Journal #4: Cross-harp Style

I planned to go through sections three & four of my textbook this week but I decided to just go through one for two reasons, the first I will point out first, and leave the 2^nd for later: This cross harp style of the blues lesson was rather difficult and I was left confused.

In the last lesson, I spoke of my fear of having the wrong type of harmonica and decided it would be fine. But after reading further, the need for a C harp seemed to be really important because I don’t have the right tools to understand the lesson. So here is the idea I had after this lesson for a research project:

(1) Not having the right tools to perform the task can make it more difficult.  Like playing basketball without basketball shoes, not having the right calculator in math class or not having the correct edition of a book in class.  How does this affect the learner?

            For me, it harmed my ability to do the task because I felt like I already couldn’t             complete the task, and further, I did not understand.  This also goes into a problem             of not having an experienced harmonica player available to me.

This chapter had me playing a song called “Red River Valley,” for which I had to listen to before I could get a handle on it.  The book said this song was rather easy to understand, but I had never heard of the song and that just made it difficult.  This got me on a search of other songs on the Internet that I might be able to play. 

The search led me to harptabs.com where I was able to search for songs that I was able to play and knew the tune to. After the search of a few songs I was led to  “Auld Lang Syne” which I picked up and was able to make the tune known to me! That was very excited.  My friends and I like to have a new years party and play music together, so I thought maybe this would be my coming out party with the harmonica. 

This idea made me really excited about the harmonica again, and helped me not get so bogged down by the textbook I was reading.  This leads me to another thought on what a research project could be about:

(2) How, if students can see a reward or purpose at the end of the lesson, then they are more inclined to push through the hard parts (or the tedious) aspects of that lesson.

One more point I’d like to make about this lesson, and the culmination of all these lessons is the amount of vocabulary involved in my textbook and the need to be able to read music.  This lead me to perhaps my favorite, and best idea, about what I might do my research project on:

(3) If vocabulary is too difficult for students (or the reading level is beyond their comprehension) how that affects learning. 

           

            While it obviously affects it negatively, I wonder this because it affects my English             classroom. If I give students a ‘too hard text’ and ask them to push through it, what will             my results be? What is the proper amount of “difficult words” to put in a text? There             seems to be a fine line here between feeding students what they already know and             overwhelming them with new ideas.

Final Point – I decided not to do the fourth section of this book because it involves how to “Jam” with other instruments. One of the members of my old band is coming into town this week and I think I’d like to try to jam with him.  I’ll use my drums/bongos mostly but I think this could be a good opportunity to pull out a new song with my harmonica and give it a go for about 15-20 minutes.