Why TEST REVUE Came to Be

Family illnesses took my parents, brother, and me from the Chicago suburbs to Houston, to continue their treatment at The Texas Medical Center. While teaching there in Houston with Spring Branch ISD, TEST REVUE was “born.” At first, I named it TAAS REVUE for the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, the schools’ state tests that occurred toward the end of every school year. Then later, I renamed it TEST REVUE, so that it could be used by students everywhere. And now, I have added an important part making the title, SING IT! RAP IT! ACT! And DANCE!… in our ELA TEST REVUE, with my DBA being: MUSIC MEETS ACADEMIA.

The following details parts of my teaching philosophy including why TEST REVUE was written. I taught vocal and general music, language arts, and ESL all of which I was qualified for teaching in Spring Branch and the state of Texas.  This particular year I was teaching 6th-grade language arts. (I taught 6th, 7th, & 8th graders while there.) With my strong convictions of using multisensory approaches for greater student achievement and the development of the brain, I thought, “What better way to promote progress than by using music in my language arts classes.” I believed that by musically reviewing and performing basic language arts concepts, students would not only enjoy language arts more, but would learn the concepts faster and remember them longer, a belief that had been around for years. This would be due, in part, to the “workout” that each student’s brain would experience by including music in the teaching and reviewing process. At that time, scientific evidence had not yet proven that brain theory regarding both hemispheres of the brain being effected by listening to music.

“Capitalization Rules,” the first song in TEST REVUE, with its many examples happening very quickly in time demanding rapid recall is a primary example for when this total workout could occur. I believed this experience would encourage and give my students the confidence they needed for greater successes in all their classes. With all that in mind, I knew right then and there what I needed to do. I wrote a musical and named it TAAS REVUE to help my students prepare for that very important approaching assessment.

Everyone usually studied very hard, because success on the TAAS meant everything! After lots of work by all, my students performed TAAS REVUE for the school. My administrators were wonderful in allowing us to have this unusual opportunity at such a busy time of the year. Still, time for practice on the stage was almost nil.

After my classes performed, these students from three class blocks became observably more enthusiastic about learning and were very proud of themselves, as they should have been. Other language arts teachers were also pleased with TAAS REVUE, and some assigned their students to write thank you notes to my classes and individual students. They were notes of high praise and congratulations that were greatly appreciated by my performing students. Some had actually become STARS at their middle school, and they knew it.

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Since my students’ performance and testing had occurred at the end of the school year, a statistical analysis regarding test scores was not done. However, five or six months later, a high school freshman, at school visiting his former eighth grade teachers, walked into my classroom. Yes, even though I and another teacher were conferring, he walked in and sat down. He had never been a student of mine, but he immediately started smiling, singing, and rap dancing in his chair to the “Four Kinds of Sentences,” a song from TAAS REVUE. He had only heard it at my students’ program that he had attended at the end of the last school year. I happily thought, “What wonderful validation that students would enjoy and longer remember the lyrics that teach the concepts.” It also validated my belief that students in the audience would benefit from attending the performances.

With over a thousand students in the school, my students performed for two different audiences as a test review booster, a kind of pep assembly, to encourage all students. My music had not yet been recorded in CD form, so I played my own music on the piano and used a super rhythm machine for the last rap song.

And now, speaking of rap … It’s time to wrap things up. With the programs over, I stated: “TAAS / TEST REVUE has been a long journey; a gigantic labor of love! How wonderful it is to hear my huge Big Band sounding chords and notated songs with Intros, interludes, and Codas played by brilliantly sounding instruments that our students LOVE! VOILA! Here it is, fellow Teachers … in FABULOUS CD FORM!“

One last thing: When I went to Houston, I had no idea as to how long I would be there. It all depended on my very ill family members. My parents were recently retired teachers from the Greater Chicago area, and my 21 year old brother had just graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. All three were very, very, ill. My father and brother had cancer and my mother neurovascular heart disease. I lost both parents within 16 years and my brother 7 and a half years ago. I was there for 19 years. Had I not been there, TAAS / TEST REVUE would not have been written.

After most things had been finished, and my time there was coming to an end, I said, not intending to sound profound, “Our world and lives go on and on. When we do our best and believe that everything will turn out fine, all in all things do turn out fine, but most of the time even a whole lot better!”