Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

I sit at my desk with a fat stack of papers.  The solitary electric guitar quietly introduces notes to the song  "Round Here" by Counting Crows– a lonely track that never should have been a hit, because it really wasn't all that radio-friendly anyway.  After that, I immediately expect to hear the goofy, hick-like beats in "Omaha" followed by the idealistic "Mr. Jones."  Although I am not in the mood to hear "Perfect Blue Buildings," I don't dare skip it.  It would be like interrupting a favorite story or cutting off a close friend just because he stutters. 

For me, this album is more than just a random collection of music.  It has been my soundtrack for the last decade of my life.  During awkward junior high, I hated all but one song on it.  My sister played it in her old Pontiac.  I liked "Mr. Jones," but I thought the rest of the songs were whiny and slow.  We had no choice, though, since it was a tape deck.  Slowly I fell in love with the music.  I played the album through late night cramming before tests, through awful break-ups, during the initial days of college, through my roughest days of teaching.  It's odd, but there is a sentimental attachment to the album "August and Everything After." 

I lament the death of the album in America.  True, bands still create good albums, but we don't have any "Sgt. Peppers" or "Dark Side of the Moon," type of albums – the ones where, isolated, the songs are okay, but as a whole they create a masterpiece.  Now, it as if bands believe that since they can release eighteen songs on a cd, they will.  The medium forced the album to change.    It used to take effort to switch a song – first it meant moving a record and potentially scratching it, then fast-forwarding a tape, then pushing a button and now music is entirely portable, digital and instantaneous with iPods. 

My classroom is a record album.  On the first day, some executive has decided the number of students, who play one right after the next and blend into something larger.  I go home, only remembering a few – a slow song that will drive me nuts, a fast energetic one that will probably get on my nerves, a luminous one that will become the first smash hit, a catchy diddy that sticks in my mind.  All the others seem to blend together into a monotonous cacophony of disjointed, dull lyrics – in my case a boring parade of white polo shirts and blue pants.  (Part of the problem being that no album was meant to have thirty five songs)

After awhile, I begin to hear the nuances of each song and realize how they blend together.  That slow one becomes a refuge of respite on a crazy day.  That crazy one becomes the zany song that forces the class to dance on a lazy early summer afternoon.  Occasionally, the brilliant one even turns out to be a one-hit-wonder – having two weeks of fame and then becoming just another album track, yet still valuable nonetheless. Every one is needed to form that beautiful concept album, like“Dark Side of the Moon” without the LSD.         

Admittedly, I don’t listen to the album all the way through at first.  I catch pieces of a song here and listen to a whole song there.  It’s in the subtle moments – in grading a paper, in a conversation between classes, during group work when I stay with one group a little longer than normal.  It’s in those rare moments when I find that what began as a cliché happy song is actually a painful lament, forged by years of abuse.  I think of this when I remember the girl who mentioned to our team that she couldn’t wash her clothes because she lived in her aunt’s garage (in May) and they had no money and she didn’t want to move back with her mom, because her step dad had raped her. 

There is a temptation to never listen to the album all the way through – to make instant judgments on a “bad one” and figure out how to keep the song censored and how to display the brilliant, radio-friendly one.  Then a few months go by and you see a flash of brilliance from a quiet girl in the middle row who writes deeper poetry than e.e. cummings and who has questions that would make a philosopher jealous.  There’s a danger in skipping songs, in separating out the best and burning them to a “my favorites” disc or a greatest hits album.  

Worse still, there’s a part of me that wishes class was more like an iPod.  When I tire of a student, it would be nice to just skip her, delete him and move them somewhere, any place where there are no paper balls to throw or smart remarks or apathetic gazes or tattling brats.  Sometimes I imagine my dream class, where students would choose to be in my there and pass some kind of interview.  I’d have eager social studies snobs and history geeks battle it out in an intellectual dual.  We’d do service projects together and write a novel and create documentaries.  Yet, in the end, I would miss out on something.  I’d have my hundred hand-picked songs, but I would never know them the way that I know an album.