Bridging the Gap Ma Teaching (music) Dissertation

BRIDGING THE GAP

Chapter One -The Beginning

This dissertation is a description of how I as a music teacher, intended to try and get closer to knowing how my year nine students feel about music and their music lessons. I wanted to be able to revitalize their music lessons by updating a small part of the year nine curriculum in order to enable me to motivate my students more. I wanted to improve the negative attitude that some of my year nine students have towards music lessons. This negativity is demonstrated particularly in the months shortly after they have gone through the GCSE options process, and the majority have decided not to study music at GCSE level. Particularly, I also wanted to bridge the gap between the interests that my pupils have in today's pop music and the knowledge that I have of classical music and popular music, which I know my pupils regard as ‘old hat.' These thought processes had mulled around in my head for more than two years.

I can remember teaching a group of year 9 pupils during the summer term of that year (2003), my NQT year. I did not write any sort of journal entry at the time, but the comments by a year nine class hit home and I began to doubt whether my subject was relevant to them by this stage. I have never forgotten the feeling of inadequacy I had at the time. I had started a project with year nine pupils on music for the moving image. We watched several film clips and replaced the original music with something ‘unsuitable', something that was opposite to the mood than was originally intended. The most interesting of these was the clip from Pretty Woman when the character played by Richard Gere is talking to the hotel manager about his dinner reservation with the character played by Julia Roberts. The original music, a rather slushy and sentimental score intending to represent the restaurant piano player, was replaced with another piece. This piece of music was the shower murder scene music from Psycho. The whole mood of the film clip was changed implying that the Richard Gere character was in fact, hatching a plot to kill the Julia Roberts character. This was supposed to demonstrate to the pupils how film music was there to enhance and define the mood of the visual image. Getting some response from some of the pupils was impossible and a group of girls had quite decided not to do anything at all. When I asked ‘Why?' they answered (my words) ‘This is all such a waste of time, we don't know why we have to do music now when we know we haven't chosen it for GCSE, and it's not useful.'

I was nearly speechless but tried to defend my subject as best I could. I realise now, with a couple of more years of experience that I would be able to deal with the situation better. But quite frankly at the time I did not know what to do. This is what has prompted