Making math and music at The Edge

We were lucky enough to get to sit down with three groups of students at Essex Middle School's Edge Academy just before the break and hear how their year-long project-based learning (PBL) projects are going.

In the final installment of the series, we talk with three students making math and music in equal measures.

 

Algebra and songwriting might not seem at first to have all that many similarities, but for these three 8th graders, there's more overlap than you'd imagine.

Especially, as they explain, they're like a family that tends to take care of each other.

Please take a listen to this special episode of our podcast, featuring a live performance of Paramore's "All I Wanted", which, I'm not gonna lie, I like better than the original. Uh, a lot.

You'll also hear about how these two projects inform where the trio sees themselves going, career-wise. Teaching? Singing? ....Baking? WHY NOT.

Give it a listen. A full transcript appears below.

 

Yasmin and Violet (background) : (singing and acoustic guitar)

Audrey (narrator): What you're listening to right now is an original mash-up by two students on the Edge team at Essex Middle School, performed live for this podcast. Yasmine and Violet are writing and recording an album together, releasing the songs online as part of their year long project-based research. Another student, Marry-Ellen, is tackling online algebra. We'll be hearing from all three of them on this episode of the 21st Century Classroom.

We've been profiling students at a middle school in Essex Junction, Vermont, who've been kind enough to share with us the progress they're making on year long research pursuits. We've heard from students writing plays and novels, and building an Eco-machine for food sustainability. And in this last installment of the series, we're going to hear about music and math, and the places they meet up. Without further ado, Yasmine, Violet, and Marry-Ellen.

Yasmin and Violet (background): (music fades to stop)

Audrey: So, Violet, why don't you tell me a little bit about your project with Yasmine?

Violet: Our project is a song based project. We're writing a whole album of songs. We're doing three covers, which, two of them are mash ups, one of them is a regular cover. And, we're doing eight to nine original songs, and we have already started three. Yeah.

Audrey: Cool. So, how does the division of labor work? Like, is there: one person writes, one person sings, or what? Mixing?

Violet: We picked the mash-ups and the cover songs together.

Yasmin: Yeah.

Violet: Though, I wrote the first three songs that we're doing. I've written lots of songs, so.

Yasmin: Yeah, she wrote them before we started, and we decided to do those.

Violet: I'm pretty sure we're going to write songs together, and I'm going to help her, because I don't know if she's ever written a song before, so.

Yasmin (background): *Chuckle*

Violet: There's not a lot to it. You just, you don't use your brain. You use whatever you're feeling, usually, so it won't be too hard.

Audrey: Ok. And what about your project?

Mary-Ellen: I'm taking algebra, an online algebra course, as an independent study this year for my project book.

Audrey: So, does it produce a project at the end? Or are you going to document the experience of taking it?

Mary-Ellen: My initial thought in the beginning, since our theme this year (every year we have themes, one or two themes), was that, instead of taking the regular algebra 1 course here, with one of the teachers here, for my project I would just take algebra onlin...