When I was in elementary school I played the violin. I played for two years, without learning how to read music. I would practice weekly with my school’s music teacher, perform in seasonal recitals, but never knew how to read music. It was never a problem. I was never reprimanded nor did I feel the need to learn. My music teacher would review a piece every time he introduced a new one by telling us the chords we were supposed to play. I would just memorize the pattern. Occasionally I would write it in my book, or maybe he wrote it in my book because he knew I couldn’t read music. After my second year a new music teacher replaced the old one, and he expected me to be able to read music as I had been playing for two years. I couldn’t, and didn’t want to learn, and so I gave up.
I managed to make it through two years of music practices and recitals without learning how to read music. In class we discussed being literate and being literate in different areas. I think everyone is literate, because everyone has the basic skills to survive, because you need to be literate to some degree in order to communicate with people and go grocery shopping and have any job. But there are definitely different degrees of literacy, why else would there be reading levels? I’ve always wondered why reading levels just kind of stop when you’re in elementary school. Is there just one set level from there on out? Should we all have the skills to read and understand complex works of writing after that?
Hello,
I can definitely relate to your memory of literacy because I also started playing an instrument in elementary school, the flute. My teacher didn’t even teach us how to read the notes, we had a book that was special to our instrument and had to read it for homework. It’s really crazy how we can jump into something, knowing nothing about it, and all of a sudden rise on the “literacy latter” or whatever you would like to call it. I feel that although you were not necessary able to read the music, you were still literate in the sense that you were able to listen and memorize it. Quite honestly, I think that trumps my ability of being able to read music because being able to listen to something and memorize it takes a lot of talent. Through all the trouble of learning to play and attempting to enjoy it, I also stopped and handed my instrument down to my younger cousin and never looked back. Needless to say, I have declined back down the “literacy latter” of reading/ playing music.
I really like your last question about why reading levels stop once we exit elementary school, and I’ve thought about this a fair amount myself. In my particular experience, I really wish I’d had a class in high school about being “literate” in older works of literature, circa the 18th-19th centuries. When I first read Pride & Prejudice, it took me forever to get through it because the sentence structures were different, they used larger and old-fashioned words, and the jokes were told in a totally different type of humor than what I’m used to. Just because I can speak, read, and write the English language of today doesn’t mean that I’m completely literate in the language’s whole history. While this is a different issue than playing an instrument and read sheet music, it shows how there can even be different types of literacy within what seems like the same subject.
I felt this was an excellent way of pointing out that one can be literate without necessarily knowing how to read or write. To me, literacy definitely has levels, and I don’t think it is possible for anyone to ever reach the final level of literacy. I have also wondered about why reading levels in elementary school reached some sort of finite point. I feel like there is too much variation in any language, whether it be written, spoken, or neither, to consider oneself fully literate in it.