A Song a Week
1. A problem
Songs are rich in human meaning, and schools hardly touch them.
Feelings, stories, values, ideas: there’s so much humanity squeezed into every good song. A good song is a qualia duplicator — it recreates in us the inner experiences of others. And this is so easy to access that songs can be positively viral.
Meanwhile, schools try to accomplish this with textbooks.
2. Basic plan
Each week in an Egan classroom, the whole class can listen to a new song together, and dig deep into it.
The song could be introduced on Monday, and listened to again once or twice a day through Friday. Each time, the teacher can expose something new about the song —
tell a story about the people who wrote it
call attention to something in the lyrics they find interesting
show something about the genre it comes from
and more
The goal is to keep inviting kids into an encounter with the song, and to spark curiosity.
“What does that lyric mean?”
“What’s that weird instrument in the middle?”
“What’s the songwriter really saying?”At the end of the week, the song can be moved to a “music station”, where kids (individually or in pairs) can re-listen to the song with headphones, and go even deeper into its rhythm, instrumentation, lyrics, or origin.
3. What you might see
Imagine walking into the classroom on a Thursday morning, and see the whole class closing their eyes, in rapt silence as they pay impressive attention to a piece of music. It ends, and a student’s hand shoots up to ask a question — “what does it mean that wears ‘a face that she keeps in a jar by the door’?”
Later in the day, in small-group activity time, you see a pair of students putting on headphones to listen to another song — “The Girl from Ipanema” — and choosing one of the “challenges” we’ve created to go deeper into the song. Some challenges might look like:
Musicality challenges
Students listening intently, laser-focusing their attention on a single aspect: can they tap out the drum’s rhythm? Can they hum the flourish of the piccolo trumpet? Heck, how many of the instruments can they name? Can the musically-inclined re-create the basic melody on a synthesizer? Can they sing it?
Feelings challenges
Alternately, some challenges can have students putting everything together and focusing on the overall feeling the song evokes. Can they express that feeling in a non-representational drawing? Can they give a metaphor for how the song makes them feel? Can they name aspects of the song that provoke this feeling?
Lyrics challenges
Another set of challenges would help kids focus on the lyrics. What do they literally say? Can the student summarize them? Is there a deeper meaning beneath the surface?
Origins challenges
Another set can help kids go beyond the song, and into research. What’s the story behind it? How was it conceived in the mind of the artist? How was it developed by the performers? How was it received by its intended audience?
Critique challenges
Once a student does a lot of the challenges (not necessarily all), they can act as a critic. Is this a great song, or not? (This might be especially fun when students vociferously disagree.)
Creation challenges
Can the student pull a Weird Al, and write a hilarious parody of the song? (Remember when in Animaniacs, Wakko sung all the 50 U.S. states and their capitals to the tune of “Chicken in the Straw”? Like that.) Can they piggyback on the melody and write a song that teaches something they’ve been learning about in another class — turning “House of the Rising Sun” into a mnemonic that makes it easy for others to memorize Newton’s Laws of Motion, the world’s major mountain ranges, deserts, and rainforests, milestones of international law, the bones of the arm, the line of British kings, Spanish verb conjugations…
Heck, you’re probably imagining more right now! Commenting on these weekly pattern language posts is a perk for paid subscribers, but you can become one for just $5/month.
4. Why?
Too often, music divides people. Our playlists are tribal shibboleths: in the 90’s, my high school could have been neatly divided into students who liked rock, hip-hop, and country, and who interacted with one another as little as possible.
Part of our need is to make schools thick cultures. To summarize Michael Strong: throughout history, humans have figured out exactly one way to actually educate people: have them be part of a thick culture. But the way we usually design schools makes this impossible. The students are whoever happens to live nearby; the potential values, norms, and rituals of a school get watered down to the lowest common denominator.
We need ways to help kids connect with each other across the divides of class, ethnicity, religion, age, and so on. Ditto for the faculty. Ditto for adults outside of school — with parents’ and grandparents’ generations in particular.
Because there’s so much diversity that we can tap into with music! A cappella, acid rock, alternative country, bluegrass, blues, boogie, bossa nova, breakbeat, calypso, classical… and that’s just up to the letter C!
Music, historically, is the great connector.
5. Egan’s insight
Where do we see this in the human experience?
