The class "Math in the Beauty and Realization of Architecture" through the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute was a wonderful opportunity to learn and grow as a teacher and learner. As a preK-8 music teacher at King/Robinson with a dual endorsement in elementary education, teachers around me value life-long learning as well as the integration and cross-pollenization of different disciplines as a means to which we can present curricular material in a more interesting and authentic way. To develop a unit that incorporates mathematics, music, and architecture reflects the world in which our students live-- a world of connections and meaningful engagement that does not operate within tight confines of disciplinary boundaries.Utilizing the five senses: playing or performing instruments that are analogous to mathematical principles in architecture (tactile, auditory), and presenting images that elicit writing, musical composition (visual), and possibly even having experiences that involve smells and tastes, elicits critical thinking and dialogue in our explorations within the unit. In other words, this curriculum will enable students to engage their senses, our vision in the aesthetics of architecture, and hearing in musical listening and composition especially, to be a springboard for writing, reading, mathematics, composition, and conversation.
Our school, like all schools within New Haven Public School District, is currently involved in a high emphasis on testing and academic proficiency. This affects the music classroom as essentially supporting literacy and mathematics growth even in a music classroom. Thus, mathematical skills placed within the context of architecture and music will be an invaluable and authentic way to support my school's initiatives and academic focus. Emphasis will be on the connections between mathematics, architecture, and music in a Kindergarten music curricular unit called "Music, Math, and Architecture." By making the interdisciplinary connections between music, math, and architecture, students will be exposed to the highest quality examples of architecture, and not only share historical facts about music and architecture (students will read, view, and listen to information), but guided with the music, architecture, and mathematics by reading, writing, discussing, and doing computations. This curricular unit includes a field trip to Yale to look at different architectural examples, counting shapes and colors in rose windows, listening to and counting the number of cymbal crashes in a musical piece of the same time period as the architecture we observe, and then create architecture pieces ourselves. The closure of the unit would be that students could work on group projects and ultimately make collage presentations demonstrative of their studies with architecture, mathematical principles, and selecting appropriate music for the background. Each student can pick one letter of the alphabet or one number in which to focus their project. Finding these interdisciplinary connections within a culture and/or time period will be an authentic way to explore the relationships that history, art, architecture, mathematics, and music have with each other.
Previous living experiences in Chicago, IL, Portland, OR, and New Haven, CT, have enriched the author's personal appreciation and awareness of architecture, not only the aesthetic beauty of architecture, but the structural, mathematical principles that allow such artifices to exist. Looking at architecture and making connections to other disciplines has much historical, aesthetic, and personal value. Being able to have the opportunity to look at, read about, listen to, and talk about these connections within architecture, mathematics, and music through New Haven Public School District's partnership with Yale was an opportunity for personal learning and for my exposure to then more broadly help create an important and engaging interdisciplinary unit for students who participate in this experience.
