Wait! Stop! Don’t run away!
This isn’t going to be anthropological, historical, or overly scientific. Today we simply mean it exactly as it sounds.
Alright, we’re not really disagreeing with all those theories and observations either.
Today, Michal Tkáčik is sharing with us a small, playful learning experience from his childhood. And the best part? It’s about music.
You see, humans really are playful beings.
Thank you, Michal, for your playful contribution!
Learning Braille music notation through a game
As a child, I attended piano lessons with other blind classmates. Finding my way around Braille music notation was not easy. We all know that these are actually letters of the standard Braille alphabet, but they have their own ingenious system, the foundations of which were laid by Louis himself.
I remember our wonderful music teacher, who tried very hard not only to give us a feel for music, but also to teach us how to read Braille music effectively. In addition to standard piano lessons, we also had theory lessons in Braille music notation. Our teacher sat in a circle with his blind students and explained the system of writing notes to us. To keep our attention on the notes, he came up with a great game.
He encoded common words into notes and dictated them to us, for example:
second finger, half note g, eighth note D, first finger, eighth note C
He ended the dictation by lowering his voice so that we all knew it was over. Whoever deciphered the word shouted it out as soon as the dictation was over. Whoever shouted out the word “bread” in this case would get one valuable point. At the end of the game, the winner was the one who collected the most points.
I assure you that we, as children aged 8 to 12, enjoyed this game immensely. Even as teenagers, when we had already mastered spelling, we sometimes asked the teacher to encrypt a few words that would be a real challenge, such as “refrigerator.”
Thank you, teacher, for making learning interesting for us.
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