Music to my Ears...

It's Friday, and because the post is about music,  here is my song for the beginning of the weekend:

Music has always played a large part in my life. My mother works as a Director of Music and has played the organ in many amazing places. I remember as a child being up where she practiced, sometimes turning the pages. Growing up, I learned to play the piano, the oboe, and the guitar. I'm very glad that my children enjoy playing music and listening to it as well.

Over the last few years, my mother has taught Music Appreciation at the college in her town. She also teaches a great class on occasion for teachers: using music in the regular education classroom (I know I'm getting that title wrong, so I'm not capitalizing it). During one visit, she asked me to speak to the soon-to-be teachers about how I weave music into the classroom, so I'm sharing some of that today:

Playlists - For years I've kept playlists for different units of teaching. In it, I kept things such as:
- thematic connections - popular music for older texts to breach the distance of time and help students connect. For example, when talking about Chaucer and courtly love, students often thought the rules about jealousy and instant love were ridiculous. For them, extreme jealousy = stalking and physical symptoms of love seem silly. But when I play something like this:

Or this:

They begin to rethink how we talk about love culturally. Asking them to go find their own examples and compare them to depictions of love in Chaucer or in the rules of courtly love help as well.
- cultural connections - In Beowulf, for example, there is mention of the woman who "sang sorrowful" during his funeral. Letting them hear a version of a keening song, for example, helps them understand the context of the singing in a deeper way:

- changes in point of view - one popular form of expression in participatory culture is to write songs and stories from a different point of view than that chosen by the author. For example, in the Harry Potter world, here is a song from the Ministry of Magic from the point of view of Voldemort and Lily:

On a more academic note, collecting songs with different points of view about war, such as "The Green Fields of France":

to contrast with a song such as "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition":

with some modern songs today about the effects and beliefs about war can add a new, emotional layer to facts that might seem dated and too far away to be relevant.
- content review - For me, there is nothing better than historyteachers when I wanted content review. I could show them this about the plague to just give them the little bit of information I needed before reading "The Pardoner's Tale" and ask them to be ready to share what they think the most important thing to remember about the plague might be to spark discussion:

Or this after Beowulf to ask the students to evaluate the song and determine if the song highlighted what, to them, were the important messages of the text:

- content enrichment - When moving into Romanticism, students struggle a lot with long, abstract texts like Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Even though Coleridge provides his own version of Cliff's Notes to sustain the reader, students struggle with the overall concept. What I wanted them to understand with this poem, and with Walton's experience in Frankenstein, was the relationship between the sailor and the sea. I wanted them to understand the mystery, the danger, the pull the sailors feel. For that, I used a variety of sailor songs including "The Sailor's Prayer" (this isn't my favorite version but I like it without instruments - try the one by Pandora Celtica - it wouldn't load):

or "The Mingulay Boat Song"- this is by a local group that unfortunately no longer performs:

 or the song "White Squall":

- creating a soundtrack for in-class reading - For sharing important moments, I tried to find appropriate soundtrack music, which helped the students remember but also emotionally connect. A lot of people today are creating battle mixes while playing video games, so this is a great connection for them. So, for example, with Beowulf's fight with Grendel, I would play battle music from a mix such as:

After going through my playlist with them for the unit (I'd never hit all the songs in the playlist), I'd show them the list and ask them to make their own. I received great examples that I added to mine over time. The Ministry of Magic addition, for example, was from a student.

Figurative Language - Music can reinforce ideas about figurative language in a variety of ways. Here are some of the ways I've included music:
- tone - It's important to note that music alone can change the tone of a piece. Music can help students develop a vocabulary of tone words, because some can describe how music feels more easily than words. In looking at how tone can change dramatically, I like to choose two very different versions of the same song, such as Europe's "Final Countdown":

With Laibach's version of "Final Countdown":

I choose Laibach intentionally because they have done covers of this as well as songs by Queen such as "One Vision" for a deliberate reason that has a lot to do with music and tone. Their story is fascinating and can be found here, where an article calls them the "unlikely godfathers of Occupy and Anonymous" and here.

Another fun way to explore tone is with the very popular YouTube tendency to remake trailers into a whole new genre. For example, here is a realistic, original trailer for Cinderella:

and here is a remix with scenes from the same movie but altered music and selection of images:

Students can generate tone words and describe how the music changes the tone. Later, students can create their own sets of trailers or other pieces for tone exploration. This ability to play and remix cultural pieces is another component of participatory culture that students identify with and enjoy doing.

- allusion - Allusions are our conversational shortcuts. We use allusion to bring in cultural knowledge without having to explain certain elements that would distract from the main point. While expanding their allusion vocabulary so that students can better participate in those conversations, I often used music to support the notion that these kinds of terms are everywhere. By far, students enjoyed this one the most and often danced in their seats:

But there is also Enter the Haggis's "Icarus" which goes well with Breugel's painting and Auden's poem - really showing how an allusion can appear in many forms and how texts can carry on a dialogue over time. There is a long instrumental beginning, so it's a good time to show other art depicting the Icarus story:

After a few examples from me, the students are off and running. They begin to see and hear the allusions everywhere, which is what I want. We collect examples in a forum, musical or otherwise, and I ask them to bring in music that depicts an allusion, like thirty pieces of silver, to see if other classmates can determine the meaning underneath.

