To figure out the 14th letter of the alphabet, most of us would have to recite it from the beginning while counting on our fingers. Instead of reciting, some of us would sing the alphabet in the tune we learned as children. But what makes the tune stick in our minds years later?

Penny Dimmick is an associate professor of music at Butler University. Debbie Friedman is a musician/songwriter who teaches Jewish values through song. Both recently talked with Y-Press about the use of music in education.

Dimmick pointed out that music is an important memorization tool.

"From a personal standpoint, if I have to memorize a lot of facts, I would make up a song, and I can remember that. When I took my doctoral exams, I had to know the whole history of music from whenever, and I don't memorize dates real well. So I made a whole bunch of songs up, so that when I went in to take the test, I could remember what I needed to remember by the songs," she said.

Friedman, who lives in New York but performs nationwide, says music also can be a tool for imparting messages.

"It's a means to an end. Ultimately, what I want to do is I want to teach a value. But the music is just a vehicle. The music just makes it more palatable."

Friedman uses music to convey educational content because she doesn't think people should waste their time learning songs without learning something else, too.

"Sometimes what I try to do in the songs that I write is to provide tools for myself and for other people, just to try to find ways in which we can make it a little bit easier to get around in the world, and to make our lives more rich and more full and more meaningful for ourselves and for other people," she said.

Friedman uses music for its beauty, not its memorization benefits.

"I didn't write it on purpose to make it stick in people's minds; I mean, it's the way it works and it's wonderful that it works that way -- I'm happy."

But she appreciates how music helps the listener with skills important to education.

"I think music has an impact on every area of learning, 'cause I think it teaches you how to hear, and I think it teaches you how to listen. I think it teaches you how to focus. I think it teaches you how to repeat what you hear," she said.

Can help with academics

In addition, Dimmick said music can help students with their math and reading skills.

"When you're doing a musical thing, more areas of your brain are involved, because you're looking at mathematical kinds of things with rhythms. You're looking at pitch kinds of things, so that's the ups and downs," she added.

Dimmick described a fourth-grade boy who struggled with reading until he learned to play music. "He was an at-risk child because he could not read. And in fifth grade, (his parents) decided he should take the cello. And by learning to follow notes from left to right -- when you get to the end of a line of music, you drop down to the next line -- with a teacher who was helping him all the time, he can read. He can read at grade level," she said. "It took him one year."

But she emphasized that music's benefits go beyond its ability to help academically.

"One thing to keep in mind is that music, first of all, is important for music's sake. It shouldn't just be used as a vehicle to help you learn other things. There's a valid and good reason to learn music because music is so important to us as a people. It helps us express things. It encourages you. It uplifts you," she said.

Dimmick explained why music is so important to humans.

"It's shown from brain scans that when people are involved musically, there's a lot going on in their brain, and their brain is talking. It's crossing both temporal lobes. Any time you use more of your brain, it develops more and it gets smarter," she said. "If you're using lots of parts of your brain, and if you're storing information in several areas, then the chance of being able to bring it back is much greater, and you're going to learn it more thoroughly and learn it better."

In fact, teaching music benefits the teacher as well as the student.

"Teaching is a two-way street: You can't teach unless you're learning, and you can't learn unless you're teaching," said Friedman. "Nothing works unless there's a dynamic, unless there's a relationship between a teacher and a student."

Dimmick agrees that a relationship is critical. "It's so important that children are exposed to music really, really young. The prevalence of television now and those kinds of things damages children's language development, damages children's musical development and all those kinds of things," she said. "You need interaction with a real person."

Looking for respect

Dimmick also agrees with Frances Rauscher, a leading researcher in the relationship of music to intelligence at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. Rauscher believes that for all of the above reasons, music should be treated with more respect in school systems and not as an expendable elective.

"There are lots and lots of research studies and projects going on, . . . and what they're showing is that music in some ways improves academic performance. Music improves attendance and attitudes toward school.

"If something is that powerful, it doesn't make sense why we cut it out of the school programs. It just doesn't make sense, and they do," said Dimmick.

After all, if it weren't for music's help in memorization of something as simple as the ABCs, people everywhere might have to consult a dictionary to figure out that the 14th letter of the alphabet is N.

REPORTERS: Zach Tuchman, 13; Megan Brown, 13; and Robin Wetherill, 11.