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Notes meet numbers
By LORRI HELFAND, Times Staff Writer Beth Argiro's gifted students dashed to their seats at musical keyboards and slid on headphones. They fiddled with knobs and started to tap out a few simple tunes until Argiro gently pulled them back to task with a few basic drills. They wiggled their fingers in the air and stroked groups of black keys across the electronic keyboard.
These second- through fourth-graders at Academie Da Vinci charter school for the arts in Dunedin are learning music. But they're also learning math. Argiro alternates musical interludes with basic math to improve her student's performance in both disciplines. "I think if you include the math along with the lesson it makes it even better," she said. "There's no way you can teach music without math." Argiro breaks up the piano lessons with math exercises. The beginning piano book numbers the fingers that students are supposed to use for each song, so Argiro often incorporates those numbers in her drills. She'll ask her students to add up the numbers measure by measure or line by line or solve multiplication and division problems on flash cards. Or, for complicated problems, she'll head to the whiteboard at the front of the room to work through the exercises with them. The kids don't know what effect the music has on their math skills, all they know is that they're having a good time. "It's the same as regular math, but you can do it with fun stuff like a keyboard," said fourth-grader Artie Ellis, 9. Argiro, 43, is a seasoned musician who has played viola with the Virginia Symphony and currently performs with the Tampa Bay Composers' Forum string quartet. Her first musical/math lessons began last school year, so she admits they're a work in progress. She gleans math training tips from several sources and recently attended a seminar by Project MIND, which stands for Math Is Not Difficult. Academie Da Vinci offers a comprehensive art program, and all students take drama, ballet, visual arts, chorus and violin or keyboard instruction. Argiro and principal Reina Mora-Blackwelder came up with the musical math lessons and kicked it off with a $400 grant from the Florida Association for the Gifted, which covered the first four keyboards. A few months later, the school received a $47,000 grant from the Public Charter School Federal Grant Program to share Argiro's lessons and several other programs with other charter schools. About $2,000 of the money went to buy 20 keyboards divided between Academie Da Vinci and Athenian Academy Greek immersion charter school. For this school year, she received a $1,000 grant from the Pinellas County Arts Council's Arts Teacher Incentive Grants program to purchase music stands, sheet music and piano books. The math and the music are a natural fit, Argiro said. "They go hand in hand. If a child studies the keyboard or piano, it actually helps them to score better on achievement tests in math," Argiro said. Some research seems to back up her viewpoint. According to a University of California, Irvine study in the March 1999 issue of the journal Neurological Research, children given four months of piano keyboard training and playtime with new math software scored 27 percent higher on proportional math and fractions tests than other children. That includes children who took English language instruction on the computer and played with the math software as well as children who had neither piano lessons nor experience with the math software. According to Dr. Frances H. Rauscher, an associate professor of cognitive development at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, there are music education benefits on certain math skills when lessons are pursued early on. She studies the effects of musical instruction on spatial intelligence, or the ability to comprehend and interpret visual information. "We find that the children who are given instruction in piano, singing or rhythm score higher on mathematical reasoning tests than kids that are given computer or no instruction," said Rauscher, who was part of a 1997 research team at UC at Irvine on preschool children. Similar improvement has been noted in elementary students with piano training only, she said. But lessons need to begin by the second grade, and they need to go on for at least two years, she said. However, Argiro may see results because she's teaching math and music concurrently rather than separately, Rauscher added. Dr. Joan Newman, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Albany, said Argiro was practicing good teaching by adding variety to the lesson, but that the research linking music and math skills is not strong. "There's absolutely no convincing evidence that music training improves math performance," she said.
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From the Times North Pinellas desks Letters |
