Thunder Soul blog

     Creating a love for music is pretty important for a music class. Music is a great class for students express themselves and have fun, with this being said it is important to maintain a positive vibe within the music classroom. There are many ways to to create and maintain a love for music in the classroom. One of the best ways I feel is to use technology and play a motivational movie. It's not a hard task to show a movie in class and more than likely the students will be on board with watching a movie for a class. Whats more important is selling the movie to students and making sure they are interested, paying attention and getting a message from the movie being played. Teachers should not just show movies to pass time by but rather show a movie that students can connect and learn something from.

      I watched a very good/motivational movie over the weekend. The movie was called Thunder Soul. To summarize the movie quickly, the movie is a documentary of students who played in a stage band in a school named Kashmir in Texas. The students went to school in the early 70's when playing Jazz in school was popular. The students in the school are from an inner city location and these students took an interesting approach to the high school style “ big bands” by mixing funk music with jazz. The students in the movie got together after 30 years to play a reunion show for their aging band teacher and for the students that attend the school now.

What makes Thunder Soul a great movie to show in class?

      There are a few reasons why this movie would be a great movie to show in class. For one thing Funk music is extremely active and exciting. Student will love to listen to and learn about good music. The music in the movie is so originally and interesting that it should motivate students to play and create their own music. A motivating aspect of the movie is that it shows people who haven't played their instrument in 30 years practicing and actually remembering how to play their old songs. It shows that once you learn something well it is hard to forget. One of the more important messages from the movie is that the musicians in the movie wanted to prove a very important point. The point was that they came from the same urban community as the students today and they were able to overcome diversity, become successful in life and all thanks to the help of music. This is an important message I would want to send to my students especially because I also work in an urban setting school district.