Schneiderman 1 Rebecca Schneiderman Mrs.

Thomas 1102-065 April 7, 2014 How Music Affects Our Education For thirteen years you go to school for seven hours, then come home and do homework, projects, papers, etc. If you go to college, your classroom instruction gets shorter but your studying time gets longer. Teachers just seem to pile on the work without any hesitation. Maybe you have three tests in a week or two papers due the same day; the question is; how do you study? Do you listen to music? Will that help you focus better? Will listening to music make you work harder or be more productive? As a freshman college student, I have had to change the way I work and study drastically from high school or before. In high school I would have max two hours of homework and studying for test was just not a thing. In college I have minimum two hours of homework and if I dont study, I will probably fail the test. When I am in the library or in my dorm studying, I seldom listen to music. If I do, it has to be calm music that I may or may not know the words to, or classical music that has no words. When I do listen to music while I study it is because it is not quiet enough. I struggle with the fact that music is distracting but so is the silence. In elementary, middle and high school many teachers would play classical music while teaching or during a test. This goes off the theory of the Mozart Effect. Does it work? Or is it just psychological? Does music or classical music specifically make you more focused and diligent in your work? Or is it all just a myth?

Schneiderman 2 Education, learning and studying affects us for so many years, and so does music. Music plays a role in just about everything we do. From movies, to the radio, to a ringtone on your cellphone, music is always there. Chris Brewer, from Johns Hopkins School of Education and author of Music and Learning says herself, Music is a powerful tool for our personal expression within our daily lives-- it helps set the scene for many important experiences. At what point is adding music into ones learning experiences too much personal expression, and not enough standardization? In a survey that I conducted, seventy percent of the participants ranging from college freshman to seniors prefer to listen to music. The other thirty percent was split in half between no or sometimes. The type of music was a wide variety and not one genre I could pin point out. Most of the participants said that the reason they listen to the music that they listen to while studying is because it keeps them focused. Whether it is focused on the music and not the background noise, or if it helps keep them calm or even if it just helps them zone everything out, the reasons vary. I feel that this a form of personal expression. This is a topic that affects people of all ages. Music is everywhere, and most people are life long learners. Many doctors, psychologist, teachers and parents try to find out what will help them and/or their kids do well in school. What will help them make the grades? Jonathan Berger, PhD, associate professor of music at Sanford University and a musician says, Music engages the brain over a period of time, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention. The research study at Sanford University reported their findings seen in an fMRI of ten men and eight women while listening to

Schneiderman 3 classical music. Their results identified two distinct neural networking systems very active in two separate areas of the brain. They found that the right side of the brain was also significantly more active than the left side. The fMRI showed peak brain activity occurring during a short period of silence between musical movements - when seemingly nothing was happening. Other studies have also shown that listening to any type of music can be stimulating to the brain it has been shown to improve memory, reaction time or spatial skills, on all cognitive test. Is it real? Does Mozart music make you smarter? If not, what is all the hype about it? Much of my research does not prove or disprove the Mozart effect. It instead said that any type of stimulating music before doing work would improve the work that needed to be done. The Mozart effect is old. It would make sense that it would be true, if music were the most stimulation of that kind. Nowadays we have computers, TVs, phones, radios, etc. We have constant stimulation. Maybe when we study or are in class we need that quiet time. But maybe the quiet is distracting. Many teachers such as Bonnie Baer-Simahk, teacher and writer for Responsive Classroom, advocate about ideas on how to integrate music into the classroom. There is so much information crammed into curriculums, learning just is not as much fun anymore. Music is fun. Learning is fun. If teachers and educators could figure out a way to integrate the two together, learning would be even more fun! Some of her ideas include music in the morning, to get the classroom alive; using songs to reinforce content such as multiplication tables; music for transitions, to making lining up easier; and songs as ritual, to celebrate grades, holidays and birthdays. Baer-Simahk says, we live in a musical worldand in our classrooms and schools, all children can be given the

Schneiderman 4 opportunity to discover and develop an appreciation of music and how it brings people together. What if life was grey and silent? Would you be able to focus and get your work done? Would you be able to learn, retain the information and be more knowledgeable? Would you enjoy life? To answer all of these questions: probably not. Music makes life interesting and fun. Music gives life energy and spunk. Music, when integrated into classroom learning or studying, makes learning more fun. To certain people, music helps them focus. Are you dumber than the person who listens to music while studying? Certainly not. It is just a preference. Music is everywhere in life, but somehow it got eliminated from education. So, lets put it back.