LJ Idol Season 8, week 33, ensemble

[imafarmgirl]

As part of my degree I needed three credits in some kind of art; literature, music, theater, it didn’t matter exactly which I chose. I decided on introduction to music. It looked like it was laid out to be a music appreciation class. The benefits were that it was online in the summer, making it easy to squeeze in around work hours. Also, I had

Comments

[notodette]

I like this professor. I'm betting he doesn't allow wiki for his upper level courses.

[imafarmgirl]

I sure hope not!

[soprano1790]

No no... That must be your professor. We were never allowed to use wikipedia or any online source that's not found in our school's databases. Music is actually highly academic. It's treated like any other subject such as lieteraure or history. Your professor is interesting...

[the_day_setup]

That seriously *is* one nice professor

[the_day_setup]

...Aside from allowing fundamental terminology definitions from certain books, I actually have a *no* sources policy in most of my undergrad courses that require papers. I know that sounds screwy, but most of what I do concerns analysis, and the students need to do their own analytical work. I can usually tell in a second when a student has consulted an outside source in their "analysis," because they start using terminology that they are in no way able to understand at their level, even with maybe 4-6 semesters of prior theory background under their belts.

And we *definitely* ban the use of Wikipedia. :)

[the_day_setup]

It also occurs to me, finally, that what you're probably assigned to write is effectively a personal reaction paper. Those are pretty common in appreciation courses and don't require significant degrees of scholarly rigor. They're more like journal entries.

(ok, I'll shut up after this)

[imafarmgirl]

We had to write a biography which covered terms like musical influence, musical legacy, setting in life, motive, melody, rhythm, and a few other musical terms I can't remember off hand. So we wrote the bio and listened to some of the works to critique them. I did a combo of books for that part and my own opinion, making it clear which was which.

[halfshellvenus]

I think one of the big differences here is that you're attending a music-appreciation class for non-majors. Music majors themselves would use more technical sources (textbooks, etc.), but such resources are also full of additional terminology that is basic to musicians and typically foreign to non-musicians

[imafarmgirl]

The course is required for music majors as well. He did go over a lot of the vocabulary and that was our whole first test, plus using the vocabulary words in all of our papers and discussion board posts.

Regardless of what he thought about my skills a professor should always assume that I can perform to the same degree as sighted students, because I can with occasional accommodations. Otherwise he's just dumming down my degree.

[imafarmgirl]

I should also add, just for educational purposes, that there is Braille music, but that's something a music major would learn. Also most books from the library can be gotten from the publisher on etexts now. The school writes to the publisher and requests them for their disabled students. Also books can be scanned into a computer and read by a program that reads out loud the scanned words as long as they are text. This software is costly, but I do have it and a portable scanner so I can easily do work and school.

Hope this helps a little. It is difficult to get books in braille but I can get them in text format and read them on a Braille display if I wanted.

[mstrobel]

I took a lot of film classes at uni, and I remember being surprised at some of the resources we were allowed to use - websites and wikipedia and a lot of books which were more "fannish" than educational! I was a science student and I was used to everything being super serious, journal articles and text books only!

[imafarmgirl]

It's sort of a nice change in a way. I found the final paper easy to write. I hope I did okay on it.