Percussion (includes psychology)

When I am helping the bands at Pilgrim Park Middle School, I mainly help the percussion, since I know absolutely nothing about how to play a wind instrument . They are having a very hard time keeping a steady beat, and are not playing the right rhythms. There is one eager boy who spends the class time randomly hitting multiple drums in no particular pattern, but does not feel the need to change what he is doing.

Now that I know the students more, I have decided that I am going to get very hands on, and make sure that the percussion no longer drags, or plays without good taste. I have to be honest... I am no percussionist, but I grabbed a pair of sticks and played so loud, that the students had no choice but to listen to me.

Mistakes were made, but the students didn't need to know that. I also helped them count the beat with mnemonic devices. Mnemonic devices are ways to make information easier to retrieve after it has been encoded. In music classes, most people are familiar with Mississippi-Hot-Dog as a way to remember how sixteenth notes sound, or, my personal favorite: "Oh I like chicken with lots of gravy" for popular Afro-Cuban rhythms, and these percussion students are no exception to that fact of psychology.