A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.

As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”

In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifths. “I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”

In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint. “It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.” Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent.

icedragon1969

markdominus

a < b
  ifTrue: [^'a is less than b']
  ifFalse: [^'a is greater than or equal to b']

if a < b then
  puts "a is less than b"
else
  puts "a is greater than or equal to b"
end

pdcawley

There are a number of well-known systems for classifying people's personalities according to various measures such as introversion-extroversion, and organisations often use these schemes to categorize their staff. Unfortunately, such methods do not capture a number of the most important aspects of an individual within an organisation; any corporate employee knows that whether someone is (for example) extroverted or introverted is much less critical than (say) how important they are. The Lipson-Shiu test attempts to remedy this and other oversights by classifying along four alternative axes:

* Intelligent-Stupid
* Lawful-Chaotic
* Important-Unimportant
* Good-Evil

ICUG (Inventor)

The ICUG is given to solitude and shoe staring. He or she loves little puzzles and is often a good source of off-the-wall, innovative ideas. Best left to their own devices with only occasional steering (example: Leonardo da Vinci)

markdominus

( There is a deeper magic )

When he grasped the completeness of my ignorance and my incompetence he did not gulp or gasp, I'll give him that. He stuck by his own beliefs and went right back to the beginning. He taught me something that I did not understand: the equals sign.

I knew what 2 + 2 = 4 meant. I did not understand however even the rudimentary possibilities that flowed from that. The very thought of an equals sign approximating a pair of scales had never penetrated my skull. That you could do anything to an equation, so long as you did the same to each side, was a revelation to me. My father, never once flinching at such staggering ignorance, moved on.

Then came the second revelation, even more beautiful than the first.

Algebra.

Algebra, I suddenly saw, is what Shakespeare did. It is metonym and metaphor, substitution, transferral, analogy, allegory: it is poetry. I had thought its a's and b's were nothing more than fruitless (if you'll forgive me) apples and bananas.

Suddenly I could do simultaneous equations.