Subjectivities and Popular Music

Somebody around here is doing coursework in the Composition and Rhetoric PhD program at Wayne State University, working towards a dissertation project focusing on how subjectivities and identities are formed through the act of writing in the classroom.

On his way to the gym, because getting PhD's involves way too much late night Taco Bell, the radio played two songs.

What two songs?

"Fifteen" by Grammy award-winning artist Taylor Swift, and "According To You" by Michael Jackson guitarist mono-named Orianthi.

What is interesting about these two songs, juxtaposed as they were, is how both of them consider the formation of identity of young women in the face of external pressures. Consider the following lyrics:

According to you
I'm boring
I'm moody
and you cant take me any place
According to you
I suck at telling jokes cause I always give it away
I'm the girl with the worst attention span
you're the boy who puts up with that

("According to You." performed by Orianthi. written by Steve Diamond and Andrew Frampton)



'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you
You're gonna believe them
When you're fifteen and your first kiss
Makes your head spin 'round
But in your life you'll do things greater than
Dating the boy on the football team
But I didn't know it at fifteen

("Fifteen." written and performed by Taylor Swift)


We think it's interesting that two songs with such similar sensibilities are on the charts at the same time, popular enough to play back-to-back on a Top 40 radio station.

There might be an application for your classroom. How do other people influence who we are? Does popular culture contain enough messages of self-empowerment? Are there any other songs with similar messages?

In case you're unfamiliar with the songs, we've embedded them below.

Somebody around here has homework to do!

The Day the Music Died

Today marks the anniversary of the plane crash that killed musicians Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, commemorated by Don McLean's song "American Pie."

The lyrics of "American Pie" are a great example of an elegy, a poetic form your students might connect with.

Of course, another great example of songs written for a dead celebrity is Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" (both versions).

More recently, P. Diddy sampled The Police for his tribute to Notorious B.I.G.

Putting Characters to Work--Classroom Activity Idea

Hello from Teacher's Brunch HQ in frosty Auburn Hills, MI.

A few of use around here have been working on a Shakespeare project, and while we're not ready to share the whole thing yet, something came up yesterday we thought you might like.

For "Macbeth," we decided it would be fun to work-up a fake resume for the tragic would-be King. It got us to thinking that making resumes for all the characters, or any character for that matter, is a neat way to have students consider the people that inhabit the literature they're reading a little more deeply.

So "Objective" ends up being less about a job, maybe, and more about that character's motivation.

Other common resume headings could be added or changed as specifically needed.

Of course, a little lesson about resume writing is never a bad thing, either.

Below is our simple ditty for Macbeth. Let us know if you give it a try.




(seems like it's a Scottish kind of week)

Pass the Haggis! It's Robert Burns Day!

January 25th is Scottish poet Robert Burns' birthday.

Poetry lovers around the world can mark the occasion by carving up another of Scotland's gifts to the world, the haggis.



If that picture doesn't make your mouth water, maybe this will: the last (translated) stanza of Burns' poem "Address to a Haggis":

You Pow'rs, that make mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill of fare,
Old Scotland wants no watery ware
That slops in bowls:
But, if You wish her grateful prayer,
Give her a Haggis!


Perhaps to honor Burns, teachers around the world should have students write their own "Address to a [ ]" poems, featuring students' favorite cafeteria foods.

We'd love to hear any "Address to Chicken Strips" or "Address to Mexican Pizza" ditties that roll across your desk.

It's Catalog Season

Hello again, from Teacher's Brunch HQ in freezing fog-stricken Auburn Hills, MI.

(As Mike, our tech guy said, if smoke and foggy makes smoggy, do freezing and foggy equal froggy?)

Teachers across the country will soon find in their mailboxes our Spring Teacher's Discovery catalogs.

We've seen them, and they look great--full of ideas and awesome stuff to make teachers' days a little easier.

If you don't think you're going to get a catalog from us, and want to make sure you get one, head over to this link for English, Social Studies, and Science teachers, and over here for our Foreign Language friends.

