however; it is simply not my preference. Furthermore, I also realize that I very well may have to teach a general music class or two (gasp, even at a junior high or elementary level!), so I need to be prepared. Now, the good news – here’s how useful I felt the last set of articles was – I found myself, while reading them, nearly excited about the idea of teaching general music. I started to literally picture myself in a general music classroom, using (perhaps slightly more modern) variations of some of the ideas put forth in the articles, and having success! I hate to admit it, but I somewhat surprised myself with my ability to even imagine that kind of success already. For that I am glad, and feel that these articles have been beneficial.

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