You got a Yamaha? We got the semitransparent plastic blue ones.
If you’re wondering, Why recorders? — there are three reasons:
- They’re portable.
- Recorders in decent enough quality can be cheaply produced, so even low-income children get to play one. Compare that with a guitar where 30$ gets you a piece of wood that detunes as soon as you lay eyes on it. Not great for practicing.
- Recorders have an easily memorizable fingering scheme that allows you to quickly pick up the C Major scale. Compare this with a guitar where you need to remember for each string individually which frets have the notes of the scale.
You don’t need to remember for each string individually which frets have the notes of the scale on a guitar. If you know where the base note is, there is exactly one pattern for minor and one for major.
Guitars are very hard to play for kids because the strings are so thin that they hurt after very few minutes.
Guitars are very hard to play for kids because the strings are so thin that they hurt after very few minutes.
That’s a better reason.
Also, longer fingers help with play and children don’t have full sized hands yet.
That said, you could probably get away with ukeleles instead of recorders, if you were really insistent on string instruments.
Indeed. The scheme for guitar could literally not be easier.
You make these good points, but all I’m hearing is that Big Recorder is paying out public schools to keep making children buy and play them. Hot Cross Buns? More like Huge Con Bunkos! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!
It was a gateway instrument into learning the clarinet then eventually the alto sax, then baritone sax for me, so I really appreciate it.
That being said, financial literacy is super important. Wasn’t home-ec supposed to teach us that??
fingering scheme
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Wait until you hear about the g string
For what it’s worth, as someone who graduated highschool in Utah (one of the shittest US states in terms of funding and education) I learned the recorder in Elementary school and was required to take a financial literacy class in highschool to graduate. True, that class taught now-useless skills like how to write a check, but it also taught me about 401Ks/Roth IRAs, how to file taxes, managing credit scores and lines of credit, mortgages and debt, budgeting, and a bunch of other skills besides. I’m not sure how standard this is across the US, but I can’t imagine it’s too uncommon given that it was a shitty small town high school in a deep red state. Hell, I’ve seen memes like this posted by people who graduated in my year and it always perplexes me because I know for a fact they had to take that class.
The number of times I have to explain to people here in California that are my age that they did in fact take financial literacy, or that they were in fact taught skills like what to do during pregnancy is unfortunately too high. Tons of people like to talk about what schools need without realizing that it has it and they just didn’t pay attention.
Totally agreed. I have often thought the same thing when people claim that schools need to teach critical thinking skills. Mine did.
Tons of people like to talk about what schools need without realizing that it has it and they just didn’t pay attention.
A semester class that happened thirty years ago probably doesn’t stick out in your memory beside the 20 years of Facebook memes pounding your brain like a mini gun.
A lot of people just repeat things uncritically because they’ve been listening to the crap on the radio or the Joe Rogan podcast or whatever for so long that it’s drowned the native memories out.
At my shitty red state high school financial literacy was a “life skill class” and only meant for those not looking to attend college.
Wild. That seems incredibly stupid, but incredibly stupid is very on-brand for the US education system lmao.
I’ll take that to mean my experience was very much not standard, then.
I had math, history, science, and English class with Spanish or French (one foreign language). None of those taught me anything as useful as your class.
Did anyone here watch American Pie? I thought the benefit of this instrument is clear from that movie.
That is a flute. This is a recorder. It’s just not the same putting it up there.
Isn’t she using a “flûte traversière” in that movie (not sure of the English name, “sideways flute”?).
Possible, don’t remember exactly. But the principle should be the same, right?
Yes yes, though I always imagined she had to take it apart because the parts you finger would definitely be a no-go.
The parts you finger can’t easily be removed.
Oh you meant the flute, not the girl.
Now that its 10 years since I last set foot in a school, I hold three opinions about the public school system (in Germany; check yourself what applies to your country):
- Schools are an institution where adolescents are detained during the day, so their parent(s) can work and not worry about their children setting fire to the city.
- A lot of the curriculum doesn’t prepare you for life. And it’s not meant to. Instead it forces you to engage with a topic for a longish period of time without the possibility to quit. That is supposed to allow you to see if you find the problems that topic poses interesting and if you like finding solutions for these problems.
- Schools should put more emphasis on life skills.
Pleasant memories. The asshole next to blew as hard as he could point blank to my ear. Fuck I hate those things.
I got detention for a week because when one of my classmates did this to me I hit him with mine.
No ragerts.