When it does arrive in your mailbox, let us know what you think.

Name That Band Classroom Activity

With the snow beginning to fly, the complaints that the office is too cold, and the end of college semester papers due for some of us here at Teacher's Brunch HQ in frigid Auburn Hills, MI, we thought we'd offer up a fun yet slyly smart classroom activity.

The premise is simple. Your kids love music. Take advantage of that by inventing their very own musical act.

To do that, they must develop:

The band's name
The band's genre
The title of the album
Ten song titles that wouldn't bother Wal-Mart
The liner notes
The album art

On the surface, this sort of seems like a cutesy art project, but you can encourage consideration of the following:

How album art is a form of persuasion
Expectations associated with genre
Artistic freedom versus the chance for commercial success
The role of media in popular art


By way of some example, this link lists, according to the writers, the best band names out there. Some of them aren't exactly school-friendly, but you could leave them off.

One of our favorite bands around here (at least among the enlightened few) is the new musical collective Works Progress Administration.

In keeping with their name, their album art mimics WPA-era art. See for yourself:



If you run this activity, let us know how it goes.

Nominate a Word of the Year

The American Dialect Society is accepting nominations for the 2009 Word of the Year, and the 2000-2009 Word of the Decade.

As the site says:

The best "word of the year" candidates will be:

—new or newly popular in 2009
—widely or prominently used in 2009
—indicative or reflective of the popular discourse

Last year's Word of the Year was "bailout." The 2007 Word was "subprime."

In keeping with the economic theme, and since the website says phrases are allowed, we vote for "Jobless Recovery." We like how it's both hopeful, and dreadfully pessimistic. When you read it you can feel good, but not accuse politicians of sugar-coating the truth. It's a win-win!

If you'd like to have your students enter their choices, you can send an email from their website here.

Feel free to post your choices in the comments section. We'd love to hear what your kids think should win.

Author Series PowerPoint Presentations

Right about this time in your school year, you're probably trying to keep students' minds on your lessons instead of Homecoming, having happily fallen into the daily grind of school and wondering if a rookie pitcher can help avoid the worst baseball team implosion ever. (Well, maybe not that last part.)

Allow us to make your job a little easier, Mr. or Ms. Literature Teacher.

The presentations we made for some of the most-read authors are ready-to-go out of the box and show students that writers are people, too--sometimes tragically flawed, sometimes surprising normal.

Each disk includes two reproducible activities, so you'll know your students know what's what in the world of letters.

Have a look here for an easy way to troll through the presentations available, and to download some samples.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears! Our new forensics game is sure to be a hit

Gribbly bits of bone and blood are sure to please budding forensic scientists in your class.

Students answer questions covering biology, evidence gathering, psychology, and physics as they make their way around the crime scene.



Not for the faint of heart, but perfectly fine for high school students who are ready to learn about the practical, real-world applications of science.

Find out more about it here.

Young Adult Book Cover Activity

Hello to everyone from Teacher's Brunch HQ in We're-Going-Back-To-School-Too Auburn Hills, MI. (of the four people in our immediate office, three of us hit the college books again in a couple of weeks and the other just finished a fitness trainer certificate program.)

We found this great blog post about creating your own fake YA book cover taking advantage of some of the cliches of the genre.

Essentially, you use a random name generator to create your Author persona, a random word generator to create your title, and Flicker to find an image that you crop (badly, if you stick to the cliches).

In addition to a great use of technology, we think this activity could be extended in the classroom to have students write a 250-word synopsis of their "books."

A nice way to highlight what students did NOT read over the summer, but might have!

Our book cover is below.

It's the heart-warming story of a father coming to terms with his newborn son's birth defect, as well as his own feelings of abandonment from a childhood spent without his own long-haul trucker father.

A best-seller, for sure.

Play Ball! Two New Science Games

These two new gems just arrived to spice up Science classrooms everywhere.




