Monthly Archives: September 2016

Problems Encountered Teaching Rhythms

Every year I spend the first four or five weeks of Probationer rehearsals teaching basics: standing and breathing properly, developing a beautiful tone, singing the major scale up and down to a light accompaniment (which doesn’t include the melody), learning note names, learning simple staff nomenclature and proficiency in rhythms. Today I want to share with you a struggle I perpetually encounter teaching rhythms.

Since learning about Takadimi and using it with children in class, rhythm proficiency has greatly improved. In the past I taught the Takadimi syllables while calling the notes by their traditional names, such as quarter note, eighth note, etc., but students were always confused. Think about it from the point of view of a third grader. It must be terribly confusing that an eighth note receives only half a beat, while an actual half note gets two beats. Or what about a dotted quarter note that receives one-and-a-half beats, but when it is the first note in the measure, it is held until beat two-and-a-half because in music the singer starts counting the measure at one instead of zero.

The main reason I continued to teach these names was because everywhere else the child went, he encountered these names. Well, today I decided to buck the system (in spite of my general LOVE of tradition) and simply referred to the various notes by their Takadimi syllables. Lo and behold, the students made the change quickly and clapped their rhythms almost flawlessly. Perhaps it would be best to approach rhythms this way until students were so familiar with sight-reading rhythms that introducing the traditional note names wouldn’t present any difficulties. If any of our readers have stumbled upon better ways to teach rhythms I would be curious to know. In many ways I feel it is more important that a piece be sung rhythmically well than to be sung with 100 percent note accuracy. I find music with rhythmic vitality much more moving.

Finally, for any of our readers in Detroit, I will be presenting at the archdiocese’s music and liturgy workshop In Service of the Sacred. I will be discussing chorister training as well as working through some of these concepts with a group of school children from the city. If you happen to be at the conference, please say hello!

The Current Heresy

Following a meeting last week for parents of choristers, the father of one boy announced to me with a twinkle in his eye that I had spoken heresy during the meeting. He was right, I spoke an unforgivable heresy–I told parents that I would be training the boy Probationers separately from the girl Probationers because… (drum roll please) boys and girls were different, and, would you believe it, they learn differently, too.

To be honest, I have always known this, as have most of the readers here, but I had never been in a position to teach our new recruits separately, but that has changed this year. The girls (9 of them) are admittedly easier to teach, but the boys (8 in number) keep me mentally on my toes. I really have to stay several steps ahead of them and make sure that I turn most of what we do into a game (or at least introduce a healthy amount of competition into the learning) and keep the pace moving quickly.

If you work with boys and girls and want to understand  how each sex processes information and makes decisions, a great book to read is titled Why Gender Matters, by Leonard Sax, MD Phd. It is written from a secular viewpoint and a few sections could have benefited from the light of a little reflection on natural law, but otherwise it is a must read. Dr. Sax himself had been convinced that the difference between boys and girls was completely due to the way they were raised (nurture vs. nature), but overwhelming medical evidence, coupled with his experience as a psychologist, spoke otherwise. He finally had to admit that boys and girls were different. One might be tempted to ask what kind of person required two doctoral degrees, untold hours of research and 30 plus years of experience as a psychologist to come to a conclusion that any sane parent throughout the history of mankind took only 24 hours (after having both a boy and girl) to realize, but then we wouldn’t have gotten this great book.

What I enjoyed the most was that the author didn’t simply state that boys and girls were different, he went in depth regarding how those differences play out in thought processes and actions, especially in the classroom. In all, it has been incredibly helpful. Go out and get your copy today!