This month, rockstar hall of fame, Steven Van Zandt, came to a town in a state of Colorado to promote music education.
Van Zandt and his music band made their way to the Central Library of the Erie town. The stop was to meet the town county executive Mark Poloncarz.
Before the crowd, Poloncranz declaimed that this year of July 12th will be named as the “TeachRock Day” in the Erie County.
Van Zandt has several projects that he’s currently working on and one of it is his school program called TeachRock, an open community that aims to bring music and art education to the students.
TeachRock offers a wide variety of free lessons that is available for all ages. The content was being continuously added with core lessons within the program.
The project hopes to provide free content that will potentially unlock every student needs in terms of music and arts while decreasing the dropout rate of the state.
In providing free content for teachers, Van Zandt hopes to unlock the full potential of every student, as well as to decrease the dropout rate by giving students a lesson plan with career goal in mind which they feel passionate about. This could help the youths to aid them in their education. As Van Zandt mentioned:
“All kids are into music, thank God.”
“They all have their favorites, and instead of dragging them through the old methodology of saying, ‘Learn this now and someday you’ll use it’ — which no longer applies because they’re getting all of their answers in 30 seconds on their device — we say to them, ‘Who’s your favorite artist?’ They say, ‘Beyoncé,’ and we say, ‘Well, let’s trace back where Beyoncé comes from.’”
Written in the TeachRock site, lessons can be taken as band classes, English and language arts (ELA), visual arts and Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math (STEAM) class interactions which acts as an extension to the traditional school curriculum of STEM in respect for the addition of the creative arts subject.
Poloncarz pointed out that adding arts in STEM is crucial:
“[Van Zandt] is no stranger to Buffalo and Erie County.”
“He’s been here many times for performances and other reasons over the years, and I want to thank him for coming today … to focus on an issue that really matters to each and every one of us here in the community, and that’s ensuring that every individual is given opportunity for the best education possible — including in an area that in recent times has somewhat been neglected by schools.”
He also mentioned that the reason behind the indifferent approach towards the uptake of art and music lessons is lack of budget from the past. With rockstar Van Zandt, the program can reach out a wide array of students in all walks of life.
“We need to ensure that we give every child the opportunity to reach their true potential,”
“We don’t know who the next Steven Van Zandt’s going to be.”
