Oscar Macchioni is an Assistant Professor of Piano and Piano Pedagogy at the University of Texas at El Paso. Upon his graduation from the National University of Tucumán in Argentina, he received a scholarship from the Polish Government to study piano at the Krakow Academy of Music. He received his Master of Music from Louisiana State University and his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Piano Performance from the University of Arizona. He has been sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. (Fellow Graduate Student, summer 2000), the Polish Government, and the Organization of American States (OAS). Most recently, he received the Music Teachers National Association "Student Achievement Award" (StAr), was named "Distinguished Graduate Student" by the University of Arizona School of Music, and was featured in the French Magazine Piano, La Lettre du Musicien. Oscar Macchioni has performed extensively in his native Argentina, Poland, Mexico, and in the USA. In March of 2005 he presented a solo recital at the esteemed Myra Hess Memorial Concerts at the Chicago Cultural Center. Dr. Macchioni has served as a lecturer and adjudicator for the Arizona Music Teachers Association and El Paso Music Teachers Association. In the summer of 2006, he was hired by the International Piano Performance Examinations Committee of Taiwan to conduct piano examinations to about 1,200 students nationwide. He also enjoys research activities and presented lecture recitals at national and international conferences.
Oscar Macchioni
University of Texas at El Paso
301 Fox Fine Arts Music Building
El Paso, TX 79968
915.747.7817
omacchioni@utep.edu
The focus of the 2006 GP3 Conference at the University of Oklahoma was The Millennial Student. Mrs. Tami Bush's presentation on "Working with Special Needs Students" opened the Friday forum. Mrs. Bush has more than 22 years of experience teaching students with learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder impairments. She is a learning specialist, counselor and school psychologist, certified in learning disabilities, mental retardation, autism, blind and visual impairment, counseling and psychotherapy.
Disabled learners (DL) do not lack intelligence, most of them have an average or above average I.Q. Mrs. Bush stressed the importance of timing and clarity: "they just have a different time to process the information and they have to process not only the answer but also the question." Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder students (ADHD) have a slower learning curve and therefore require more time to reach the same place as the rest of the class. They are not always hyperactive; there is another classification called inattentive type. Examples of famous people with learning disabilities including dyslexia are: Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Frideric Handel, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur, General George Patton, J.F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Alfred Hitchcock, Stevie Wonder, and Tom Cruise.
Tami discussed the pros and cons of medicating an ADHD student and provided an example of performance on a spelling test, before and after taking the medication within the span of two days. The results were incredible; the medication helped the student concentrate and achieve an almost perfect score. Scientific examples of normal and ADHD brain tissues were also shown.
Mrs. Bush advised that in order to diagnose DL students, an analysis spanning at least six months must be made regarding performance in different aspects of their life, such as music lessons, school and home. DL children may have at least two or three of these problems:
Regarding DL to teaching music, Mrs. Bush made the following recommendations for teachers:
Many of these students have sensory integration issues, it may be necessary that they:
Mrs. Bush also made the attendees experience what it is like to be a learning disabled person through a few exercises. One of them was to see what a Dyslexic child may be looking at when reading a text: words are randomly separated and/or connected to other words without space; and "p", "b", "q" and "d"'s randomly replace each other, signifying that a Dyslexic child may see just a circle connected to a line without discriminating different shapes. Another interesting exercise was to trace a shape on a piece of paper looking at its reflection in a mirror. This experiment generated a lot of laughs, including this reporter's, since many attendees couldn't follow the lines and became somewhat dizzy.
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