The Secret of Teaching Science & Math Through Music
Madeline Frank PhD
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
1997 Frank Publishers
ISBN: 0965858308

If you want your child to excel in science & math, read this book.

By delving into lives of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, physicians & educators, Dr. Frank offers insights into how music can help your children & students with their learning.

The Secret of Teaching Science & Math Through Music shows how “[s]tudying a musical instrument... [teaches] ...discipline, cooperation, teamwork, motivation, concentration & self esteem”

By highlighting people, such as Oliver Sacks, Professor of Clinical Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who studied piano as a boy & continues today. Other contributors of both historic fame or quiet dedicated lives, which have enhanced the way we think & look at life, are many doctors of all practices, all retaining almost concert playing skills with the instruments of their choice, while inventing such things as the X-ray & the H bomb, or simply being in the top of their fields.

Dr. Frank also includes people from all walks of life who have kept on playing music after their childhood: from Galileo Galilei to Edward Jenner -- Jacques Loeb -- Aleksandra Borodin -- Robert Christison -- Ilya Prigogine -- Judith A. Resnick -- Margaret F. Pinkston -- Richard Feynman -- Albert Schweitzer -- Charlie Chaplin -- Albert Einstein, & many more!

In Chapter II Arnold Scheibel, director of the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, tells us how music transforms our minds, how we have to thank Pythagoras for fractions, & how Ronald Price, a promising French Horn player, stricken with a degenerative disease in his twenties, took up playing the harp.

Chapter III gives us the Test Results of various public school projects all around the U.S. about what happens to students who study music... & how a cornet changed Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong's life.

The Secret of Teaching Science & Math Through Music is a short & curious read, in need of editing & layout work, which offers compelling evidence that music & scholastic motivation are intrinsically entwined.

More from Madeline Frank: Musical Notes On Math
(08/14/05)

Rebecca