Research abounds discussing the benefits of music in classroom learning. Vh1 collected much of it for their "Save the Music" campaign, and that can be found here. While it focuses on formal music education, some of the quotes also discuss music and learning in general. Here is an article that discusses wider uses of music in forms such as the long-popular Schoolhouse Rock pieces (my daughter was humming the one for the Constitution as she took her test just last week) to modern rapping with math. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics offers a grant for using music to teach math in early grades. The American Historical Association provides this resource for using music in a social studies setting and illustrates how to incorporate music in a variety of ways, including like the example of different points of view I listed above. Finally, this Edsource article shows how the California State Standards called for implementation of music.

Even with online learning, our team talked about music implementation just a week ago, and we all shared a variety of strategies. Sharing music with the students helps forge a relationship and can show them new sides of our personality. While teaching content, to start a collaborative session, or as a creative opportunity, finding ways to weave music into a course brings a new layer to the content itself.

Changing Perspective

I'm a big believer in the importance of perspective. Changing perspective can change so much, and some don't realize how much of our perspective can be changed. When I'm feeling that a learning experience doesn't seem to generate the curiosity, complexity, or engagement I want, I try to shift perspectives and encourage people to re-examine from another point of view. Here's one TED talk about the importance of perspective:

Tolkien once said in his lecture "On Fairy Stories" that fantasy began with a shift in perspective, saying, "The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water." The change in perspective, creates the mythical world and also provides us with new ways to view our own. 

How to start? A good hook for beginning a change in perspective can be found in lots of ways on YouTube. Here, thanks to my children, are some of my favorites. The first is one that has gained a lot of popularity: "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On": 

Students can look at how Marcel lives in our world and uses the objects we use but in different ways. It's a great way to start looking at the world around us in a new perspective. I certainly don't look at lentils or Doritos the same. You can segue Marcel into real life by looking at some of the fabulous photographs of Vyacheslav Mischenko and his documentation of tiny snails moving through our world at this Distractify site. 

If shells and nature don't fit in as well into your learning experiences, we can look at the human experience through either of these series. The first series is "Convos with My 2 Year Old", and here is the first episode:

By taking conversations with his daughter and giving those pieces of dialogue to a grown man, the conversation changes entirely. Why is it creepy? What makes that one change such a significant change? How does this perspective on the words change when a new speaker recites them? To continue with the child perspective, excerpts from Jason Kotecki's The Escape Adulthood Manifesto (personally, I would skip the religious part). 

Children have a natural curiosity and imagination that this video and others in the series show with this altered perspective. This can move into a great exploration of what our students are curious about. Here is a great post from te@chthought about the stages of curiosity, the characteristics of those stages, and how how stages process and the role of the educator. 

Regaining the childlike perspective and celebration of the everyday can lead to great discussions and products. Here is a TED talk from poet Billy Collins about just that: 

In this talk, Collins reads some of his poems that celebrate the everyday and discusses how those poems changed perspective some when turning them into animated films. Transfer of a genre is a great way to encourage a new perspective and shows a high level of synthesis! Students can remake things in a new perspective - whether the things are their own or someone else's. Students can also respond in a different genre than typically expected. After reading nonfiction, how about taking those annotations and building a haiku? 

If you want to just remain with the childlike perspective, here is Collins reading "The Lanyard," which is in the voice of an adult considering a childhood gift from this new perspective: 

To continue in the vein of creepy changes in perspective, Buzzfeed has a playlist of creepy videos also all about perspective. Here is the one called "Things Cats Do That'd Be Creepy if an Adult Did Them":

This piece resembles the video above with the notion of changing the agent of the action. By turning the agent into a human instead of a cat, the actions look creepy and out of place. Yet, we have no problem with expecting cats to do cat-like things. What other actions of people and animals do we accept because we expect this to be so? How does turning this on its ear help us reevaluate the action in the new and original contexts? 

To move this into more depth, here is Billy Collins again, this time with his poems from the voice of dogs:

Collins discusses how he writes these poems in this excerpt as well. In the second poem, "The Revenant," the dog reveals that the human's perspective of their relationship was completely wrong. This gets into assumptions. What assumptions do we make about others? about animals? about how we see the world? Where do those assumptions come from, and why do we accept them? What happens when those assumptions are challenged or proved untrue? 

Once the hook is there, perspective can be gathered and investigated in other ways. Sites like ProCon.org provides multiple perspectives surrounding current issues of the day.  Students can debate perspectives and provide reasoning for their perspective on sites such as Tricider. 

So What? 

In all cases, the simple change of perspective provides a variety of meaningful ways to enter into a topic, explore new ideas, challenge assumptions, and grow in our thinking. Encouraging a new perspective also reaches into the 21st Century Skills involving Critical Thinking and Problem Solving as well as Creativity and Innovation. 

Never Enough Time!

