Yes, I am blogging right now from the cafeteria during the lunch break of the Kemp Endowment seminar. It got me so mad that I just couldn't hold it in any longer! We had to sit through a 45 minute commercial for the Royal School of Church Music led by Enid Oberholtzer, and specifically the Music for Life method of teaching music to youth chorales.
Now, I'm not trying to say that what she said was not valid. I'm sure that for many people, the workbooks are an effective way to teach children. But the whole time while I was sitting there, I couldn't help but thinking, "this is the exact opposite of Critical Pedagogy for Music Education." They make these workbooks with sample concerts and lessons, broken down into distinct modules for improving technique, decorum, community standards, and more. Obviously, these are important skills for the director of a children's choir to be teaching to their students. But you can't just sit back, offer up some trite, programmatic scheme for improving childrens' singing and pass that off as an education in music!
At some point during her commercial, she said "you don't have to do one thing... it's all here in the workbooks." I can understand that this might be a good method for a volunteer choir director who doesn't have enough of a background in music to teach a choir for themselves, but to me the idea of handing out some color-coordinated workbooks to my students and letting some diagrams and sketches of a girl with good posture be my method of teaching, is appalling.
I have really been enjoying the other speakers at the seminar. Joe Miller's lesson was excellent. But I absolutely cannot believe that I just had to sit through that RSCM commercial. How (not) fascinating!
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3 comments:
I agree with just about everything you said.
And may I add..
Those were at least 4 hours of my life I will never get back.
I enjoyed the children's choir workshop somewhat, but I thought that a lot of what she said was outdated too. I HATE acronyms with hokey, non-informative meanings. The principles are good, but mostly it means NOTHING.
I like Helen Kemp's music (for children) and I like her manner and her exercises, and I realize that the woman must be about 85 and therefore of a different era, but all of the little hokey acronyms and sayings start to drive me out of my mind!
While I agree that the info-mercial-ness of the whole thing was completely unnecessary and a teensy been inappropriate, I like the idea that such things exist, as potential supplements to the wonderful CP-ness that will be our classrooms. We have to keep in mind that kids with different learning styles might like having all the facts written out for them there on the page, and that might be more effective for them than anything we can teach ourselves. But for the most part, I agree with you... *yawn*
And, um, can we talk about that first guy for a minute? I didn't absorb a word he said because I couldn't get past his unbelievably grating accent... "can-gre-gay-tion" wow, I almost threw myself out the window. Anyway, sorry... yeah. Boo for info-mercials.
Talk about an infomercial. The fisrt guy could not back anything up just by his belief, he had to show a book that used his idea. "You guys should get this book and read it." It sounded like I was in a book club. "These are the new books out, you should read them." After a while, one realizes that there were more infomercials than we realize.
What about Dr. Miller? Was he doing any sort of infomercial? I think he was. He was trying to show how "he" warms-up a choir. How many people are going to take Dr. Miller's warm-up method. Quite a bit.
I am not backing up the fact that it was riddiculous that we had to sit through a whole 45 minutes of a gal talking about work books. She was a little bit dry, but she had Laura and many other people getting some rest from the long seminars.
Just remember this, when you attend the big state MENC, it will be sponsered by Hal and Lenord, or Hawkes Publishing. They will have a wonderful workshop called, "High School Choir Repotoire". This will be sponsered by one of those publishing companies. Is this infomercial OK? Why?
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