No surprise here: music teaches fractions

Comments

1. Edward Palmer says

   April 12, 2012 at 8:41 pm

    

   When music was on a par with other subjects kids were learning the nature of sound: cycles per second per note, speed of it,

   vibrations of voice compared to humming bird wings, etc., etc.   The miracles in creation can be revealed in a non-public school.

   Hard to believe that a soprano voice on a high C is making 1024 cycles per second?

    

   On a ruler the number is after the inch.  Of course, in music the one is the beginning of the first beat. I once heard a dogmatic                                                                                             bass singer argue that a dotted half note ends on the count of 3. I never did convince him that the dotted half note ends at the count of 4.

    

   The panic foisted in anticipation of the year 01/01/2000, thinking it was the end of the millennium, can be of interest  It was to me!

    

   History; come to think of it, music could contain just about every subject!!

    

   Love it.

    

   ep

    

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2. Ronald Richard Duquette says

   April 12, 2012 at 8:21 am

   I think any number of us have figured this out; it just takes the other disciplines a while to catch on.  When I was a long-term substitute teacher at my son’s school, I started teaching the kids about time signatures, using the concepts of fractions they were learning in their third grade math classes.  Stuff started happening!  It was amazing – it was just as though they suddenly realized that this fraction stuff could not only be COOL, but they could actually — USE IT!  Now, here’s the funny part:  I’m not a formally-trained musician (lots of years, though, at the University of Hard Knocks – you know, the place where you take a score and you beat yourself over the head with it long enough that some of the notes fall off and actually enter through various openings in your skull!) nor were higher forms of math my cup of tea (couldn’t stand ’em, to be honest – but basic math, I’m pretty good at – sometimes even to the surprise of my mathematician wife and my mathematically-inclined but very musical son) – but I saw this connection and thought, “Why not?”  Well, my music colleagues, in particular the head of the department, told me, “You’re not supposed to be teaching them about time signatures!”  I answered, “Why not?  They’re doing the fractions in math; this just reinforces it and gives us a chance to introduce what can sometimes be a really difficult concept.”  It’s what happens, I suppose, when you don’t know any better…!!!!

    

   Ron

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