Geeky Songs

The 44th in the Egan Pattern Language

1. A problem

Overall we want to help kids achieve understanding… but occasionally it’s helpful if they can first memorize the details.

And some details (like the names of states and countries, mathematical formulas, the names of the bones of the body, spelling, grammar rules…) will always be hard to remember.

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2. Basic plan

Introduce kids to geeky songs that teach academic details. Let them read the lyrics, and talk about what they mean. When possible, act them out — writing down the numbers in a formula, or pointing to spots on a map, or on their bodies. And sing them regularly — while marching out to the playground, or while doing the dishes.

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3. What you might see

Students singing along to They Might Be Giants, Schoolhouse Rock, and the Animaniacs. Kids who are weirdly conversant with the elements on the upper reaches of the periodic table and the digits of π beyond the first seven.

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4. Why?

Big ideas can only be built on a foundation of many small ideas. The details — dates, formulas, terminology — are the necessary building blocks that support larger concepts. Without a solid base of these small ideas, big ideas have nothing to stand on.

This gives us insight into the two warring ideas in education. Educational traditionalism often focuses on teaching small details, but when it overdoes it, students can end up overwhelmed with disconnected, pointless facts. Educational progressivism, on the other hand, sometimes tries to leap straight to the big ideas, but when students don’t have the necessary grounding, those concepts remain abstract and lifeless.

A good education understands that big ideas must be stacked on top of a solid foundation of small ones.

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5. Egan’s insight

Where do we see this in the human experience?

Do you know about “songlines”? They’re songs created by the Aborigines of Australia that serve as memory devices. From Wikipedia:

A knowledgeable person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the song, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena…. By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, Aboriginal people could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia's interior.

And cross-culturally, stuff like this probably isn’t even that unusual. The world before air conditioning was a terrifying place, and just to survive, people in traditional societies needed a detailed knowledge of everything around them: what plants are safe to eat? How do I make a fishing trap? How do I prepare poison? How do I know when an elephant is agitated? What do the clouds look like before a storm? How do I handle a conflict with one of my social superiors?

Not for nothing might our average ancestor have known more than a hundred songs.

How might this build different kinds of understanding?

PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) understanding doesn’t come out of nowhere — it requires an intimate knowledge of details of the world. One of Egan’s basic insights is that those details come most easily through MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️) and ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️) ways of seeing the world. So this pattern uses a Mythic tool — 🧙‍♂️SONGS — to build Philosophic understanding. (What do these weird emoji mean?)

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6. This might be especially useful for…

Geeks, but also normies who’d rather sing songs than memorize terms (but who might be open to doing them both at the same time).

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7. Critical questions

Q: Are these really “high level” enough?

Some are probably too high — take a look at this one about “entropic time”!

But that’s fine: like we said at the top, it’s okay to use terminology-laden songs to introduce concepts to make sense of later. (This, in some ways, is educational Traditionalism in a nutshell.)

Q: A lot of classic science songs are outdated… we should avoid them, right?

The opposite! Part of understanding science is to see how our ideas evolve; outdated song lyrics can be a perfect tool for teaching.

As you can see, I’m pretty keen on these. Can you think of a way this could go terribly, terribly wrong? I’d like to know about it! Become a subscriber to join in the comments conversation.

8. Physical space

Lyrics really matter in these songs, so you’ll want to make sure kids see them as they listen to the music.

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9. Who else is doing this?

Too many groups to keep up with! Which is a shame, because there really ought to be an online list of these, organized by subject (e.g. history, math, science…) and topic (e.g. multiplication, algebra, calculus). Ideally it’d be free, and it would provide links to listening/watching them on YouTube or purchasing them. And maybe it’d have a space for notes (e.g. “Part of this is outdated…”).

Would anyone be interested in putting together such a thing? It needn’t be perfectly comprehensive (how could it?), and once you get tired of making it, others could take over.¹ If you make a useful one and share it in the comments, I’ll put it in a post. (Feel free to work together! Message one another if you’d like to do a live call to make it.)

How might we start small, now?

LET’S LIST FAVORITE GEEKY SONGS. I’ll start with just a few that I really like in science…

Physics: The Periodic Table, updated (AsapSCIENCE)

Biology: Evo-Devo (Despacito parody), by acapellascience

Chemistry: The Molecular Shape of You (Ed Sheeran parody), by acapellascience

Astronomy: The Galaxy Song, by Monty Python

• also Why Does the Sun Shine? followed up with Why Does the Sun Really Shine?, both by They Might Be Giants

Also I really like basically everything I’ve ever heard from Lyrical Learning — the money I’ve spent on their songs has been well worth it.

Got more? Throw ‘em into the comments below. (If anyone would be willing to put them into a Google doc and share it, that’d be swell.)

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10. Related patterns

It’s interesting that this has way less to do with our other music patterns in Art (like A SONG A WEEK°, MYSTERIOUS MUSIC° and MAKING NOISE°) than with something like GEOGRAPHY BY HEART°, LOCAL BIRDS°, or CHANTING YOUR TIMES TABLES° — it’s more about memorizing than about feeling or thinking.

Which is to say that this is one of the most educationally Traditionalist patterns we have! Well, good. There really can be a joy, as Egan writes in Getting It Wrong from the Beginning, in rote learning — provided it’s done wisely, and on content that’s wonderful.

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Afterword:

WE’RE DOING ANOTHER COHORT OF LEARNING IN DEPTH. You’ll hear more about it shortly, but it’ll start in early October, and luxuriously span the rest of the 2024–25 school year. For adults and students (middle school and up).

1. My recommendation would be to give it a Creative Commons copyright. Just paste this at the bottom: “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.” And make sure the link points here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/