Breakthrough

At the end of every 30-day cycle of 7th grade music class, the students must complete a group project on one of the genres of 20th century music we have studied: jazz, classical, rock, rhythm and blues, rap/hip hop, or reggae. I split the class into 6 groups and randomly assign a genre to each group. The group members choose an artist/group/composer from the genre and plan a persuasive presentation to get their artist/group/composer voted into the "Music Hall of Fame." I created a system to make the assignments completely random. In two instances so far, the group who got assigned "classical" got very upset. This time, I think because I am growing in my thought process as a teacher, I think I did a better job dealing with the resistance.

I have a student who is constantly talking out in class and drawing attention to himself. This particular student, I'll call him "J," hated everything we did in music class because it wasn't rap. And then when we got to the rap unit, he also didn't like the music I chose. So when his group got assigned "classical," I really panicked. I heard him say, "I don't care if I fail. I'm not doing a project on classical." I wondered if I made a mistake by not rigging my system to guarantee that his group got rap. Luckily, I had the weekend to think it over. On Monday, I had a talk with him about how I really wanted him to challenge himself on the project. As we talked, he said (in what I swear could have been out of a critical pedagogy book) "Why do I have to learn about classical? Nobody cares about classical. I don't care about classical. It means nothing to me." After an initial internal angry and frustrated feeling, I answered, "Well, let's start from there." So, realizing that he ONLY likes rap music, I suggested that part of their presentation be a rap about Philip Glass. I suggested that he state at the beginning of the rap that he doesn't like classical music, but Philip Glass is not like all those other boring composers. We began composing the lyrics together, and the beginning went something like this:

I don't like classical music, I think it's whack, yo
But Glass is cool--he wrote the music to "The Truman Show."

(I think part of the reason J is so engaged is to laugh at me when I come up with lyrics like "whack, yo.")

The best part came at the end of the period when one of the group members asked J to see the rap, and J showed him and said "I'm not done with it yet." The other student read it and said, "hey, that's really good!" And I could see the proud look on J's face.

That's what it's all about.