One assault for another
My guy, they’re 6 to 8. It’s not time to learn that mess
Yeah kids aren’t going to engage with something like that if they’ve never seen a bill in their lives, or even had their own money to spend. Music is universal, and 6 to 8 is exactly the age when they can start developing talent.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t know of any 1st grade classes teaching financial literacy, nor high school classes focusing on how to play a recorder.
I did have a few weeks that focus on domestic finances in 8th grade. That almost nobody paid attention to. So there’s at least one school that did both 20 years ago…
They did teach us financial literacy.
If you found it important as a reasonably intelligent adult you could teach yourself basic financial literacy in an afternoon.
I agree. A lot of people don’t know where to start, though. And there is a lot of bad information out there.
OP yearns for the boot of capital
All education should be about creating productive citizens for the state!
Education should inform us how to least get fucked by the state and capitalism.
You mean like teaching children the basics of musical theory and practice so they learn they can to enjoy life and create art without paying for it?
Or like how to have enough money for food, shelter, and other essentials.
Obviously it’s impossible to do both.
Obviously children have a finite amount of time to study without impacting their own agency too much.
I always found music class to be like a break between other classes. If you would’ve tried to teach me finances in the same timeslot, I would not have learned half of it.
If only education could be a lifelong endeavor instead of something to do until you’re 18.
Bet.
Let them learn music when they’re 19 if they want and focus on important shit at school.
2 mins MS paint
Music is far and away the more worthy subject.
I’ve had co-workers refuse a pay rise because they thought they would lose money due to higher taxes.
Music as a lesson has never once been beneficial outside of a classroom.
One skill is useful for life, the other is useful for the 3 people who intend to go on to study music.
For you, maybe.
Playing music is still my number one coping skill for stress, and still my number one activity that raises my self esteem.
I have done nothing with my music knowledge except enjoy it for myself. Still love it, and am grateful to have discovered I enjoyed playing when I was ten years old from school band. My band teacher was awesome. She encouraged me at a time no other adult did.
School should not be for finding hobbies. It’s bad enough children are denied agency, but to waste time on hobbies that aren’t even relevant to them?
I literally just said it was relevant to me. Im not gonna argue with someone who sees music as a waste of time. Band was an elective. Accounting was also an elective (in high school). I took both.
How would you know what career/life/goal you want to pursue if you don’t try it first at school? Is the purpose of school to teach you how to be an automaton working a dead end job? Cause that’s what it sounds like you want
Also describing music purely as a “hobby” is asinine
You must be some kind of troll. Music literally transforms the structure of your brain, strengthens neural connections, and makes you smarter in every way. If you knew anything about either music or mathematics, you would know the two are fundamentally linked. There are many problems with our society, but too much access to arts and culture definitely is not one of them. Do they even teach music in schools anymore? States have been cutting the curricula to the bone, and the arts have suffered the most.
More note worthy even…
I’ll see myself out.
No. Only CPAs are valuable because only having a high salary matters.
…music teaches you to be a good person; financial literacy teaches you to be a tool…
People will be complaining about percentages and fractions being taught instead of teaching how to do taxes or do a budget. Which leads to the conclusion that people are idiots and it doesn’t matter what you teach them. Other people are not idiots and they use the skills they learnt doing exercises and homework for good stuff but also sometimes for taxes and budgeting.
There is a cross section of smart people who only learned how to do school work and got straight As but failed to understand how that school work applies to real life.
I’ve been in classes with people who were in AP calculus have real difficulty in shop class trying to figure out how much square footage of whatever you needed. These are people who can figure out the area under a curve but fail to calculate a 20% tip.
Which leads to the conclusion that people are idiots and it doesn’t matter what you teach them.
There’s a joke, once you get to college, that freshman year is about unlearning all the crap you were taught in high school.
This isn’t an issue of “stupid people” nearly so much as it is deliberately manipulated and propagandized people.
What they’re taught matters immensely. And one of the more insidious lessons of the Western education system is that schools exist to Stack Rank students, in order to segregate the Smarties from the Dummies and sort the deserving from the undeserving.
I was a bit rude here, true. And I don’t love all the testing and grading. A lot of teaching up to around seventh or eighth grade is putting material in front of kids until it clicks.
But anyway, still a bunch of people will whine that they didn’t learn this very unenjoyable, very specific thing in school while chastising schools for not being enjoyable enough. And chastising schools for teaching things that are the very basis of being able to figure out this very unenjoyable, very specific thing.
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