Jason’s Reading Log for his Music Education

Posted by on April 12, 2010 
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I have no musical talent or abilities.  I never took a piano lesson as a kid, I wasn’t in the band, I can’t read music, I’ve never even taken a music appreciation course, so I was surprised to see exactly how much overlap there is between problems in teaching music and the problems that I face teaching sociology.   This is one of the reasons that I am so interested in SoTL research, while every discipline is different, we all are confronted with many of the same difficulties. 

With that said, I thought a great point made in the readings was framing motivation as (at least partially) a teaching problem.  I always hear professors complaining that students today are not motivated to learn, well, what motivated you to learn?  Chances are it was a professor that took the time to offer insights, quality feedback, and demonstrated to you that they genuinely cared bout your learning.  The motivated you to do the reading, when you could have watched TV or went out with friends, because they convinced you that waht they were asking you to spend you time on mattered, and that they were there to guide you in your learning.  Now if we are all sure that we are doing all of this for our studentst, and they are still not motivated, we can start ranting against their individual work ethic.  However, if we are not fully sure of this fact, we may need to review what we can do to motivate students, and what social forces may be limiting us from doing so. 

While I do tend to agree that we are competing with an onslaught of distracting entertainment that is pulling people away from devoting their time to the learning process (and our time to the teaching process), there are some other notable forces at work.  Students are paying more for college and getting less.  Faculty are teaching more students than ever and getting paid less for their effort.  Expanding class sizes are a budgetary solution but a teaching and learning problem.  So, a student puts serious effort into a paper and receives a check mark, often regardless of the overall quality of the work.  A professor gives that check mark because they have to manystudents and can’t realistically give quality feedback to all of them.  I did the math, the author estimates that six three minute audio feedback can be completed each hour.  If I was to do that I would need to dedicate a full work week (over 40hrs) just to responding to one activity.  This is not a personal problem.  This is not a disciplinary specific problem.   This is not even a higher education specific problem.  This is a core public issue.  We need to invest in hiring more teachers to lower the student to teacher ratio.  Podcasting feedback is a great idea for a number of reasons, as are number of other teaching ideas, and they may work at institutions with good student to teacher ratios,  but we are kidding ourselves if we expect these ideas to be implemented in the current reality of most classrooms.

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