Musical Musings

I love working with music. While many social media trends escape my understanding, the Tic Tok style of videos use lots of different samples of music across eras and from many genres. This means that "modern" music is ill-defined and old music pops up in surprising ways. Ergo, when I use music in the classroom I am not necessarily just an "old," deeply out of touch. The students have no real consensus of what is currently "cool" and know a lot of my references. I also dig using music because the students typically help me find some new tracks I love, sometimes even new artists or entire genres. 

Working with music is typically much easier for students. The pieces are small, poems really, and the music greatly helps the search for meaning in the lyrics.  Lately, my go-to, FIRST WRITING ASSIGNMENT OF THE YEAR (you know, the assignment we use to assess our students' writing abilities) is called "Song Where You Are." The students select a song that fits their current "vibe" and write a proper little essay about it. There is an introduction with a thesis, a conclusion, and all the works. 

I like this writing assignment because it is about the students and music. Its very approachable. While some students are not big into music, most are. This makes the content fairly easy for them and lets me look at their mechanics: transitions, topic sentences, citations, sentence structure, etc. 

Now to sell this assignment, I have to go through the entire process myself. So, every year, I find a song that fits my current "vibe" and model all parts of the paper. I typically go through the prewriting with them doing my own and then explain how my writing would fit the rubric. I have posted the rubric in our resource section for those interested.