rediscovering eden
Who am I, that the Lord of all the earth
Would care to know my name
Would care to feel my hurt
Who am I, that the bright and morning Star
Would choose to light the way
For my ever wandering heart
Not because of who I am
But because of what You've done
Not because of what I've done
But because of who You are
I am a flower quickly fading
Here today and gone tomorrow
A wave tossed in the ocean
A vapor in the wind
Still You hear me when I'm calling
Lord, You catch me when I'm falling
And You've told me who I am
I am Yours, I am Yours
Who Am I, that the eyes that see my sin
Would look on me with love
and watch me rise again
Who Am I, that the voice that calmed the sea
Would call out through the rain
And calm the storm in me
whom shall i fear
whom shall i fear
i am yours
dailies
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
-10:00 PM
Hi all,I know. You're probably thinking: NOT AGAIN! But sorry. This is urgent. It's 1am in the morning and I have to go to bed. Good night!JanelleWhy I decided to choose this topic:
I chose to do this topic because I wanted to answer the question: What, exactly, are the benefits of learning an instrument? I myself learn 3 instruments: Piano, Violin and Clarinet and I knew that there were benefits to learning an instrument, I just didn’t know exactly what. Thus I decided to do my science fair project on this as a study of the benefits of learning an instrument.
Hypothesis:
If a student learns an instrument, then his or her academic performance will be better due to the fact that learning an instrument develops your brain in ways necessary for academic achievement.
Procedure:
Doing an experiment for this topic would take at least a year and a lot of resources which I did not have. I decided instead to do a survey to see if students who took music lessons actually did better academically than those who did not.
However, there were many variables in this survey. I was basing their academic performance on their marks, which could be affected by a lot of different factors, such as the general intellect of the person and their work attitude. Taking into account all these factors, I developed a survey, tested it, and then had it distributed to a few classes of the same age group. Then, I collected the data and analyzed it.
Variables
Independent Variables:
The independent variable in this case was whether or not the student was learning or had learnt an instrument or not.
Controlled Variables:
There were many controlled variables that could affect the grades of the student: The intellectual capacity of the student, the student’s work ethic and attitude, special programs such as enrichment, outside help in the form of tutoring, the student’s previous school and the student’s favourite subject (students tend to do well in the subjects they like).
There were also variables that could affect how much learning an instrument benefited the student such as how often the student practiced, how long the student had been learning an instrument and what instrument he or she was learning.
Dependent Variable: The dependent variable was the student’s grades.
To insure an accurate survey, I put in questions that would help me to understand the background situation more such as: Do you get private tutoring? What programs are you in? How long do you practice on average a week?
That helped me to control the variables and balance everything out as I could see outside factors that might affect the student’s grades and in turn, the results of the survey.
Results:
After graphing the data in a scatter plot in which I compared the scores of students who learned or had learnt an instrument and the scores of those who had never learnt an instrument. I discovered that the scores of those who learned or had learnt an instrument were consistently higher for English, Math and Science as well as the overall mark, which meant that did better academically.
Conclusion:
My results support my hypothesis. At first, because there were so many variables that could affect the result of this survey, I was doubtful of whether the results would be accurate or not. But in the end the result, which was that a student that learns an instrument will do better academically was supported by all the other research I had done which leads me to believe that all the information is correct. All in all, I do think that learning an instrument has countless benefits. So much research has been done that supports this statement that it is impossible to ignore. And I believe that there is still so much more about this topic to discover.
Applications:
This has serious implications on education and the way we teach. For decades, it was thought that the best way to teach was to write things on a board and do as many worksheets as possible so as to drum the content into young heads until it was engraved forever in this brain. That method proved to be rather ineffective at times. But now that we know that music helps develop the brain that causes it to be better at things like languages, we can turn it into an effective educational tool that can be used to develop and educate minds better than we ever could before. 