Ethics and Music Education

I am taking a course right now through Boston University for my Masters in Music Education. The course I'm taking is Foundations of Music Education: History and Philosophy. For some reason, I preferred the Foundations of Music Education: Psychology and Sociology course I previously took. Oh well, that's besides the point.

For my course, this week we're addressing ethics in music education. Quite an interesting topic, I do have to say. I'm about half way through the reading for the week.

Friday evening I have to take part in a live online debate with other classmates. As part of this debate, I have to argue AGAINST the following statement:

"Music educators have a professional and ethic obligation to teach for social justice, including teaching for equal treatment based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. Teaching music is not enough."

This is going to be a difficult assignment as I personally AGREE with this statement.

As this group is comprised of other arts educators, what are your thoughts?

Kristin

Confounded spelling

I have an admission. 

I am forgetting how to spell. Seriously. I think it is a real problem.  I write (pen to paper) so seldom that I have lost my ability to correct my own spelling.   I am dependent on spell check and that wonderfully informative dotted red line that appears to alert me of my spelling foibles.

Interesting also that i know how to spell foible but just yesterday had the darndest time spelling "editing".  Here are my retrospective attempts.  edditing, editting, edditting.  Yes, I went through them all before I finally typed editing and that damn red line finally disappeared.  There is another one disappeared. I am so irritated by double consonants. I expect them to be everywhere they aren't and forget them everywhere they should be. 

But that is with the help of a computer.  When I hand write I am absolutely hopeless. This is particularly embarrassing when writing on the board in my classes.  I realized that being a visual learner (spatial more than verbal), I have come to rely on the typed appearance of a word to know if its spelling is correct.  For instance when I type embarased I realize that the 'shape' of the word is wrong, too short. And therefore, I recall that it should be embarrassed.  It looks right from a design perspective.  But, I have so long ago given up hand writing on a daily (large scale) level that I can't remember how the design of my hand written words look. 

Also, the rhythm of a word.  Hand writing slows me down to the point that I can't imagine there being THAT many letters in a given word. it just takes TOO LONG to get it down on the paper.  Commencement, for instance, when written long hand fills up half a line! I have trained my brain out of spelling.  Instead I use the physical, spatial and rhythmic memory of typing, which I can't seem to recreate with a pen in my hand. 

I don't want to think I need to practice my spelling just to write a hand written note off the cuff.  But it seems, I do. Or, I could just give up on hand writing all together because using my smart phone to look up words mid-sentence just sucks. And, I won't do it.


Sigh. 

PS If address is spelled with two d's, then I think "addmission" should as well.   Just sayin'.

Some Videos that you might find interesting

A random list of videos from youtube that might strike your fancy.

Remedies

Just a couple of recommendations:

To bring jobs back home why don't we work to unionize the Chinese and Indian workers (eastern)

An investment opportunity -- buy into guillotines (The French might have survived if they could have just keep secret how rich they really were)--Occupy the World

It just isn't that difficult.

Dave

An Artificially Intelligent Music World -- Installment #1

I'm just completing the book Swarm and have had a major deja vu. In the 1990s I had many lunches with a visual artist/programmer/friend designing an artificially intelligent evolving world that would generate art of any medium. I didn't realize I was designing my own swarm.

This will be the first installment of a description of this art world in hopes that I might trigger an interest in others to further shape the world or even join a programming effort. I have pages of code which I can willing jettison if an even better vision should emerge.

This installment deals with the most immediate similarity with the swarm. The world is inhabited by single objects (vis a vis amoebi) that share possibilities but each with their own genetic capabilities granted them at birth. These objects (we called them units) can aggregate to amplify or extend genetic strengths and weaknesses.

This aggregation takes place within a universe with natural laws and a god working to its own extinction (the designers). As the neural net of clustered objects grows in complexity with clusters of objects some survive and others don't. I had fun writing the birth class (Java talk for an action object) but got depressed writing the death class. Designing a reward or demerit system for the world is still in progress. As objects aggregated they were meant to resonate artistic output that could be attached to art media.

Above the universe sit a pantheon of inert gods (or managers) that oversee the implementation of natural laws to guide the evolution of new aggregate artistic cultures.

Our hope was to be able to watch art worlds evolve to see if they gained their own sense of intelligence. We did not plan to ever evaluate them, only watch and listen. We expected to be able to initiate hundreds of art worlds simultaneously to play that evolutionary roulette game to see if art more intelligent than our own might emerge, art that might carry an affective weight of its own. It is probably naive to think that a human affect might be created, probably more likely a software affect.

Hire a friend, grass roots employment

So here is the link:

Hire a friend for a day

Let me know if you would participate in a day to hire. If it were big enough we could put millions of folk to work for at least one day. Who needs congress??

Dave

This is a test to see if I can post a poll

I am thinking about polling for those who might like to create a "hire your friend for a day" as a small contribution to the employment problem. I need a poll to sense the interest.

Here is a link to a poll as a trial:

Are polls good?

Dave