Chiayi City International Band Festival

The school where I work is well know in Taiwan for their music, judged first place in the country, in fact. On December 9th Chiayi City held an International band festival at the cultural arts center, so I drove on over to check it out. Some of my students are members of the Pei Shin Junior High School Wind Orchestra (PSWO) and they were to perform first.
I sat "back stage" with them for awhile before the performance and took some photos. Their conductor is Chiu Wei-lun. He is also the conductor of the wind band at Chiayi University and at another junior high school in Taiwan. I had noticed him at school a few times and always wondered who he was. His appearance as well as his "presence" makes him stand out from the other teachers and at first I had thought he might be a visual arts teacher... but, he was too "clean" and upright for a visual artist. He does a tremendous job with these students. They played seven compositions and sounded great in all of them. Even better, he has cultivated a deep love for music with the young musicians and a discipline to help them thrive. My students who are in the band, are in my class for high level academic achievement. Being a supporter for the arts, I can't resist the opportunity to give a quick "lecture" on the merits of studying music as a youth. America might benefit by looking at how parts of Asia value the arts, and how these arts are not "extras" thrown into the overall curriculum when funds are available, but are rich resources essential to the development of higher order thinking. Educational research demonstrates the connections of studying the arts (particularly music) and increased scores on academic tests. Yet the arts are among the first subjects to be tossed when schools face budget crunches. BUT . . . as we all know... when the demographics of testing in America are shown, the Asians are the ones who top the scores. I am told there are six or seven visual arts teachers at my school of over 3000 seventh through ninth graders. This doesn't include music, dance or drama. We have those subjects here at Pei Shin, but I am unfamiliar with the statistics. Back at my old school in the US, I was the only art teacher for about 2,500 students and I also was required to teach multimedia, health, English, and sometimes child development and tech apps. We had one music teacher as well., but his duties included a heavy dose of administration of web based classroom software. True, there are a number of schools in America that value the arts and have a clear understanding of how arts studio and performance will directly influence academic achievement and increase higher order thinking skills. Unfortunately, those schools are the exception, and not the majority.