An aspirational goal for teaching (more music)

Andy Narell frequently plays and teaches with young people. Here he is visiting with the UNT steel band, playing with their admirable jazz ensemble. Everyone here is making music at a high level, but compare the affect–expressions, body language, everything–of the kids on the left side of the screen (who are actually wearing uniforms, symbols of identity suppression and servility) with those on the right (who are not). Which would you like your students to display?

How do we make this happen in, say, a statistics class?

Author: Michael O'Hare


6 thoughts on “An aspirational goal for teaching (more music)”

  1. Well, there’s also a difference between sitting and standing, so the comparison is a bit apples and oranges. When you see the brass sections in those southern university “step” bands that take the field at halftime, the trumpet and sax and trombone players get into it.

  2. The best statistics course I ever taught was one in which I gave each student a single state’s data on homicides (from a multi-year data set of the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data). It included such variables as age, sex, and race of victim(s) and, if known, offender(s): weapon; circumstance; month and year of occurrence; victim-offender relationship; etc. The students’ job was to go through their data set and write a report, for their governor, on the homicide problem in their state.

    I likened it to a “studio” course, where the instructor looks over the shoulder of the student and suggests, “Maybe you should make the sky a bit bluer over here,” but instead of color, suggesting different ways to slice and dice the data. They would present their analyses to their classmates frequently through the semester, and since all of them were dealing with similar problems but with different data and using a different sequence of methods, they all learned a lot of statistics and how to present them to an audience.

  3. Well. This happened to a … very, very good friend of mine. (ahem) She showed up for jury duty – as one is forced, I mean privileged, to do – and accidentally got put on as an alternate. That isn’t the bad part.

    The bad part was … there were two co-defendants in a homicide case. The jurors were told that one defendant’s blood match was a “million to one” match, and one was a “billion to one” match. The hapless juror had forgotten pretty much all the statistics she’d learned in a one year graduate course, and she didn’t get to deliberate anyway.

    Both got convicted. Alternate Juror was left feeling rather non-great about the whole thing.

    So, I would argue that there are probably a lot of real world examples one could use in a classroom, and a murder trial might not be a bad way to go about it.

    Plus, if you want to do a good deed for the world … make a Schoolhouse Rock version of this. I am not kidding. I don’t think this should be left to lawyers, and it shouldn’t be done from scratch every single time somebody gets killed. Which is *what is happening now.*

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