Maya's Exhibition: "Jianmarco Cannot Be Teached Music."

Isobel attended Maya's Exhibition. Here are her notes.

Maya's question was, ‘Is there a frustration threshold difference between five-year-old boys and girls?’ For her project, she went down to the kindergarteners and had each child try and teach The Dinosaur Song, which they had written in music class, to Jianmarco on the ukulele. 

Each child tried to teach Jianmarco for two minutes--but Maya had instructed Jianmarco to pretend that he didn’t understand. After six trials, they met with the children and explained how the study worked. One exclaimed, 'I know what we learned! Jianmarco cannot be teached music!'

In her Exhibition, Maya told us that there was a certain way to teach that the kindergarten class just could not grasp--that there was a particular phrase that would unlock and enable the teaching. 

Next, she taught us the song on the ukulele and paired us off in four different groups, there were teachers and students. Jianmarco, Trent, Josh, and Karl were students, and the rest of the people were teachers. So we split up into those four groups and Maya watched us to see our frustration levels as the four 'students' failed to learn the piece just as Jianmarco had in the original trials.

At the end she told us that she had lied to us just like she lied to the kindergarteners, there was no certain way to teach. We then rated our frustration levels on the Maya Scale: (1) contented, (2) confused or bemused, (3) a little frustrated, or (4) very frustrated. As a pilot study, this opens up some different ideas for how to observe frustration levels, even though the sample size was too small to note differences.