Music is in Your Mind

Violins Prevent Dropping Out?

            When Albert Einstein was young, he did very poorly in school and, when he was in grade school, his teachers told his parents that he should probably just drop out of school (back then you could just drop out in elementary school, you know) because he was just too dumb to learn. Nowadays, a teacher would get fired for saying something like that-- maybe the parents would even sue the school! The teachers told his parents that he was just wasting the school’s time and resources by being there. The school suggested that they get him an easy job involving manual labor and, obviously, very little thinking… how mean!

            Einstein’s mother didn’t really want to have a son who was an elementary school drop-out because, come on, how humiliating would that be? I’m pretty sure people would’ve talked! Instead, she just got him a violin. After all, she didn’t think he was dumb. He learned to play the violin and he got to be a really amazing violinist. According to Einstein himself, among many others, playing the violin was what led to his success. If it weren’t for his violin, he probably never would have been able to accomplish all he did in his lifetime. All of those amazing accomplishments, of course, led to him eventually being recognized as one of the smartest people ever to have lived. I bet you never even knew that he played the violin! His favorite composers were Bach and Mozart.

            Someone else who used the violin to their cognitive advantage was Thomas Jefferson! When he was writing the Declaration of Independence and he couldn’t think of the right word to use, he would just play his violin until he turned his ideas into words.

            Okay, so you might be thinking that you should go out and buy a violin right now. Honestly, it’s quite tempting. However, the violin isn’t the only instrument that helps you work. In fact, you don’t even need to play an instrument to have music help you think. Nowadays, they have iPods and, even many, many years before now, there were other forms of music, such as records, that didn’t require practice or any of that violin-related work! A lot of people listen to music while they work on their iPods and it helps them to do better and work faster on assignments, especially in schools. Unfortunately, while a lot of schools in other areas don’t have any rules forbidding iPods or other MP3 players, the schools in Miami-Dade County do. They either do not realize that music is conducive to learning or they care more about not having the legal responsibility for the iPods. Whatever the case may be, I dislike this rule!