Mary Had a Little Misfire...

It occurred to me that when I assigned my beginning strings students the task of figuring out "Mary Had a Little Lamb (MHALL)" by ear, not everyone would succeed.  I expected that, and told the students that while I didn't expect it to be perfect that I did at least expect some progress from each of them.  What I had not counted on was to have 90% of my students come back whining about how hard it was and how they didn't know how and couldn't do it and it was so unfair.

Really?

Apparently I'm just a mean music teacher who wants to see my kids fail.

Wait, what?

Since I gave my students the starting pitch (F#), and told them it only used the three notes they knew at that point, I kind of thought that they would be able to at least get a rough idea of how the song went.  Especially after we sang it together several times in class, and I had a fairly solid feeling that everyone knew how MHALL went. 

So it looks like next week we will be discussing two things - the importance of sticking with an assignment, regardless of how daunting it may be, and how you can make a pretty good guess about what the next note in a song is just by knowing if it is higher or lower than the previous one.  Especially when you only have three choices. 

Now, in all fairness, not everyone complained, not everyone came in with tales of how impossible the given task was.  I actually had a handful of kids who could play MHALL or some approximation.  That's exactly what I was looking for, just a starting point to get them playing using the new notes they had just learned.  There were a few kids who, when asked to play what they had figured out, froze in the spotlight and couldn't seem to remember how to hold their instrument.  We'll work on that later.  For right now, I want to get the rest of the group up to speed on actually attempting an assignment rather than either giving it two or three halfhearted minutes and giving up or just not trying at all and giving me some lame excuse.

I hate lame excuses. (I forget where I picked it up, but I have been known to tell students "Excuses are like armpits.  Everyone has one and they usually stink!")

Next week I am going to teach everyone "Hot Cross Buns" and have them attempt to figure that out by ear.  This time, though, I will give them some more structure, spend some time dealing strictly with the rhythm of the song and have that written out for them to refer to. I might even given them a sheet with the rhythm written out and blanks for them to fill in the note names. 

We'll see how that goes.