I asked my Aunt Mary, active music education advocate and singer in the Madison-based band Rosewood, to do some research on a local music booster group of which she has been a member for many years: the Madison Music Association. Oddly enough, her name also lends well to my attempts at alliteration...

A few summers ago I was out in my backyard planting flowers when I heard a curious hammering sound. It sounded like construction but too specific and metered. (My husband and his brother spend their lives on building sites: I know what construction sounds like.) For the next few weeks I heard this sound from time to time and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was. I cannot remember how I finally became enlightened to the fact (or who told me), but it turned out to be a woodblock metronome belonging to the marching band, the newest part of the music program at Madison High School. I was very excited to have them practicing so close to my house, mainly because I was in marching band in high school and have many fond memories of those days of practice and football games. However, I could not believe that our high school (that I knew was filled with so many talented teens) did not have a marching band before this summer.

I had been a member of the Madison Music Association (MMA), a non-profit corporation, for many years, since my oldest was in first grade. In fact, I was the MMA liaison between the elementary school and the high school. I had only attended a few meetings, so it made sense that I had no idea we didn’t have a marching band. By the time the year was over, that new marching band leader took those kids from beginners to award-winning marchers. It was amazing to see what a little passion, and a lot of hard work, had created. 

The MMA was established sometime in the 1970s primarily to supplement the music program. I have seen it transform over the last 10 years and in particular the last 3 years it has become a phenomenal force in the Madison public school system. The goal in the by-laws of the MMA is to create a meaningful relationship between the parents, students, music and arts faculty, and the public. It supports the students, faculty and all the visual and performing arts programs of the Madison Public Schools, kindergarten through twelfth grade. The organization constantly provides assistance and encouragement, along with financial assistance to applicants of the summer music program and aid in defraying administrative expenses associated with arts education.

The MMA officers are a group of parents of Madison K-12 students currently participating in any of the music or art programs. The officers include a president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer with 1-year terms. The past few years, the MMA has been working on getting itself more well-known. It has been low-profile for a long time but through hard work and advertising with posters, banners, websites it has come a long way.

It's just $20 to support arts education in Madison schools and become a member of MMA.

Let me tell you, I have been the membership coordinator for over 7 years and have watched membership go from paper to electronic. I spent many a summer stapling and stamping to get those membership packets out in time for the August mailing before school starts. Now you can get the membership form online (see below), print it out and send in your dues!

The greatest thing about music in schools is that it encourages so many great values and principles. Rehearsal is the most abundant aspect of music, and it instills principles like hard work, dedication, the importance of practice, and the drive for perfection, while at the same time teaching kids that if something isn’t perfect, it's OKAY! I have never had a music educator who stresses perfection over expressing emotion and having fun.

Since there are so many, I’m going to break down the benefits of music education into two aspects: emotional and practical.

All-in-all, there are many clinically proven benefits to music education, as well as those observed first-hand by teachers and students in the field. Music education has given me so much and has provided me with skills I continue to use today.

Welcome to Musical Madness March! The theme of many of the posts and articles this month will be specifically based on music education. There have been countless proven benefits that music education can provide, from improved language ability and spatial intelligence to better performance (pardon the pun) on standardized tests, all while teaching the value of hard work and perseverance. According to The Telegraph, choir singing “boosts your mental health” even more than playing a team sport does! Larger vocabularies, better overall academic performance, and bigger paychecks are just some of the measurable long-term benefits, not counting the friendships made that last a lifetime or other qualitative benefits.

Over the next four weeks, you can look forward to posts like the ones below, all with contributions from past and present music educators and students!
- The benefits of music education and its impact on kids (with input from music educators as well as past and current students)
- The impact of extra-curricular musical activities on students, educators, and the school community
- A look inside one of New Jersey's premier children's choirs, the New Jersey Youth Chorus
- The long-term effects of music education on career path and educational attainment
- A look at the impact music education has on the community at large.
- The impacts of musical education from a mom's perspective

I have taken input from over several dozen current and past students and educators and will be featuring first-hand accounts of their experience with music education. Several guest authors will also be making contributions as well!

This whole month will culminate in the unveiling of a new portion of TheOxfordObserver.com, so stay tuned!

Introducing a new page on Taylor Mali, teacher and hilarious poet who does educationally-themed poems! Read more...

I recently watched two different TED videos (below) on the blog Collective Evolution that play off each other nicely. The first was by Sir Ken Robinson, whose talk has been viewed over 5,000,000 times on YouTube and many more on TED's website. Sir Robinson raised some interesting points about mavericks who, going through the system now, would now have been classified as ADHD or with some other learning disorder. The second was by 13 year old kid named Logan whose parents decided to pull out of traditional schooling after they saw Sir Robinson's video.

Most of the schools around the world today are, as Sir Robinson puts it, modeled after the industrial revolution. "The Arts", the subjects most likely to get you a well-paying job (by today's standards), are always pushed to the bottom of the list. This is because society forgets to value happiness and healthiness, something Logan has been put back in touch with. So how do we solve this problem? One word: individualism.

America is often thought to be similar to the Roman Empire in many different ways, including in their far-reaching influence and patterns of societal development. The Roman Empire cannot boast to having as many academic innovators as their Greek predecessors. This is surprising considering the Greeks even had their own Dark Ages, where they lapsed into a sort of post-literate world without a written language after the Dorian invasion around 1200 BC. Why then did the Greeks produce so many notable academic pioneers?

While the Roman culture was very much a collectivist culture, the Greeks were champions of individualism. Nowhere is this more evident than in their naming structures.

Roman names had three parts: a praenomen (child name), a nomen (family name) and a cognomen (nickname). There were only about 10 praenomen in the entire Roman world, so as a result they were abbreviated with one letter. The nomen was a family name, passed down throughout generations. "Julius" for example, is the nomen of Julius Caesar (whose full name is Gaius Julius Caesar, or G. Julius Caesar). The cognomen, or nickname, was generally given to one person because of a feat or physical feature and was then passed down to his children and other descendants. "Brutus" ("brute" or "dullard") is a great example of a cognomen, given to Lucius Junius because he apparently feigned stupidity to avoid his uncle Tarquin's wrath. Females took the feminine form of their family name and were differentiated by words which would indicate which number child she was ("Julia Tertia" would have been Caesar's third daughter). In complete contrast, Greek names were individual to each person and passed down only on occasion.

It would stand to reason then, that individualizing education is the road to a more successful system, but that's common sense, right? It would stand to reason that we have to redirect the focus of education from comparing different students' standardized test scores to seeing how many innovators come from each system.

The question then is the biggest one facing educators, parents and society today: "How?"

Yours truly,
James McManus
The Oxford Observer
Sierra Company, Class of 2016