Month: March 2019

It’s finally spring. After what seemed like a never-ending winter, it has finally arrived. The birds are singing. The Habitat for Humanity concert took place on Sunday. All is as it should be.

The Habitat concert, a combined effort by the ESU Acapella choir, the Emporia Chorale (formerly known as the Community Chorus) and the Emporia High School choir to raise funds for Habitat, has been a harbinger of spring for years. Music does lighten the mind and gives us energy. Perhaps that is why I associate it with the beginning of spring rather than any other season. It’s hard to think of any music that makes one long for winter unless perhaps it is a Wagner opera. For the most part, music is uplifting.

Studies have shown that music has a great effect on the human mind, and some might argue on the whole of nature, i.e., music soothes the savage beast.

Exposure to music, just like exposure to another language at an early age benefits a child into their adult years. There have been many studies about the correlation between music and development, but I base most of my opinions on observations over the years.

One of the things that early music helps children with is math. I was discussing this with a friend recently. My brothers and I all studied some form of music and excelled in math. My friend said that all of her siblings were good in math except for her. They all studied piano, but she had a different piano teacher who was not as disciplined as the one who taught her older brothers and sisters. They were all talented musicians and good in math, but she was neither.

Look around at the people who find themselves making music during their spare time. Often, they are accountants, computer programmers, or doctors. In many cases, it was not the family that they were born into that made them successful, it was the advent of music in their lives.

Studies have also shown that exposure to music at an early age improves verbal skills. Quoting from an article published in the Public Library of Science in 2008, Children who received at least three years of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on two outcomes closely related to music (auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills) and on two outcomes distantly related to music (vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills).

The problem is there is music and there is what some have construed as music but it is not. Music is not just rhythm, there is a mathematical structure to the notes that forces the brain to think more clearly. Classical music specifically has a beneficial effect on the mind. A study in France found that students listening to a lecture while classical music played in the background, scored significantly higher on a quiz about the lecture compared to those who heard the lecture with nothing in the background. Researchers speculated that the music put the students minds in a more receptive state to absorb what they were hearing.

Another study of radiologists at the University of Maryland Harbor Hospital found that listening to Baroque music in the reading room resulted in improvements in both their mood and their diagnostic abilities.

It’s just my opinion, but I don’t think you would find the same results from rap, hip hop, or hard rock. From my perspective, that music is just too jarring. Many have complained over the years about the lyrics being violent and suggestive, but I don’t think it is the lyrics alone that are provoking. The music throbs, and gets the blood pumping. That might be good for an 80 year old who needs to be propelled out the door, but is is unnecessary for teenagers, especially those in the poorer communities who already have their awareness heightened by their surroundings. Those teenagers might benefit more from classical music that increases their reasoning ability and prepares them for a future.

It was disheartening to observe on Sunday how the size of the Emporia High School choir has diminished over the years. Friends have speculated that it is because of the change from two semesters to a trimester system instituted a couple of years ago which limits a students’ ability to participate in music because of the limited opportunity to take elective courses. I’m not sure that music should be an elective. Education , in general, has failed to recognize the importance of music, and I might add all of the arts, in the development of healthy intellect. They are doing a disservice to those they are supposed to be educating and limiting the ability of those students to excel.

If the robins think that music is the way to herald spring, perhaps we should recognize its importance in our lives as well.

I take back everything I wrote a few weeks ago about how beautiful the winter was this year. I spoke too soon. Obviously, I believed Puxatawny Phil’s prognostication that winter was over and from past experience, we know that he lies a lot.

It’s easy to look at the interpretation of a groundhog’s behavior, used for years as a predictor of spring, and acknowledge that it is an amusing but seldom exact representation of the truth. Unfortunately, most of us are not so adept at recognizing the difference between opinion and fact in the media these days.

I have been writing for the Gazette for several years. I have never thought that what I am writing is anything but opinion. This is the opinion page, after all, not page one. Some of my opinions are based on fact, and whenever I state a fact, I research it to the best of my ability, although I admit that I rely on Google for my research sometimes and that requires fact checking the sources as well.

Social media is a great example of a platform where facts fall by the wayside and gossip, opinion, innuendo and even humor are forwarded as truth. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a story from “The Babylon Bee” forwarded on Facebook as truth. We have a very gullible society where doctored videos and falsehoods are accepted if they conform to our preconceived ideas.

Few people realize what a threat gullibility is to our freedom. Being able to differentiate between opinion and fact is one of the reasons why education is so important, but I fear (and this is just my opinion) that much of education today is indoctrination rather than teaching. We are creating a younger generation that cannot think for themselves but is ready to fight for ideas based on heresay and false accusations. The Jussie Smollett situation was a sad illustration of how fast people are to jump to conclusions before examining the facts. People used to have a ‘gut feel’ that something was not right, but we lose those abilities when our education system teaches what to think rather than exposing students to factual truth and letting them decide for themselves.

It isn’t just in the classroom that we are losing the ability to separate fact from fiction. Journalism is suffering the same fate for more than one reason. The so called news channels have become opinion pages with the occasional news headline thrown in. I remember first watching CNN when they covered the various foreign wars and you saw the reporters in flack helmets, waiting for the next barrage to explode in front of them. That was not an opinion.

Now, members of the news media have become celebrities, abdicating their journalistic responsibilities for ratings. Those same reporters sit at a desk and tell us what they want us to believe as factual when it is merely their opinion. They are directing our minds and wills towards the response and outcome that they want.

That is why local news and journalism is so important. Local newspapers are disappearing at an alarming rate, but local news is much more likely to be based on fact rather than opinion. It’s hard to accuse someone of something that is mere conjecture when you may run into them or their mother in the grocery store. The local news gives us what we need to know. What the city commission is voting on, what streets are going to be shut down for repairs, the newest store opening, who just had a new baby, who is moving on to another position, and who has died. None of this is conjecture. It’s fact.

We all have opinions and local newspapers make it possible for us to share those opinions with our fellow citizens. The Gazette is blessed to have a lot of citizens who are not afraid and are willing to take the time to write down their thoughts and opinions to share with the citizenry of this fair city. I think most of the Gazette’s readers recognize that one of the beauties of this country is that we don’t all think alike or express ourselves in the same way. That’s what separates us from the more oppressive societies like communism. Journalism may not always be objective, but as long as we have page four of the Gazette, the public will have the ability to challenge opinion that has been stated as fact.

Speaking of facts, we began daylight savings this week and it has messed my timing up once more. I could say that spring has finally arrived, but that is just my opinion.