Classroom With The Students And The Teacher example essay topic

Jazz and education are not as unrelated as one might think. Although they seem different on the surface, the very things that make up jazz and education are one and the same. Education exemplifies the elements of the jazz model. Obviously the community exists in and of the classroom, with the students and the teacher creating the energy, and they themselves embodying the other elements of jazz. The most common place for education to take place is in the classroom. The fact that a community that exists between the teacher and the individual students is blatant to anyone who is able to observe the relationships that form during a class.

During any normal class period, the students are almost guaranteed to interact amongst themselves, and are of course forced to interact on at least a minimal level with the teacher of the class. This interaction on an individual and group level forms a sense of community in the class room, and as with living communities, each class is different depending on the type of people in the class and their personalities, as well as the personality of the teacher. The energy possessed by an educator is very important to the learning process, just as the energy created in jazz music is important to how the music is taken as an art form. For example, if a teacher stalks into the classroom with a scowl on their face and yells at the students, it is obviously not as conductive to learning as if the teacher had walked into class and started making jokes to catch the student's attention.

This parallels jazz in that jazz must possess a good driving energy in order to be taken well and be pleasant to listen to. Communication is also essential to having a successful educational experience. In jazz, the musicians and dancers must be able to communicate with each other in order to perform well. As far as education goes, it is essential that a teacher have good communication with their students to ensure that the ideas behind their lessons are passed on clearly and efficiently. Just as the fact that any good jazz combo would quickly fall apart without the ability to communicate, the lessons of a teacher unable to communicate with their students would be pointless.

Educators would be totally unsuccessful in communicating unless they knew what they were talking about. Being a successful teacher requires that the teacher be well versed in the subjects in which they are teaching. The technique of their teachings has great influence over how much is learned in their class, just as the technique of a jazz musician affects how the music is played and heard. Both must be talented and well educated in what they do to have the best effect. This ability, knowledge, and technique must be passed along to students through the individual teaching style of an educator just as each jazz piece is played different, however subtly, by each jazz musician. How well students learn in a class can very well depend on how interesting a teacher makes a class.

The ability to engage students is contingent on a teacher's ability to come up with their own creative ways to portray the lesson in a unique and interesting manner. Listening to the same music time and time again gets dull, but different music played with different styles is always interesting. This is why creativity is important to the teaching process. Of course, in any realistic classroom situation, there will always be students who excel in saying things that are inappropriate for class or things that are said at inappropriate times. Thus, a good teacher must be able to handle events that happen unexpectedly with fluidity so as to not interrupt the lesson. This improvisation takes other forms as well.

A teacher must also be able to use improvisation in the sense that they need to be able to change the lesson plan of the class in order to work around unforeseen events that delay the learning process, such as if a teacher were to be unable to teach for a short amount of time and a substitute must take over, which inevitably slows the learning process. As is clearly outlined above, teaching wholly encompasses the elements of the jazz model. I believe that they are so closely related that the jazz model could be called the education model without making any significant changes. Jazz is simply so new that it is easy to make the connections and have those connections seem like original ideas, when they have in reality probably existed since the dawn of time. Without the education model, jazz would not be the beautiful art form that it is today, and without the jazz model, education would lack the ability to truly instruct students in their coursework.