The Smart Guide to Resourcing - an addendum
An addendum to my last posting on strategies for music education resourcing. I did want to say something about headphones.
Story 1: Not long ago, I was working in a local school where the head of music would round off her day by gathering up all the headphones, untangling them and wrapping the cables up tidily, repair the broken arms with gaffer tape and try to do something about the disintegrating foam pads that covered the earpieces. She had two boxes – one for working headphones and one for broken ones. By the end of the term the latter box contained the lion’s share, so she would then scour the catalogues to find out the cheapest option for replacing the defective headsets.
A significant part of any lesson time, which involved the use of headphones, was spent sorting out what to do about the students who weren’t lucky enough to get a working pair…
Story 2: I was called into a primary school to lead some musical activity using iPads. 30 eager kids and 15 shiny new iPads and we were ready to go. I outlined the activity and the pupils responded immediately and set down to work…within seconds a forest of hands. Nobody could hear anything – the sounds from surrounding iPads and the ‘ambient’ classroom noise was a real problem. When I suggested to the teacher that we were going to have to use headphones, it transpired that there were none available….
These stories are sadly widespread and typical, but both have an obvious solution. It is the case that practically every secondary school pupil will have a set of earphones in their pockets or their bags. It is also the case that most primary school pupils will have a pair of headphones at home…. time to make use of these!
The next iPad lesson went much better. The pupils all arrived with their headphones ranging from large pink fluffy ones that looked like earmuffs to cool minimalist types. The school simply provided the headphone splitters and we were away.
We need to stop thing of headphones as specifically a music lesson resource for which the music department has a responsibility to provide. They need to be thought of as an essential generic item [like the biro, and roughly the same price for a basic set] which becomes something the student brings with them to school. Yes, there will always be the odd student who forgets to bring them in, but we can have a few large clunky sets to use on these occasions.
And who knows, this may in time become the thin end of a wedge – looking forward to the days when students are allowed to bring into schools the mobile devices they usually plug their headphones into!