The Educator's Notebook

featured articles

“How Music Primes The Brain For Learning”
Edutopia - 4/22/22

“Consistent exposure to music, like learning to play a musical instrument, or taking voice lessons, strengthens a particular set of academic and social-emotional skills that are essential to learning. In ways that are unmatched by other pursuits, like athletics for instance, learning music powerfully reinforces language skills, builds and improves reading ability, and strengthens memory and attention, according to the latest research on the cognitive neuroscience of music.”
How The Arts Benefit Society: An Interactive Research Synthesis
Mellon Foundation - 5/1/19

“The Arts + Social Impact Explorer is designed as a gateway to research, projects, and support organizations. The goal is to enable people to extract key information at a quick glance, helping users visualize how the arts permeate community life while providing leaders what they need to make visible impact.”
Arts Experiences Improve Writing, Discipline, And Compassion
Brookings - 2/12/19

"We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others. In terms of our measure of compassion for others, students who received more arts education experiences are more interested in how other people feel and more likely to want to help people who are treated badly.”
On Integrating Arts Into The Curriculum
KQED - 1/13/15

"Art is not a second thought at the Integrated Arts Academy (IAA). Instead, artistic learning goals are held up as equals to academic standards and teachers work hard to design lessons that highlight content through art. “If you pick a subject area like science, social studies, math or literacy and you integrate it with an art form, what you do is connect the two and find ways to really integrate the two so they lean on each other,” said Judy Klima, an integrated arts coach at IAA.”
Playing Music Causes (Not Correlates With) Cognitive Improvement
NPR - 11/20/14

“Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices… Several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others.”

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The Rise of the AP Art Portfolio
New York Times - 10/31/14

“Students are tested not by their mastery of the material but by their skill, a far more subjective area of evaluation. “Readers” must make judgments about competence and inventiveness as they work their way through some 48,000 portfolios of student artwork. That’s more than double the number submitted a decade earlier… But the growth does not necessarily signal artistic aspirations. According to a 2007 survey by the College Board, only about 13 percent of the students major in art. So why take A.P. studio? To try to impress a admissions office, of course, or perhaps to make a rest stop along the academic autobahn or, maybe, art really is a labor of love.”

arts

“A Collection Of Antique Book Patterns From Front Or End Papers”
Kottke - 9/20/23
Farhad Manjoo: “I Finally Learned How To Draw. Here’s How.”
New York Times - 9/15/23
Slow Songs Are Now Sad Songs (For Increasingly Sad Teens?)
Honest-Broker - 9/10/23

“I’m told that the top search term at Spotify among teens is “sad.” And it’s more than music. Sadness is so widespread among youngsters (especially teen girls) that the Centers for Disease Control is now tracking it. So we shouldn’t be surprised that music and cultural indicators reflect the same reality… So what songs do sad teens want to hear during a bummer summer?”
“Grown-Up Theater Kids Run The World”
New York Times - 8/20/23

“Well before being appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson participated in theater and improv as an undergraduate at Harvard, and was once paired with Matt Damon — then a student, now a Hollywood actor — in a drama class.”
Close Reading John Williams’ Compositional Techniques For Film (via Indiana Jones)
New York Times - 7/7/23

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School Plays Are Increasingly The Subject Of School Politics
New York Times - 7/4/23
“These Were The Most Performed Plays And Musicals In High Schools This Year”
NPR - 6/5/23
Is Musical Ability Nature Or Nurture? An Initial Study.
Harvard - 3/10/23
Brooks: On The Importance Of Art
New York Times - 3/2/23
Making Music Has Huge Brain Benefits
Boston Globe - 12/21/22
Bringing Music Back Into Schools Helps Heal From The Pandemic
New York Times - 6/19/22
“The War On Music” How Modern Classical Forgot To Sound Good
Wall Street Journal - 6/16/22

“The great virtue of John Mauceri’s “The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century” is that it acknowledges what many writers on the subject know but can’t say: that something went badly wrong in music in the 20th century, and especially after 1945. The time has come, Mr. Mauceri writes, “to ask why so much contemporary music played by our greatest musical institutions—and supported overwhelmingly by music critics—is music that the vast majority of people do not want to hear—and have never wanted to hear.””
Can A.I. Create Art?
The Daily Beast - 6/10/22
How To Read A Still Life: A Beautiful Multimedia Essay
New York Times - 5/8/22
“People Who Attend Cultural Events Are Happier With Their Lives Than People Who Don’t”
ArtNet - 8/26/19
Most Popular High School Plays And Musicals, 2019
NPR - 7/31/19
On The Role Of Dance In The Ancient World
New York Review of Books - 7/20/19
“10 Reasons To Let Your Kid Major In Music”
Forbes - 6/4/17
Yes, The Arts Do Promote Meaningful Creativity
Pacific Standard - 2/11/15
How Music Is (And Isn’t) A Language
Pacific Standard - 2/26/14

cognitive science

Require Music Lessons Already: They Build Focus
Pacific Standard - 7/5/16
Making Art Lowers Stress (In Limited Testing… And Elsewhere?)
Pacific Standard - 6/16/16
A Life Full Of Art: Correlated With Strong Lifelong Cognitive Skills
Pacific Standard - 4/8/15
Music Increases Cognitive Performance b/c of Executive Function
Pacific Standard - 6/18/14

curriculum

“The Mind-Expanding Value Of Arts Education”
New York Times - 5/2/23
Strong Correlation Between Music And Academic Achievement
Psychology Today - 12/2/20
Panelists In Tech Share How The Arts Helped Their Success
EdSurge - 6/12/19
Will The Arts Be The Most Important Subject In The Future?
The Stage - 2/27/19

“The modern world doesn't reward you for what you know, but for what you can do with what you know.”
"Middle School Theater And Music Students Get Better Grades
Pacific Standard - 2/12/19

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On Teaching Music Via The Recorder (Instead Of The Ukulele)
WBEZ - 11/19/17
"The Most Popular High School Plays And Musicals”
NPR - 9/15/17
On The Importance Of Kids Making Art
Atlantic - 7/5/17
A Review Of Research About The Effect Of Arts On Life Health
Createquity - 11/2/16
How Intro to Dance Changed the Life and Career of this CEO
Fast Company - 10/29/14
Arts Education Increases Employment, Decreases Dropping Out
Huffington Post - 10/27/14
Music Benefits Learning in Kids from All Income Backgrounds
Pacific Standard - 9/2/14
Structures in Music Help Us Understand Structures in the World
New Scientist - 2/5/14
Do the Arts Add Economic Value?
Pacific Standard - 11/5/13

stem

DALL-E And Whether AI-Generated Art Will Replace Human Art
Wired - 7/13/22

“The project helped convince him that image-generating AI will lead to an explosion of creativity that permanently changes humanity’s visual environment. “Anything that can have a visual will have one,” he says, potentially upending people’s intuition for judging how much time or effort was expended on a project. “Suddenly we have this tool that makes what was hard to imagine and visualize easy to make exist.” It's too early to know how such a transformative technology will ultimately affect illustrators, photographers, and other creatives. But at this point, the idea that artistic AI tools will displace workers from creative jobs—in the way that people sometimes describe robots replacing factory workers—appears to be an oversimplification.”
A Few Thoughts About Mathematics And Art
The Conversation - 4/27/17
How Did Music Help Shape Modern Science?
New Scientist - 8/25/14

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