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We Should Teach Music History Backwards

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#171

Post by michaelt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #151
o_____________o wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot This is oversimplified to the point of either being disingenuous or misinformed, and China was discussed in the book. There are valid issues with the work, including environmental determinism[1], but it was a wide ranging pop sci book and as such has many surfaces and incentives for attack. [1]:…

> including environmental determinism[1] Why is this considered an issue? Is there a good discussion of this that you could recommend?

https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-ger...

  I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points,
  his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a
  distorting disservice to the real historical record.
  Diamond claims that the differential success of the
  world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture,
  except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does
  not withstand scrutiny. [...] Unfortunately his 
  story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has
  seduced a generation of college-educated readers.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#172

Post by UncleMeat »

drb91 wrote: post #146
UncleMeat wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is not how historians think about history. This risks presentism. History should be understood in its own context, not by the events that came afterwards. Presenting history backwards makes it feel like prior events happened in the context of future events when historical actors had no understanding of those future events. Instead history is best understood in the context available to the people at the time.

The academic work of history and teaching history to non-historians have different constraints; the latter requires certain reduction to causality. Or at least that seems like the current state of affairs. I’m not necessarily a fan, but it’s better than no education at all.

Disagree totally. It is more important here. The reason we teach the humanities to non-experts is to teach empathy and the ability to fully separate from your own context. Teaching history backwards sabotages this effort.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#173

Post by newsbinator »

smallnamespace wrote: post #33
tomjakubowski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gilbert Strang's lectures on linear algebra work this way. He typically first gives a simple example (like for least squares, fitting a line to three points in two dimensions) and then over the course of the lecture susses out a broader generalization / formula from the simple example. Unfortunately, OCW seems to be having some kind of copyright issue with YouTube, but here's a link to the video anyway. https://ocw.m…

I generally agree with this approach, but sometimes even the 'simple' example isn't intuitive or motivating to someone; it highly depends on your audience. E.g. a lot of math courses under my school's engineering curriculum would start off with examples from physics, but if you don't have the proper physics background or aren't interested in those applications, it's just another layer of abstraction to slog through.…

What you're saying makes sense and is one viewpoint. I could see it the opposite way too:

In school, it's good for someone who doesn't know or care about epidemiology to get a slice of what would be useful to an epidemiologist. Likewise in reverse.

The reason Macs have always had nice topography is because Steve Jobs happened to audit a calligraphy class taught by a monk (who stopped being a monk because he met a nice girl).

I'm not banging the interdisciplinary drum- we all already know learning outside our interests is good. I'm saying it's probably a good educational tool to force students to look at problems based on their utility to someone else.

Sometimes the further a problem is away from being directly useful to you, the wider your horizons will be once you understand how to solve it, and (more importantly) why to bother.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#174

Post by newsbinator »

matte_black wrote: post #8
newsbinator wrote: post #2

This makes sense. I've always been an advocate of teaching the majority of things backwards.

How would you teach mathematics or reading backwards?

One way to teach reading backwards is to start by creating a personal alphabet together with the student, from first principles.

Make up symbols for various words. This gets cumbersome when you have words like peace, happy, glad, joyful, nice, etc.

To solve for that, make up symbols for each sound. Then start writing new words by assembling the custom symbols you made. The problem you run into is that books/articles/internet aren't printed in your symbols, and no one you know can read them.

Solve for that by introducing the (English/Spanish/Korean/etc) alphabet and the sounds it makes. Write simple words together. Then read simple words together. Then expand.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#175

Post by pvaldes »

jcranmer wrote: post #115
c3534l wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?" Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Nati…

The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from evidence. For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it. But... the Americas won the…

> the Americas won the agricultural jackpot

I Don't think so. The trouble with America was that the people wiped most big fauna before doing any serious domestication attempts. America always lacked force-power for agriculture by lacking suitable animals. Deer and antelopes are un-trainable and intractable, specially when in heat; big cats pose a lot of problems; bears are too solitary and individualistic and pronghorn were skittish, designed to run fast and go away, not easy to confine in small spaces. And Lamas, almost the only big animals available suitable to domestication, are still too small and lack power to help with a plow. Maybe glyptodonts would made marvelous and valuable domestic animals. We'll never know.

The old world instead had the horse and the bull, that made an huge success in agriculture. Small details like egyptians having a small friendly carnivore around made a huge difference in an economy based on grain. And the carp recycling agriculture debris and the chicken where a blessing for China also.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#176

Post by canes123456 »

bambax wrote: post #19

Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's n…

History told backwards makes events seem more inevitable and not less. You are looking for the cause of what will happen instead of wondering. Knowing the end colors how you read all the events leading up to this. I believe this is the problem with traditional history. It is told forward but the people writing it are looking for the seeds of the cause and overfitting the narrative.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#177

Post by badminton1 »

ljw1001 wrote: post #161
badminton1 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in your revisionist mindset, the opium wars were just like any other war? The motivation of the opium wars was to fix the British Empire trade deficit by selling opium to China, turning them into drug addicts in the process. When the Chinese started seizing their opium they declared war. It's fucked up to just imagine what kind of morally bankrupt psycho could have thought of that as a solution to an economic pro…

in my revisionist mindset it's a lot like King Leopald in the Congo, the near extermination of native Americans (to get their land), the slave trade, the proxy wars in Asia and Africa to fight (or expand) communism and other horrors.

Fair enough, those are good examples. I take back the ad-hominem.

The term to describe what happened in North America is settler colonialism (where settlers seek to replace population with their own rather than assimilating it).

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#178

Post by linkmotif »

bredren wrote: post #44
linkmotif wrote: post #32

This is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue, because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn is only associated with the need to earn a…

>The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the first place. Music history is an elective required for music majors in US liberal arts colleges. For example, at Colorado College[0]: MU150 Music in Western Culture, MU212 Mozart and his Age, MU284 Beethoven, MU285 Music of the Baroque & Classical Eras, MU286 Romantic and Early Modernist Eras. [0] https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics…

If your first introduction to music history is in college, that's not a rich cultural upbringing.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#179

Post by olavk »

vidarh wrote: post #51
olavk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a valuable approach to art history, but I am doubtful it will work for history in general. Going backwards, looking for the causes of what happens later, is very prone to hindsight bias.

In a history lesson, the teacher will not be looking to students to uncover new explanations, so I'm unsure why that would matter - the narrative is already set. Which direction you're describing it in boils down to how to best convey the knowledge to students.

I guess this depends on how it is taught. If it is just memorization of historical events then it probably wouldn't matter. But if the students are expected to try to understand the mindset of the people acting throughout history, then it is quite important to avoid "presentism" and "hindsight bias".

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#180

Post by dghughes »

dgellow wrote: post #46
dghughes wrote: post #6

As a terrible programmer my trick is to read statements backwards. Maybe programming should be taught that way too not just reading of it but the history of it all the way back to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and even weaving looms.

Curious about this. How do you do that? Shouldn’t you still have to read the statement forward to then be able to read it backward? I can see in lispy languages how you could do that, because of the structure of S-Expressions, not sure how you would do that with more conventional syntaxes (let’s say C-like). I think that personally I do a lot of back-and-forth in-between forward and backward reading to construct the…

As I say I am a terrible programmer the best example I could think of was this for Python 3.

float_num = float(input("Enter float num: "))

The way I read it is: I need to enter a number, the number is input, it's a float, that number will be assigned to the variable float_num.

It's not the best example but for me at certain times it's far clearer. Most times it seems like I am reading the equivalent of a person writing backwards then it dawned on me to read it backwards.

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