Caution

I ran into my first problem.

The person that I was supposed to interveiw ran out of time so i couldn't interveiw her.

I am trying to reschedule but we both have really busy schedules.

We are hoping that since we are both in the Winter Guard that we can both arrive really early to practice and i can interveiw her then.

Hopefully I can get this interveiw along with one more done by the end of the week.

I am trying to interveiw Tyler Ingling, as one of the students that doesn't play music, and Marissa Murphy.

Marisa Murphy does play music but is restricted due to scheduling in school making it to where she does not have a band class at all. Hopefully she can give me more oerspective on how music can effect you if you stop playing after doing so for so long. I know that she loves playing and she really does miss it. I am hoping to interveiw her Friday.

I hope that I can get these two interveiws done and post them on this blog for everyone to see.

I hope I can get some good evidance for my point.

Getting Going

Today, I am starting my interveiws. I am going to start asking friends and collegues the questions I posted earlier. I don't know what type of repsonses I will get.

I also changed some of my questions on surveymonkey.com. With the help of my teacher, hopefully I will get some responses.

I think that if people complete my survey, it can help me a lot with my project.

Survery Monkey

Today I created a survey on surveymonkey.com.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WR39XD5

Above is the link

I have 10 questions on there right now and plan on using the evidence in my final PowerPoint.

Hopefully a lot of people take the survey.

If not, I will have to research a lot of statistics to try to make my point made.

Getting ready to gather information

Tomorrow, I am going to try to gather some information with interveiws.

I am also going to have a meeting with the National Music Honor society on Tuesday and we are trying to get some things ready for fundraisers adn some fun community service projects to complete which I also plan to use in my project.

Overall, this weekend, I have been trying to get myself ready fro interveiws with the hints my teachders have given me this week in my WISE class.

Now it is time to truely get things started. 

Overveiw part 1

After I started this project, I joined the Percussion Ensemble in the high school and I was also asked to join the National Music Honor Society.

I am now the Public Relations Officer of the Honor Society. 

I think that joining those two organizations will help me through out this project by getting more insight of music and what others think about music.

I have yet to interview people but as posted in my other blogs, I have created questions and a list of people to ask. I would like to start interviewing this week.

Hopefully, I can start to get some data for my project in these next few weeks through the interviews and research.

Not much has happened yet but it's just the beginning and I am getting ready for the real quest ahead of me.



The Last Lecture part 2

We watched the actual lecture today.

I never thought I would learn a life lesson in a lecture.

It is hard for me to even believe that he had cancer due to his optimism and pride.

I almost cried when he said the day before was his wife's birthday and he came out with a big birthday cake and suprised his wife with 500 people saying happy birthday to her. He included that the lecture he was giving, might be his last.

I found it odd though that even when he talked about the brick walls and always being optimised about over coming them and tearing them down, he didn't seem to take his own advice about his cancer. He didn't seem like there was any chance he was going to beat it and that even with the therapy he was given, there was no hope.

He didn't seem to be as much of a fighter as other people I have seen and met with cancer in my own personal lifetimes.

But that is just my opinion.

The Last Lecture

The quote given to us today is one of my favorite.

In my opinion, it is probably one of the most true quotes I have ever heard of.

 

I believe that if people don't want it enough, the walls can keep them away from their "goals" while others will try everything they can to make it to the finish line even if the wall is 100,000,000 feet high. They will find a rope, they will try to climb it, or blow it down and won't give up until they win.

 

This quote inspires me to keep going even if I already see problems I might face. It makes me want to strive to do more.

 

If a wall tries to stop me, I will use my imagination and creativity to create a way to face it and make sure that I can get the information I need to prove the importance of music education.

 

 

If a guy with Pancriatic Cancer can do it, so can I.

Sierra Leone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSgY6n_ek_g

In this documentry, the Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars prove that music can help others and the musicians even when there is a war going on around you and you have seen the worst parts of war with your own eyes and possibly even had it happen to yourself. With the power of music, you can let loose and forget about the problems in life but without music education, they wouldn't have this get away.

