A whole new education.....

Yesterday I attended a talk given by author Daniel Pink titled "A Whole New Education" which was based on his book, "A Whole New Mind".

1. The left brain is very important but the right brain is the new #1 of equals.
2.The continuted left brained dominance of education is the legislature's fault. (not the students, not the parents, not the teachers, not the principals, not the superintendants...)

I'm wrestling with the lack of momentum of his ideas. He book was published in 2005 and here we are listening to him say the SAME things. There was nothing new. This is 2008 and things are moving so fast in this day and age! Everything is moving so fast except...education.

What is the institution of education to do, exactly? We must still maintain an excellence in left brained knowing. The SAT's and flow charts continue to be important--we'd sink with the right brain that lets go of the left brain. So do we expect the school day to get longer? Add art and music to the 4 year requirements of highschoolers who already are having to be at school for classes before "first hour"?

Here's MY theory: trust students to develop left brains in a right brain environment.

A friend of mine who is taking violin Suzuki style with her daughter (that means mom gets to learn right along side--actually playing violins with her daughter). She described a leap of (FAITH) brain activity that she experienced. The teacher gave them a new piece to work on and with much concentration of violin position, finger placement, bow placement and direction, listening for intonation, etc. she started to master the music. Later mom picked up her violin again and it seemed that she had gone backwards in the mastery but the execution was feeling different....with less focus on each separate detail. After a couple more repetitions she knew the understanding of everything it takes to play the music had shifted and she could play with out "thinking". She has given the execution over to muscle memory. This is where I believe the music can now live in the right hemisphere.

Last week I was eavesdropping on my daughter, Claire, while she was teaching a violin lesson. Her student was a junior high school student and they were working on musicality and tone. Claire was using words like weight, speed, and division. Sounds like a physics lesson or geometry maybe. There were angles, perpendicular and parallel lines, but no numbers, formulas, or symbols. They were working on bow technique and when they added it up the right answer was obvious...beauty.

How do we assess that? ......there you go again, dipping back into believing the left brain is the end all.

Musically yours,
Yvette
PS if, in paragraph that begins: MY theory, the word "trust" sends you into a nosedive then we need to sit down and talk. Invite me for coffee!

Click on the cello for a fun cello game. When I played it I said, "I'm sorry" to Camille Saint Saens....I need more practice!

Also as I'm "playing" I'm thinking of bow speed and the division of bow because sometimes one bowing has several notes.

That's more math....

Have fun.

Finding patters everywhere.....

From Wikipedia:

A pattern, from the French patron, is a theme of reoccurring events or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set. These elements repeat in a predictable manner. It can be a template or model which can be used to generate things or parts of a thing, especially if the things that are created have enough in common for the underlying pattern to be inferred, in which case the things are said to exhibit the pattern. Pattern matching is the act of checking for the presence of the constituents of a pattern, whereas the detecting for underlying patterns is referred to as pattern recognition. The question of how a pattern emerges is accomplished through the work of the scientific field of pattern formation. Patterns are also related to repeated shapes or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of the series. Some patterns (for example, many visual patterns) may be directly observable, such as simple decorative patterns (stripes, zigzags, and polka-dots). Others can be more complicated, such as the regular tiling of a plane, echos, and balanced binary branching.

The most basic patterns are based on repetition and periodicity. A single template, or cell, is combined with duplicates without change or modification. For example, in aviation, a "holding pattern" is a flight path which can be repeated until the aircraft has been granted clearance for landing.

Pattern recognition is more complex when templates are used to generate variants. For example, in English, sentences often follow the "N-VP" (noun - verb phrase) pattern, but some knowledge of the English language is required to detect the pattern. Computer science, ethology, and psychology are fields which study patterns.

In addition to static patterns, Simple Harmonic Oscillators produce repeated patterns of movement.

In Kindermusik "Imagine That!" we are pretending, playing, twirling....looks like just plain old good fun. Deeper down we are becoming intentional listeners and intelligent thinkers! This week we are listening for patters of words in songs. For instance how many times do you hear a repeated word in "Row, Row, Row Your Boat?" I believe this kind of work creates places in your brain for math.

I'll often stop a circle dance to point out how the song has a pattern of "aural stripes" for the ear. Last semester singing "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me" (thin stripe, thin stripe, thick stripe....) and the rondo activity we did with our "Drum Walk" (walk, run, walk, run, walk) where we illustrated the different movement with different color scarves on the floor.

A couple weeks after this particular activity Grace's mom tells me her story about how Grace is processing patterns in her mind:

Grace (3 1/2 yo) asked me if she would have a bath tonight. I answered, "No, you had one last night." She said, "That's a pattern, bath/no-bath, bath/no-bath."

Since then she finds patterns everywhere, in the color of cars (grey car, red car, grey car). or in her jewelry box (round earrings, silver earrings, round earrings etc.).

She loves Kindermusik and has learned more than I even imagined she would.

At this age they can't help but be brilliant! I'm so excited to be working with these children and to be nurturing their amazing potential!

Love,
Yvette
PS (also from Wikipedia:)

The golden ratio, (approximately 1.6180339887), occurs frequently in the natural world. Two numbers a and b keep the golden ratio when (a+b)/a = a/b, in this case a/b equals the golden ratio. It has a direct relationship to the Fibonacci numbers. This pattern was exploited by Leonardo da Vinci in his art. The Fibonacci pattern has a closed-form expression. These patterns can be seen in nature, from the spirals of flowers to the symmetry of the human body (as expressed in Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, one of the most referenced and reproduced works of art today.