I spent a good chunk of this week helping teach a class on music and audio production for Red Hat High, a week long camp for rising 9th graders.
I was very nervous before the class started, as I assume we were under prepared and the students would have trouble with the tools. But that was not the case at all. A few minutes of instructions to get the basic, and they were off running.
The first day or two were mainly getting the students introduced to the tools (Audacity and Hydrogen).
Then after that, we were onto the projects. One of the parts of the camps was that the students are to present what they did over the week tomorrow to all their peers (and parents?). So each student was to prepare 2minutes of audio for the project. They could do pretty much whatever they wanted to. Some wrote pretty sophisticated song patterns in hydrogen, and overdub vocals or freely licensed loops with audacity. Some folks did interviews, or “talk shows”. Pretty high quality output for a week of only a few hours a day (9am-noon everyday).
It was interesting discussing some of the various issues related to copyright and reuse of music with the students, who generally don’t really have to think too much about this.
Spent a few hours today doing a collage/mix/remix of the students work for the presentation tomorrow. I think I managed to learn more than a few things about the tools this week.
We had a pretty good student/teacher ratio (15 students, and typically three teachers [myself, Greg DeKoenigsberg, and a few other folks]). But one things for sure, teach a class of 9th graders will wear you out.