When beginning music teachers enter a new classroom for the first time, they start a journey toward understanding a new context and community. Place consciousness develops as they become embedded in their community and begin to recognize how its culture and environment interact with their teaching practices. By mapping the objects, people, and…

My unit on sound and waves is embedded within a long-term project in which my high school students construct a musical instrument out of common materials. The unit culminates with a performance assessment: students play the first four measures of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"--chosen because of the octave interval of the first two notes--in the key…

Although music educators in training complete a battery of courses pertaining to the playing and teaching techniques of the instruments that will be found in their future classrooms, the intricate details of learning to play and teach the five Western woodwind instruments successfully are at times overlooked in teacher preparation programs.…

The physics of the plucked string has been treated in many articles and books. For our 12th-grade high school physics laboratory, we have built a cheap, simple sonometer apparatus for each pair of students on which they may investigate some interesting phenomena that arise when a string is plucked. Among these are the generation of harmonics…

The central ideas of postcalculus mathematics courses offered in college are difficult to introduce in middle and secondary schools, especially through the engineering and sciences examples traditionally used in algebra, geometry, and trigonometry textbooks. However, certain concepts in music theory can be used to expose students to interesting…

In response to a need for curricular support, the Idaho State Department of Education gathered teams of exemplary educators from throughout the state to write courses of study related to the original five subject areas within Idaho's Achievement Standards. In turn, all of the state's school districts received hard copies as well as online access…