For this observation, I traveled to Keister Elementary School in Harrisonburg, Virginia and

observed a fifth-grade general music class taught by Ms. Maggie Hagy. Keister Elementary has a Hispanic
population percentage of 41.8%; of white students, 42.6%; and of English language learners, 40.7%

My experience in Ms. Hagy’s class was very positive. Even though I’m not sure if I want to teach
at the elementary school level, I very much appreciated the positive educational techniques and
philosophies Ms. Hagy was representing in her class. For example, from the very beginning of class, Ms.
Hagy used different styles of talking (different “voices”) and asked her students to emulate her,
developing their early abilities to differentiate between and create different pitches – in addition to
operating within both the chest voice and the head voice. She also played a game called “March or Swing”
in which she beat a drum in alternating straight and swing meters which I immediately noted for its
originality, potential to help students in their future more advanced music education, and pure fun. In
addition to games that introduced broad rhythmic concepts, Ms. Hagy also worked with some more
specific skills using singing and solfege syllables. At the time that we observed her class, she had not
introduced all seven syllables, but rather was working with only do, mi, so, and la; I would imagine that
this sequence is followed to familiarize students with the pentatonic sonority so that later on they might
be able to practice improvisation on the syllables they are already more familiar with.

As someone who is very passionate about anything and everything having to do with language
and communication, I was immediately struck by Ms. Hagy’s familiarity with Spanish and her use of it with
her Spanish-speaking students. She may not have been fluent or been able to have a full conversation
with her students in Spanish, but that didn’t matter; what was important was her effort both to include
her Spanish-speaking students and to broaden the horizons of those who didn’t speak Spanish by using
basic words and phrases with all students. I went into this observation with the knowledge that white
students are the minority in all Harrisonburg City schools except for one and that this school system has
an expansive Hispanic student population. A teacher who speaks even a little bit of Spanish is at an
immediate advantage because they have the ability to connect with a broader variety of students in a
broader variety of ways – not to mention the flexibility, depending on the teacher’s proficiency level, to
teach Spanish as well. This is likely to add an extra sparkle to a resume, particularly in today’s times of
teachers who have to be multiskilled and prepared to teach subjects that are not their specialties or even
comfort areas. Seeing these necessary skills in practice made me think about what I might do after I
graduate from JMU, and I was excited by the possibility of being able to integrate two of my passions:
music and language.