Over the millennia, music has worked so powerfully to connect minds in different bodies. It’s one of the human universals, found in literally every culture. It’s load-bearing: oral societies transmit their values and knowledge of the world through songs; an educated man or woman in such a society will necessarily know scores of songs by heart. Songs are part of the original human recipe.
How might this build different kinds of understanding?
Reminder: At the heart of Egan’s understanding of education is the notion that, for humans, certain practices and formats of information are special. Egan calls them “tools”, because throughout history, cultures have used them to pass themselves down. He groups them into five “toolkits” — SOMATIC (🤸♀️), MYTHIC (🧙♂️), ROMANTIC (🦹♂️), PHILOSOPHIC (👩🔬), and IRONIC (😏).
Well.
Obviously, humming the bass lines builds the tool of 🤸♀️MUSICALITY and tapping out the beats builds the tool of 🤸♀️RHYTHM; less obviously, we can help kids engage their 🤸♀️BODILY SENSES in this beyond hearing. We can put on computer-generated visualizations to help them see the music, and at times, we can crank up the speakers and have kids feel the music.
Some of our challenges can invite kids into the song’s narrative as 🧙♂️ROLE-PLAYING, to retell it as 🧙♂️STORY-TELLING. Dissecting songs is wonderful after we’ve listened to them a few times, and notice something that doesn’t seem to fit with our initial understanding of what the song is about — it opens up a 🧙♂️SENSE OF MYSTERY.
Learning about the artists who made the song builds 🦹♂️HUMANIZING KNOWLEDGE (what I’ve often been calling “gossip”); recognizing that those individuals were riffing off a long chain of music builds the sense that what drives the world are 👩🔬PROCESSES RATHER THAN HIGHLIGHTS. To try to explain analytically how music sparks a psychological reaction (is it the minor key? why do minor keys make us feel like this?) is to grasp for a 👩🔬GENERAL SCHEME and start learning music theory.
Arguing about what the song really means builds 👩🔬THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH; recognizing that, for some songs, we may never know builds 😏APPRECIATION OF AMBIGUITY.
6. This might be especially useful for…
Gonna go meta for a moment:
Here, I’d love to crowdsource all of our thoughts on how this pattern (“Song a Week”) might be helpful for different kinds of students. I mean this in the broadest possible way — feel free to think of all the kinds of diversity you can: neurodiversity, cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, socioeconomic diversity, religious diversity, gender diversity, sexual orientation… “Learning styles” is mostly bunk, but it might be pointing at something real, feel free to include “visual learners” and such. Academic abilities and interests, physical abilities, age diversity, geographical diversity, family diversity, and life experiences — they’re all fair game!
Note: this is a wonderful time to remind everyone that we’re working hard to cultivate a diverse space ourselves. Ordinarily that means steering clear of everything culture-wars-y; however, for this thread, we’ll obviously be needing to touch on some contentious issues. Triple-check that everything you write in this thread is put as carefully as you can. I’ve given a friend moderator powers and the instruction to delete anything that touches on culture wars stuff without also being maximally kind and careful while laughing maniacally.
7. How this could go wrong
We murder to dissect
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”
“Oh boy,” a kid says, “it’s time to murder another song. Why can’t we just enjoy these things?”
The goal of all “Song a Week” is to help kids enjoy music more. We need to watch to make sure this is happening.
Attack of the IP lawyers
Imagine an officious email arriving. “Dear blood-sucking parasite,” it begins, “you are in violation of [meaningless stream of letters and numbers], and if you don’t stop using this song, we will have your head on platter for Christmas dinner.”
We need to make sure we’re making it easy for teachers to understand how not to run afoul of this fate.
Challenges are boring
Maybe the “challenges” above that sound most amazing to you and me end up being dull for the majority of kids: this is the fail state of many an educational invention. I suspect that we can help avoid this by Egan-izing some of the challenges.
Can you think of another way this could go wrong… or, um, a way to help avoid that? Become a paid subscriber and join in the comments conversation!
8. Classroom setup
How might the physical classroom environment support this?
One thing that I suggested above implies a Montessori-inspired setup: “stations” with “works” (which I like to think of as “challenges”) that kids can choose to do, by themselves, or in pairs.
I really don’t know, though, more about how this could specifically look, and would appreciate your ideas on this.