This week time seemed to just elude me - everything took longer than it should have. Whether it was working on a particular site or just trying to print, all of it took longer than I expected. Last week, time was the enemy. I felt like this teacher who just wanted to get out simple directions and got waylaid in the process:

To be productive, I had to reprioritize, which means the usual Friday posting is getting done on Saturday. I know I'm not the only one who has had weeks like this. Because of that, this week I wanted to post about ways to save time:

- Changing the work - so all can work smarter not harder - 
This article from Edudemic lists some of the more popular technology tools out today. Within the description, you can see all the different ways teachers use these tools to not only engage students but also to improve the overall working of the class.

This site provides technology solutions to several aspects of a teacher's life that eats a lot of time. Some of them seemed obvious, but there are some interesting options out there I had not considered as well.

- Working on what matters - 
When reading about best practices, where do they tell us to emphasize our time?
What work do we invest in that brings the best results in our students and in our own work as educators?
For example, this study by Allingham and Belanger reveals student opinions about teacher feedback. Based on this study, and others since with similar results, teachers can see where to spend their time providing feedback in a way that improves writing and where to spend less time because the feedback is not as effective.
In addition, what kinds of formative assessments can quickly inform you as the educator how the student is managing the content and where/how the teacher can provide additional support? This site and this site look at technology and formative assessment and suggest different options depending on the goals of the implementation. This site lists others but does not provide as much information. We can use formative assessment to guide the process, allowing us to work on what matters. With help from some of these tools, that information can arrive to us quickly and in a variety of ways.

- Realizing limitations - 
Finally, this article comes from a site in the UK devoted to strategies for time management for teachers. In this particular post, the article talks about achieving a sense of balance and knowing our limitations. For me, this meant letting it be okay to leave something until tomorrow. The world kept spinning, so I guess some things really can wait...

My Top 4 Ways to Elminate Second Person Use

I don't know how many times I talk to students about use of second person in writing. From asking students to examine peer texts to circling examples in class myself, the use of second person continues in the next draft. Students seem to replace second person use when it is pointed out, but they don't understand deeply and in an authentic way why use of second person should be avoided. Here are some of my further attempts to eliminate second person use:

First, pass out copies of Merwin's essay "You Are the Second Person" (the full text is at the bottom of the post). I found this essay in Merwin's Book of Fables, but it was printed earlier. Let students discuss Merwin's reasoning for use of second person and what using second person says about the writer. Students can then revisit their work and reflect deeply on how and why they choose the words they do. When they return to class, they need options better than replacing "you" with "one", so here are some questions to ask in conferencing:

1. Can the pronoun be inclusive, turning the "you" to "we"? Merwin believes so. If so, what are the ramifications of making the essay inclusive? Does this allow for an anecdote or personal connection that would strengthen the paper?

2. Can the pronoun be elminiated? Doing so means seriously rewriting the sentence, but sometimes  when doing so, the sentence loses some of the passive voice as well.

3. Usually the second person use appears in the beginning or closing, so can other leads or endings be explored? After showing how use of the second person can be off-putting, giving students examples of strong leads and endings may help.

4. What function does the sentence with second person serve in the paragraph? Asking students to describe the function of the sentence allows you to have conversations about paragraph structure, which can lead to a conversation about better options.

What are some other strategies? I'd love to hear how other people handle this particular issue.
Here is the Merwin essay:

The Second PersonYou are the second person.
You look around for someone else to be the second person. But there is no one else. Even if there were someone else there they could not be you. You try to shelter in imagining that you are plural. It is a dream which the whole of the waking world is trying to remember. It is the orphan’s mother who never lived but is longed for and has been accorded a pronoun that is an echo of your own, since she has no name. Her temple is an arrangement of mirrors. But nothing stays in it. Think how you keep your thoughts to yourself, on your rare visits there. And how quickly you leave.



You are the second person. The words come to you as though they were birds that knew you and had found you at last, but they do not look at you and you never saw them before, you have nowhere to keep them, you have nothing to feed them, they will interfere with your life, you cannot hear yourself, the little claws, meaning no harm, never let you alone, so tame, so confiding. But you know they are not yours. You know they are no one else’s, either. Sometimes between sleeping and waking you really forget that you are the second person. Once again you have embarked, you have arrived, nothing is missing, nothing. The twilight is an infinite reunion. Then a messenger enters looking everywhere for someone. For the second person. Who else?


Made in the image of The Second Person, you never see your face. Even the mirrors show it to you backwards. Dear reader at times imagining in your own defense that I am the second person, I know more about you than I know about myself, but I would not recognize you. For your part, it is true that you do not know your own story. That it has all been given away. That it lies at the bottom of a river where everything joins it but no one owns it. No one admits to it. Why this elusiveness of yours, like that which lives in an animal’s eye? For you have to be found, you are found, I have found you. You make a pathetic effort to disguise yourself in all the affectations of the third person, but you know it is no use. The third person is no one. A convention. Can you never answer happily when you are addressed? Do I want you to?
No, you insist, it is all a mistake, I am the first person. But you know how unsatisfactory that is. And how seldom it is true.
–W. S. Merwin, The Miner’s Pale Children, 1970. Also in his Book of Fables 2007