Music In The Classroom

I was drawn to the piece, "School Days: Hail, Hail, Rock 'n' Roll!" by Rick Mitchell because the beginning of my non-teaching career was in the music industry.  I worked for Sony Music for eight and a half years at the start of my working life.  It was a fantastic and magical time that ended in 2003 when the music industry bubble "burst" with the explosion of Napster.  I found myself on the outside looking in on something I had hoped would go on forever.  Music was and has always been an important part of who I am, so I incorporate music in my fourth-grade classroom.  Rick Mitchell does the same, in his high school classroom.

Rick Mitchell was a professional rock critic for years before he became a teacher.  He explained that he "outgrew the mysterious joy and pride I once had found in telling people that the music they enjoyed actually sucked."  At that point he had a "desperate epiphany cleverly disguised as altruism" in which he made a conscious decision to become a teacher.  He explains that the fact that he is more fluent in the ways of hip hop than the average middle-aged white teacher makes him at least seem somewhat cool to some of his high school students.  Most of his students just want to know how the music relates to them.

Mitchell uses music as part of the three classes he teaches.  He uses "thematic connections between song lyrics and poetry in English, to the epistemological implications of aesthetics as a philosophical area of knowledge.  I also give an eight-week series of guest lectures on the history of jazz for the advanced music classes."  What Mitchell focuses on for his chapter in Rethinking Popular Culture and Media is his ninth grade U.S. history class.

Mitchell uses the history of American music to illuminate the issue of race in the United States.  He explains to his students about how black artists have done the majority of innovation, while the white artists have received the majority of the financial rewards.  Mitchell uses his unit as an opportunity to highlight stories of "gradual and sometimes spectacular triumphs over racism and class discrimination."

Mitchell outlines in the following pages some of the lessons he uses with his ninth graders.  From his discussion on how the British banned instruments that slaves used from Africa, so they created new instruments and utilized hand claps in songs, to the connection between West African griot music and Celtic bards and how they were some of the earliest storytellers (connecting to current hip hop culture), to the "mating of 'black' blues, gospel and R&B with 'white' country and bluegrass that gave birth to rock 'n' roll."   

Mitchell discusses how Elvis Presley's first record was a bluegrass cover on one side and a blues tune on the other.  He also talks about how music has conquered the United States and continues to be a reflection of the culture.  Mitchell explains, "That such a terrible and dehumanizing institution as slavery could create the conditions that allowed the brilliance and beauty of great black artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Otis Redding, and Aretha franklin to flourish is one of the tragic ironies of modern Western civilization."

Mitchell explains that music is a record of what people are thinking and feeling in society during a given period, so for history teachers to not take advantage of it is comparable to "leaving the photographs out of a textbook."  He ties music into the Great Depression and the New Deal, by watching The Grapes of Wrath and playing protest songs including Bruce Springsteen's "The Ghost of Tom Joad" and the Rage Against The Machine cover of it.  Mitchell finishes off the essay by explaining how his school has adopted "Hippie Day" where the Principal (after the ninth grade has learned about the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam) allows the Freshman class to come into school dressed in 1960's attire and at lunch they hold a "sit in" with protest music.

Mitchell explains that some of the lyrics about drugs make some of the conversations in class a little complicated at times, but he believes his ninth graders are sophisticated enough to handle the conversations.  He believes that to blame drug epidemics on music culture is crazy, but it is too simple to say there is no connection at all.  Mitchell explains that music, culture and history are all very complicated and interwoven.  "Cultural history should not be considered merely a sidebar to military and political history.  It is important in its own right, perhaps more important than memorizing the names of the past presidents and generals."

I loved Mitchell's essay because as a lover of music and a teacher, I appreciate ways that music becomes a reflection of culture.  I use songs as elements of poetry during what I call "Lyrical Poetry" every morning, but I also use it as an opportunity to incorporate social studies lessons.  I play Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" right around 9/11 and speak about the point of view of the firefighters running into the Twin Towers.  I play protest songs with images of marches and riots to discuss the civil rights movement and the current struggle of race equality in this country.  I guess it could be considered "sneaky antiracism".

Music is a part of all of our lives...so why shouldn't it be a part of all of our classrooms?