9. Similar stuff (others are doing)
Who’s doing anything similar to this? How do Montessori schools use music? How do Waldorf schools? How do classical schools? What other educational programs are making music load-bearing? Who’s doing it wonderfully? Are there any online essays, or book chapters we might look to to get a better grasp on this?
10. Open questions
How should we choose the songs? I can imagine three options, all with different strengths.
Option A: Each teacher chooses the songs. On the plus side, this can be a way for teachers to express themselves by sharing what they love. (Passion is a virus!) On the minus side, this is a lot of work for the teacher, and might lead to a narrow range of songs (and songs being repeated year after year).
Option B: The whole staff decides. Plus: this can help create a fit between the school and the local culture — what’s canonical in Mumbai isn’t canonical in Milwaukee. Minus: this is a lot of work, and a potential source of conflict.
Option C: The whole school cribs off a list. Plus: each school doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel; teachers are freed to teach. Minus: a bit authoritative?
Who should share the songs? Should the whole school do the same songs at the same time, or should this be shared by each grade?
How can we incorporate non-lyric music?
11. How could this be done small, now?
Someone in our community could make a mock-up of this for one song, or could propose a list of songs. If you’d like to do this, put it in the comments! (If you’d like to do an especially wonderful job of this and charge for it, I encourage it! There are a lot of parents — especially in the homeschooling world — who’d love this.)
12. Related patterns
This is quite similar to the Poem a Week° pattern we’ll also use, though unlike that, it might build up to Dancing in the Classroom°.
Re-writing the lyrics of songs is a way to create Clever Mnemonics°, and appreciating music in general must help assist learning memory-helpful Content-Rich Songs°.
Since songs can deal with weighty matters, this might be wonderful fodder for Philosophy for Children°, and since so many songs are old, this might be a good way to generate Intergenerational Conversations°.
Songs can carry the flavor of different cultures, this is an easy way to bring The Whole World in Grade School°. The publishing of the song can be put on one of the Big History Timelines°.
Afterword: Going full-meta, here
Okay: this was the first of many Egan education patterns! I think future ones will be quite a bit shorter. I’ll try to pre-structure the comments section to make it easy to focus on specific elements of this pattern; we’ll see how that goes.
Any general feedback?
If you’d like to comment, but can’t afford the $5/month, feel free to ping me, and I’ll see if I can cook you up a discount.
I’ve tried to emphasize the high intellectual content (and analytical thinking skills) supported by this, but I suspect starting with music might feed into the “Egan = artsy-fartsy” vibe. Ah well. To weigh on the other side, I think next Wednesday’s pattern will be more math-related.
If you know of someone (or a community) who’d get very excited about this idea (whether or not they’d like to subscribe to the rest of the newsletter), please do share!
This is more about science and less about the songs themselves, but are you familiar with Lyrical Life Science? I was homeschooled, and I grew up with books like these in elementary school. I still remember some of the lyrics: https://www.christianbook.com/lyrical-life-science-1-with/9780974163543/pd/59775.
The tunes are mostly taken from classic folk melodies, though I'm not sure how many kids would recognize them these days.
There’s a big puzzle piece that I think needs to be added in here.
We connect deeply to music primarily when we’re deeply familiar with the style:
— As far as I know, most teenagers’ music tastes expand out something like this. They fall for a simple, catchy song. Then they fall for a handful of songs by that same artist. Then they fall for that artist’s whole album. Then they finally fall for a couple of similar artists. Our music tastes naturally expand through intense exposure to subgenres, not through the random sampling of great songs.
— One of the main things that I did in music class in primary school was listen to traditional music from cultures all across the world. I didn’t have a good grasp of those styles. It felt boring and incomprehensible. Only when we worked for a long time practicing one specific style (we did 2 years of some type of African drumming) did one of those styles sink in.
— I went to Catholic school. We were frequently exposed to a very simple kind of Christian music during school assemblies. Was it good music? Probably not. But that didn’t matter. We knew our corny Christian music well. And we sang our hearts out to our corny Christian music.
If we were to play a random great song each week — the Beatles, then ABBA, then Louis Armstrong — most kids would find most songs incomprehensible/boring. It’d be like spending one week on algebra, then the next on calculus, then the next on trigonometry, never diving into any area enough to grasp it properly.
So I think this idea would work most effectively if we focused in on one subgenre of music each semester. Give the kids a chance to really get a feel for the style they’re listening to/playing with.