Lyrical Joy

by Holly Sheppard Riesco

My dear teachers, I have a confession: sometimes, sometimes, I find my own class boring. Gasp! I know! Terrible to admit, but it’s true.

My students and I are grinding away at understanding how to develop commentary and how to synthesize different perspectives into our thinking and writing, and while I do think this is necessary and deep thinking is joyful (although the students don’t always agree in the moment), it is also cognitively draining.

So, I did what I said I would do: I returned to my inspiring texts and tried to create a moment of joy—a brain break that actually connected the skills we’ve been using to the outside world of literacy.

We’ve been reading the short story “Harrison Bergeron,” and I was going to have them complete a writing. Instead, based on a formative I did, I realized they needed more support in choosing appropriate evidence and making connections between texts.

This led me to music. I recently had my students write about a song that they thought connected to the relationship of freedom and power. What I got back was some of the best analysis I’ve seen all year.

So, I came up with the “Harrison Bergeron” soundtrack project. In a single class session, students had to set particular scenes in the short story to appropriate songs. (I did chunk the short story for my students, but I realized they could have easily just chosen their own scenes as a focus.)

On their posters, they had to briefly summarize the scene in either words or an image (or both!). They had to write the title of a song and the artist they thought related to the scene and then choose an appropriate lyric from the song that they thought symbolized that scene. I did require color and at least one image.

You may be thinking, Sounds great, but I need an example. No fear! One group considers the end of the short story, where Hazel, Harrison’s mom, is crying after watching her son being killed on television, but can’t remember why she’s crying. One group chose “Someone I Used to Know” by Gotye and the lyrics, “But you didn’t have to cut me off / Make out like it never happened and that we were nothin’,” since Hazel tells her husband she “always” forgets bad things, which, the students realized, included the death of her son. Here, the students noted in their discussion (with some prodding as I walked by) that the totalitarian control was even emotional, preventing true emotional connection.

In developing their posters, the students did this work in small groups with their clock buddies and, let me tell you, they were researching and thinking and talking and drawing and writing and laughing in ways that were engaging and powerful in the very short amount of time I gave them. Some even came in to finish their posters during advisory, and I wasn’t even grading them! I told them that I might put some in the hallway, and they started saying things like, “Oh, ours is going in the hallway!” or “That’s not hallway-worthy!”

What a great project with joyful collaboration and deep thinking! And it let me chat with them in ways I simply haven’t been able to do while doing some of the intense work that comes along with a college-track course in high school! Turns out low stakes + high engagement + high levels of thinking = high win!