Musical Math
Many educators use textbooks when teaching math to their students. However, math is everywhere and is an integral part of everything that we do in our lives from the time that we wake up and look at our alarm clocks to when we go to school. However, since so many students claim to have math anxiety, teachers need to make math more relevant to their students by working to assimilate it into their culture. For instance, many students who are in the intermediate levels of elementary school and those who are attend middle school are interested in music, art and superheroes because these mediums enable students to express themselves. Therefore, it is essential to integrate these forms of creative expressions into our lessons. This essay focuses on the benefits of including music in math education.
Incorporating music in the teaching of mathematics is an exciting way of engaging students (Costello-Dougherty, 2009). It also enables students to “take creative risks to express feelings, ideas, and experiences” (Building Student Success BC’s New Curriculum, 2015). Even if they do not sing or play an instrument, music is a central part of our students’ lives. They are constantly listening to and being influenced by music, which makes it so important for educators to employ this into their curriculum.
It is essential to note that students do not just passively listen to music, but they actually take part in learning the lyrics and moving to it. Therefore, music helps students learn concepts through “repetition […rhythm] and rhyme” because they tend to constantly sing songs that they enjoy and it involves kinaesthetic learning because students actually process these new ideas through movement (Costello-Dougherty, 2009). This is form of learning is exciting, hooks students and enables them to remember concepts that they would have struggled with before (Costello-Dougherty, 2009).
Teachers can scaffold math education through music by creating their own songs that relate to mathematical concepts. If a teacher is not able to do this, YouTube is a great source for music videos that relate to teaching students math. Once students learn that they can use music to help them learn, teachers can then move from modelling making music for the students or teaching by borrowing other people’s music videos, to asking them to create their own music in groups based on different math concepts. This way, students can perform their songs and learn from each other. Educators can even take this a step further and incorporate other musical tools into their lessons so that students can learn how to produce their own music. This way, students can study concepts like algebra by learning about musical notations, such as beats per second (WNET Education).
References
British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2015). Building student success BC’s new curriculum. Retrieved from https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum
Costello-Dougherty, M. (2009). Rapping math teachers bring it. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/rapping-teachers
WNET Education. (2015). John Pallino teaches math in music to his algebra class. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTo8FUNEPek&index=21&list=PLU9y4zDnK7k_ARVd9eCWRwOxIjTbP5HQw
Claire Rushton
February 28, 2016 — 10:34 am
This is an interesting idea and approach. Another way to integrate music is in the way that music is written in bars. How many notes, rests etc are in a bar? What is an eighth note and how does this relate to fractions. How is a song composed in bars? This works in terms of clapping beat at primary levels to figuring out fractions at intermediate levels.