Students to ask

Along with the teachers I am going to ask, I need to talk to students that have experience playing and those that don't. Some people that come into mind are;

Ray Delfing

Cassie Daamsguard

Marisa Murphy

Taylor Falkowski

Jozee Muscella

Tyler Ingling

Miranda Gable

Taylor Borgstrom

Tom Haley

Jesse Whitbeck

Maddie Didonato

Rachel Patterson

Elizabeth Porter



Interview Questions

Today, I wrote out some questions I should ask for each group of people I am going to interview and also found that I should interveiw some people that are not in any music class some questions too. These are the starting questions I will ask for each group.

Students/ Adults that play an instrument:

1. When did you start playing?
2. What do you like about music?
3. Why do you like music?
4. How has it helped you in life? How? Why?
5. Have you seen any type of grade improvement since you joined a band/ chior?
6. What do you personally use music for?
7. What are your grades like?

Students/ Adults that don't play:

What do you like about music?
Why do you like music?
How has it helped you in life? How? Why?
Have you seen any type of grade improvement since you joined a band/ chior?
What do you personally use music for?
What are your opinions on music activites? ( Marching Band, Jazz Band, Chior, ect)
What are your grades like?
Have you ever thought about learning how to play or sing?
Do you know anything about music theory?

Music Teachers

1. What do you tink is the most important part of your job?
2. Why do you teach music?
3. Why did you get into music?
4. What are your students like?
5. Have you seen some "bad" kids change in anyway becasue of music?( in a good way)
6. What complications have administration caused for the music program?

People of Interest

This weekend, I tried to figure out who I should ask questions to.

I tried to think of people in the area that I could easily have access to.

I realized that I also needed some people outside of the Burlington County area. After some thought, I found two teachers that I had while I lived in Virginia, to help me out. They are both music teachers and hopefully they can give me some insight to my project. It also helps that one is a Middle School teacher and the other is a High School teacher so I can have different perspectives and maybe some different answers which can further my research.

Here are some of the people I would like to contact to help answer my research questions:

Mr. Lindner

Mr.Pinto

Mr. Taylor

Mrs. Dobberstien

Mr. Bacz

Mrs. Tomasone

Over the next few months, I hope to have more people to contact and have a decent answer to all of my questions.

Research Questions

1.       How does music help people involved in music throughout life?
a)Talk to graduates/ teachers
b)talk to people who have given up music

2.       What do I have to accomplish in my career as a music teacher later on in life to become a professor in music education or performance?
a)ask a professor
b)ask teachers what they have done so far and how close they are to achieving it
c)research statistics on how long it takes and what i need to do

3.       How has music/ music education positively impacted our our society in general since it has emerged?
a)research history of music and how it has evolved with society
b)ask a music theory/music history teacher

c) ask different types of people about how music has impacted them
d)ask a history teacher how music has impacted the world historically



4.       What are the hidden benefits in music education?
a)research past studies on the importance of music education
b) ask cuurent students how music has helped them
c)ask music teachers

These questions are going to help me throughout my project.

Julie and Julia

This movie was inspiring in many ways.

It kind of gave me hope about my project because we are doing essentially the same thing. She wrote about what she learned with the recipes and we are writing what we are learning about with our topics. Even though our research most likely wont get national attention, we still are going to learn great things about the stuff we want to learn about.

I feel as if the movie was trying to set a positive attitude to start our project out to show what we can potentially end up doing.

Maybe one of us will have a great blog about our experience with our "Julie and Julia" essenced project and get it published or shown nation wide.

It also showed me that even though you run into problems, you should always stay positive even though it can be hard to do so. Not only if something happend to your project but also in yyour personal life. Keeping a positive attitude adn not giving up is the best advice given to us from this movie in my opinion because without keeping our heads up, our projects might fail or we might just give up on it.