Sharps and flats continued

I'm seriously going to post a sign in my room that says, "I don't get it!"-Free Zone.

Kids will come up to me, their little laptops in their hands and wail, "I don't get iiit!!!" And my first response is, "Did you read the question?"

When they say, "...noooo..." I just shrug my shoulders.

If I had a back massage for every time I had to say, "What part don't you get?" I would feel a lot more comfortable than I do right now.

I wonder if other teachers I work with have the same problem? Anyone? Anyone? I wonder if we could conduct a multi-discipline approach to asking questions. A Tet-Offensive of problem-solving, if you will.

I tell the kids to ask me a question that helps me help them. Do they even get how to do that?

On to the subject of the post: Flats and Sharps are now not only giving my 6th graders fits, but also the middle and high kids. I decided that whatever the 6th graders could handle, the 7th, 8th and the few 9th graders in the other band could handle.

Turns out they couldn't.

The kids all had fits again, even when I helped them one on one. About fifteen kids stayed during my planning hour, their gym class, to get it done. And when I went home and looked at them, they still weren't done right.

I asked my husband, a science teacher, what he thought. I often ask him for advice, of the sort of, "what would you recommend in this situation?" and he's really good about steering me in a direction that feels comfortable. So I asked him if he thought the worksheet was too hard.

He took one glance at it and said, wow, that's exactly what the standardized tests in science look like. Exactly. (With emphasis.)

I said, "Oh, really??"

He explained that in science you are given a set of information, often a table or graph, and asked to find information or fill in something based on that information. In other words, the answers are given, you just have to find them, reinterpret them, or put them together somehow.

He also commented, no, the worksheet is not too hard.

For example, I gave them the following information, quote: "All flats and sharps that appear in a key signature go in order. The order is: Flats: BEADGCF. Sharps: FCGDAEB."

(Raise your hand if you noticed they were opposite order from each other.)

A little while later I wrote, "Notice that in your different key signatures if you have one flat, it is always the first one, B-flat. If you have two, it is the first and second, B-flat and E-flat. You will never have one flat that is a D-flat, for example. Same for sharps—one sharp is always F-sharp, two sharps is always F-sharp and C-sharp, and so on."

I wanted them to tell me what the flats were, in order, if you have a key signature with three of them.

BEA. Right? Does everyone agree? First three flats, in order, are BEA. (Key of E-flat, but we're getting to that.)

Next I gave them a table listing names of keys depending on how many sharps or flats were in the key signature. Below, I wanted them to fill in another table: I set up a column that said "three flats", or "two sharps", or things like that, and then they were to fill in the second column with the flats or sharps in order, and then the third column telling me the name of the key. None of the information was stuff they had to look up on the internet, or in a book. They didn't have to pull it out of thin air.

It was right on the worksheet.

It feels sometimes like I am going out of my mind trying to figure out why the kids don't get what they don't get. (Especially when they wail at me, "Miiiiiss, I don't get iiiit!!!")

My husband's comment to me was that kids don't get enough practice with problem-solving skills like this. They don't want to read what they need to read in order to figure out the correct answer, so they skip it, and of course don't get it, and of course do poorly on state science tests.

The other issue is that just like science and math, there are what I like to call Musical Laws of the Universe that don't change. The order of sharps and flats is one such. There are others, like the order of whole- and half-steps on the pentatonic scale, or the fact that an eighth note equals exactly half of a quarter note. These things are Inviolate and Must Be Memorized.

We'll see how long it takes for the last kiddo to get the worksheet done and completed. The 6th grade have had since the 31st, the 7th-8th grade since the 5th. Any bets?