Love Letters and Play Lists (notes from a typical day)

I let my kids listen to their ipods during work periods, under the condition that if I can hear their music coming out of their headphones, it gets turned off for the rest of class. That seems fair to me. If a student is listening to music and it's not bothering anyone ... how could I justify forbidding it? I can't be hypocritical; I have to have music on while I'm working, so I understand that some of them do as well. And amazingly, having music on instantly calms down some of my most attention deficit students - when they can tune out the distractions, they get a lot more work done.

I like to look at their ipods and pick out music for them while they're working - one grade 8 student today was listening to John Coltrane during a work period and I FREAKED OUT. I was so proud of him. That led to a teachable moment. I started to write the names of artists up on the board.

OLD: The Beatles. Janis Joplin. The Rolling Stones. The Who. Bob Dylan. Johnny Cash. Arethra Franklin. Duke Ellington. Coltrane. Robert Johnson. Ella Fitzgerald. Billie Holiday. The Kinks. Bruce Springsteen.

NEW: The Killers. The Hives. The Strokes. Oasis. The Postal Service. The Arcade Fire.

This list is now considered the "Johnson play list". I even did some air guitar Elvis for them. One student said "you're so cool Miss J - my last teacher didn't even know what LOL meant!" and so this list of music is the only acceptable thing to listen to during class. I figure that if I can't get them to learn about history, at least I can get them to learn about good music.

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I'm such a soft heart; I love love. I love anything to do with love. I love even the idea of love. Now hours after school has ended, I'm marking letters that my Grade 7s wrote, acting as though they were Henry Hudson writing his last letter back to his wife Katherine in England. And seriously, the sentimentality in some of these letters has left me teary-eyed.

"Please Katherine, pray for me. Pray that I will be able to leave this wretched place alive. If you pray, I might be able to return to you again, and love you the way I wish I could love you right now. Don't ever forget that this letter is sent with all the affection that one man's heart is capable of possessing. I am yours, even in death."

Written by an 11 year old! He didn't get that many points for factual content, but I bumped him up to an 80% because he made his teacher cry.


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And those are the notes from the trenches for today.