I’m fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in my car. It’s Los Angeles, after all, and working and going to school on opposite sides of town lead toward frequently lengthy commutes. Left alone in a silent room long enough and I’ll go crazy – as I am now, sitting in the jury selection room of a Los Angeles courthouse sans headphones. In any case, a lot of my time is spent in the car either arguing to NPR & talk radio or shuffling through CDs (remember those?) and listening discriminately. A week and a half ago, as I was listening to my umpteenth live Otis Redding album for the umpteenth time I felt a profound sense of understanding of the nature of catharsis and learning within song structure. I wasn’t able to put this into words but had a clear understanding of how something as short-lived as “Try A Little Tenderness” inculcates theories of learning within Redding’s performance (James Paul Gee would call this “tacit knowledge”).

That being said, in a generally unscientific way, I’ve been thinking about what “liking” a song or certain style of music tells us about learning. I’ve been trying to put this into words and I think contextualizing it case-by-case may be the easiest way for me to do this over time. Today I’ll jump in with a look at what Top 40 hits mean to my teaching practice.

The Repeat Offender

I’m fascinated with pop culture. I revel in it. I’ve talked about this before. What I like about something like a pop song is that, though it may be “catchy,” it’s not necessarily something that you “like” right away. It doesn’t take a genius to correlate repetition with – if not pleasure – at least acceptance. I’ll provide a schmaltzy example: A few months ago, you couldn’t sit through an hour of top 40 radio without hearing Florida’s “Low.” It was… okay. Of course repeated exposure made it infectiously anthemic. The song (in the words of Gladwell), “tipped:” It was used in a sequence of Tropic Thunder, was used as part of a controversial dance routine, and – within my house – became the short-lived theme song for our resident basset hound.

So what? In terms of learning, we can take a lot away from “Low,” or “Paper Planes,” or “Blame It.” I didn’t “like” these songs because someone told me about them. I didn’t like them because I was regularly reading about how they were made, their history, or their relevance in modern day society (like a frivolous blog post). Instead, I liked these kinds of disposable songs because I experienced them first hand. I interacted regularly with them. I became immersed in contextual uses of these songs next to station IDs, ringtones, film montages, karaoke performances, and personal singing in the shower. We can’t divorce learning from doing from experiencing in this sense. I’m not going to like math by learning about it abstractly; I am going to like that T.I. single* if I’m involved with it. I may make comments about it online, discuss it with friends, and generally use it in my everyday practice. Why aren’t we doing these same things in our classes? Why aren’t English standards being situated within the current economic crisis? Why aren’t we broadly engaging our students in curricula that immerse them in their own experiences? I realize many teachers are indeed doing this and may balk at such questions. However, a look at the landscape of professional development and the continuously bemoaned world of standardization and assessment don’t look toward a different approach at both schooling and education.

I’d also caution people to look toward this analysis as a draconian endorsement of repetition. I do think that revisiting concepts and ideas is a necessary piece of the learning process. However, the analogy of liking a song after hearing it the 37^th time on the radio to improving better at English after the 37^th essay isn’t the strongest to make. Monitored, situated and repeated practice will get us where we want to go. I liked “Low” more once I contextualized it within a nightclub setting. And heard it in a movie. And talked about it being a “guilty” pleasure with friends. And unbashfully “performed” it for a disinterested hound.

As a final thought, I’d throw out that things as silly and frivolous as pop music and pop culture are necessary additions to our classrooms. Look what is on the student folders as they shuffle in. The patches on their backpacks. The distorted tones of interrupting cell phones. The music played during pep rallies. This is the world that we, as a community, exist within. It is the world that is likely of more import to a student than what may be assessed within your classroom. However, this doesn’t need to be a separate world. Immersing popular culture within my classroom is more than trying to appear cool or hip to my students (they see through that charade immediately!). Instead, illustrating how these “outside” aspects of society not only connect to my curriculum but are actually at the heart of what I teach help students experience (more so than “understand”) the way that English is a part of what will help them become agents of change. The Chris Brown and Rihanna media storm, for instance, became a natural turning point of discussion and understanding when my class read Othello and discussed domestic violence. I realize this may state the obvious, but it needs to be stressed: there is no textbook or curricular guideline that will teach you what aspects of contemporary culture to use in the classroom. We need to engage and understand our society just as our students. We need to learn from them. As a community, we need to build on shared experiences within class.

* As an aside, I’ve been thinking about how T.I. is exemplary of the current problem with hip-hop these days: it’s forgettable. There are a handful of songs by T.I. that I like but I can’t remember a single lyric by him. The draw for all of these songs are the hooks – sung by Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, John Legend, etc. The main attraction – as he’s supposed to be seen – is filler for each hook-laden hit. On the other hand, my fascination for T.I.’s Road to Redemption will require further elaboration at some later point.