He couldn’t find a textbook he liked. So this SCF professor wrote his own.

Pete Carney has written the book on music appreciation. Literally.

When Carney, who is now the director of jazz studies at the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, couldn’t find a textbook to use with his music appreciation classes, he decided to write his own.

“Interactive Listening,” was a hit. Carney and co-author Brian Felix released the text in 2012, and it shot up to No. 1 on Apple’s iBooks chart, beating out 22,000 other titles. Last year, Florida adopted Carney’s textbook as the official state textbook for middle school and high school music classes, and it is now in use in hundreds of schools statewide.

The book isn’t like other textbooks. Relying on students’ curiosity and intuitive bent toward technology, the text serves as the backbone for Carney’s classes, which tend to feature students constantly on their cell phones, using Google and Wikipedia to find answers to Carney’s many questions.

“It goes back to Socrates,” Carney said. “He taught them by asking questions.”

On Wednesday, Carney’s 11 a.m. music appreciation class was learning about Modest Mussorgsky, a Russian composer from the 1800s.

Rather than presenting a lecture on Mussorgsky with an accompanying PowerPoint display to guide note taking, Carney had a brief list of questions to guide the discussion, and students called out the answers. He intersperses his talking points with YouTube videos, and students take notes on the different instrument groups they hear.

“(In traditional classrooms) you are just given information, just read this information and give it back to me,” Carney said. “But I just found it more engaging to inquire people to build history than just regurgitate it. You can use Wikipedia, you can use any of the sources you want, but you have to get the story right.”

Cellphones. Wikipedia. YouTube. Carney is not afraid to embrace some practices that are anathema to other teachers.

Jennifer Somers, 32, is a student in Carney’s class. She said she dreaded classes where the professor lectures for an hour, and Carney’s approach works well.

“Having a lecture for that long, it’s just kind of uninteresting, having someone speak for that amount of time,” Somers said. “You tend to not learn much in classrooms like that. I like the interaction with classmates and the professor.”

Somers said Carney broke down the differences between “Every Breath You Take” by The Police and the song’s reinterpretation in Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You.”

“I’ve just never been in a class where you’re going to YouTube and listening to songs that can relate to the younger generation,” Somers said. “I’ve never enjoyed a class as much as this one.”

This story was originally published February 22, 2017 at 3:46 PM with the headline "He couldn’t find a textbook he liked. So this SCF professor wrote his own.."