Little drummer boys & girls
Love students learn skills from Infinity instructor during in-class sessionsBy Dave Emke demke@post-journal.com
Article Photos
To some elementary school teachers, the idea of arming a class full of students with an arsenal of percussion instruments might sound like the plotline of their worst nightmares.
For three teachers at Love Elementary School in Jamestown, it is sweet music to their ears.
Representing the Infinity Performing Arts Program, instructor T.R. McKotch has been visiting classrooms at Love for the past three weeks to both share his expertise in the art of hand drumming and help students learn some valuable life skills in the process.
While he has been helping students with reading skills in third- and fourth-grade classrooms, helping kindergartners with their listening and comprehension skills, and working with them all on personal traits such as self-esteem and creativity, McKotch says the chance to work inside Love has been just as enriching for him.
''This is a very amazing school,'' he said. ''The students are really into it, and the teachers are very into not just this but the kids - you can see that they are here because they want to be here. It makes it a lot different working with the kids.''
A WHOLE NEW EXPERIENCE
Though McKotch had visited elementary schools in Jamestown in the past, he said those had primarily been end-of-the-year visits, just as recreational activities with students. This month's program represented the first time he came into a classroom in the effort to use his drumming in conjunction with teachers' lessons, he said.
In visits with cooperating teachers Adriana Cammarata, Christina Spontaneo and Roslyn Sisley-Kazelunas, McKotch discovered that he would be working in classroom environments where his drumming would be incorporated with storybooks, poetry and creative language - an idea with which he was unfamiliar, but he was willing to try.
''It's a good challenge for me, because as you get set in your ways, you aren't always conscious of any new things,'' McKotch said.
Using an old musician's technique of ''playing by ear,'' McKotch quickly tweaked his approach to fit in with what the teachers were looking to accomplish in their classrooms.
''I came in at first just teaching the rhythms that I know, the same old routine,'' he said. ''Then we had to incorporate the poetry and I had to find a rhythm that is simple enough but yet can hold the poem.''
In the third- and fourth-grade classrooms, Ms. Spontaneo and Mrs. Sisley-Kazelunas worked with the students with a poem called ''Africa,'' extolling the continent's landscape and heritage. To complement the students' reading of the work, McKotch chose a drum rhythm called the shiko, a Nigerian beat used to celebrate a harvest.
As students took turns reading the poem aloud while others drummed along, Ms. Spontaneo said the readers were learning skills including fluency and expression in reading, intonation, accentuation and vocabulary. McKotch, meanwhile, says they are learning to find their voice, be it through the drums or through the spoken word.
''Over the weeks, I've seen some of the kids who are more soft-spoken and who don't want to speak up be more willing to project their voices,'' McKotch said.
DRUMMING AND DANCING
In Mrs. Cammarata's kindergarten class, McKotch holds Brian Pinkney's picture book ''Max Found Two Sticks'' high. He reads through as the book's title character takes his sticks and bangs out rhythms on buckets, boxes and garbage cans, leading the class to imitate the beats on the drums he provides each day.
In between pages and drum beats, McKotch stops repeatedly to ask the class questions.
''Do you remember what Max has drummed on? How many marching bands did Max see?''
If McKotch hasn't had formal experience working with children in this capacity, it is difficult to tell. He seems to have little difficulty keeping the often fidgety, occasionally distracted little ones engaged and active as he turns through the pages and keeps them drumming through Max's adventure.
''I've always had really good interaction,'' McKotch said of his past work in the schools when compared to this new experience in the classroom. ''This is just a different scenario, a different gig.''
After he gets the correct responses to his questions and finishes the story, McKotch leads the students in an exercise he refers to as ''call and response,'' in which he plays a beat called the kpanlogo, a recreational rhythm from Ghana, and asks the children to play it back.
The results are mixed, but the efforts are certainly spirited. The children put just as much excitement behind other drumming games, including listening exercises where they close their eyes and try to match what McKotch's hands are doing based only upon the noises they hear coming from his drum.
Action truly picks up, however, when McKotch asks the students to demonstrate what they learned when Infinity dance instructor Nicole Ten Eyck visited the school on Feb. 12 to share cultural dances with the classes. While some of the students were hesitant to enter the center of the drum circle to dance, a handful were more than willing to channel another culture through dance.
Moving in time to the drum-playing of their peers and of McKotch, the kindergarten dancers moved their arms and legs in a dance that represented the capture and harvest of fish, they explained afterward. McKotch said that the ability to incorporate dance into the lesson gave the youngsters one more lens through which to explore music and language.
''With the traditional rhythms, you have the song, the drum and the dance,'' McKotch said. ''It's just part of the traditional ceremonies, and it gave (the kids) that outside element and let them experience the energy of drumming more than sitting in a circle in a classroom.''
A CHANCE TO LEARN
Shane Hawkins, Infinity Performing Arts director, said that funding for the program - as for all of Infinity's daytime, in-school programming - comes from BOCES cooperative-service funding. With the funding, Infinity provides programs at Love, Jamestown Public Schools middle schools and Jamestown High School.
''Our goal is to make music and the arts accessible to all students, regardless of race, religion, neighborhood or ability to pay,'' Ms. Hawkins said.
McKotch's program at Love School has received very positive feedback, and Infinity may be looking to expand it in the future.
''We are extremely pleased with the student response and positive development of the original idea,'' Ms. Hawkins said. ''We look forward to expanding this program to other schools and developing new ideas to present at Love and other area schools.''
Among some of the development of the original idea at Love has included recordings of the student drumming and readings in Ms. Spontaneo's class. Those recordings were edited in GarageBand and were developed into a podcast - both the students' and McKotch's first dabbling with the technology, they reported.
The four-week program will come to an end Tuesday, and it is clear to see that everyone who has been involved with it has learned a lot from the experience. The children in the classrooms at Love have learned from it and McKotch, saying that he has had to put the lessons together on a week-to-week basis and evolve with the program as it develops, said that he is better for the opportunity as well.
''It's good to constantly be thinking, even at 40,'' he said.
For more information about McKotch and his hand drumming workshops, which are often available for the public, visit myspace.com/universalhanddrumming.