The first baseball game covers micro-organisms and bacteria. Sure, it's a gribbly topic, but that's what makes it all the more fun!




Tornadoes, hurricanes, snowstorms, floods, earthquakes, tsunami, and a host of other insurance adjuster nightmares take center stage in our second new game, Natural Disasters Baseball.



Of course, both of these games are perfect for your new interactive whiteboard, but they work great on a regular wall, or a computer lab.

Let us know what you think of them by emailing us at teachersbrunch at teachersdiscovery dot com.

Your Friends at Teacher's Brunch--On the Cutting Edge of Educational Theory

In this month's issue of the English Journal, you'll find a piece called "Turn It On and Turn It Up: Incorporating Music Videos in the ELA Classroom" by Luke Rodesiler.

It's a fine article, one we here at Teacher's Brunch HQ in apparently prescient Auburn Hills, MI firmly endorse.

We endorse it so much, we even went back in time to create a blog post about the exact same thing. You'll find it here.

(We tried to post some of the videos Rodesiler mentions, but the videos are technologically blocked. They are, however, pretty widely available for viewing in your classroom.)

Who Listens To These Guys?

All of us here at Teacher's Brunch HQ in cool-for-the-season Auburn Hills, MI are getting ready to go to an art exposition this morning, so before we take off, we thought we'd just post a nice, innocent, political post.

Specifically, we were wondering if all the reels and reels of audio and video generated by the talking head culture of politics might have some value in the classroom.

We've highlighted Ed Shultz and Rush Limbaugh (appropriately on the left and right of our post-opening image, respectively), but there are loads of similar folks on the airwaves.

Thinking of their use in the classroom, it might be neat to compare coverage of a major political event--studying time given, or language used perhaps. Maybe an analysis of the types of callers who make it through would be an interesting way to look at this type of media. How about "Time Talking" compared to "Time Advertising?"

So we'll open up the comments if you'd like to describe how you already use the megaphoners out there in your classroom. Or maybe we're off base, and all that hot air just makes your school's air conditioning work too hard?

A Dark and Stormy Blog Post

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)



San Jose State University announced the winners of its annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

To the uninitiated out there, Bulwer-Lytton is a generally well-respected writer, but he also dropped the bombshell opening sentence posted above that Snoopy stole for years.

So, SJSU hosts a contest each year to match--nay, surpass!--Bulwer-Lytton in writing so much while saying so little.

While the winner is certainly worthy, we here at Teacher's Brunch HQ in firework-hungover Auburn Hills, MI, prefer the runner-up because, well, it has a monkey.

We also got to thinking what a fun activity this would be for creative writing classes, or any classes, really. The trick is to make it a "good, real" sentence, while still qualifying for the contest.

We also also got to thinking about the basics of the contest, exhorting overwrought, cliche-ridden writing by writers who don't know when to quit while

Spelling Bee

Mega congrats to Kavya Shivashankar who yesterday won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, though those of us here in spellcheck-grateful Auburn Hills, MI were pulling for Michigan's own Sidharth Chand.

Sid fell to "apodyterium," a Greek bath. Seems rather unfair, since nearby Mt. Clemens was known for its mineral baths, not places to hang your togas.

So we thought we'd post two of our favorite moments in Spelling Bee history. The first is from Rebecca Sealfon, 1997 winner and, we think, the foundation for the nation's renewed interest in the Bee. Here she wins. Isn't her enthusiasm great? (But, to step up for our Michigan man Sid, isn't euonym a bit of a softball compared to apodyterium?)




This clip speaks for itself.

Yet Another D & D Post

Well, followers of this blog know someone around here at Teacher's Brunch HQ in rainy Auburn Hills, MI has a "Dungeons & Dragons" jonesing, so it makes sense that when we saw this article, Everything I Know I Learned From Dungeons & Dragons, it had to be posted here.

Hopefully, game clubs will spring up across American schools.

New Essay Prompt Book

We're pretty excited about our new book "11 ESSAY TYPES AND 50 PHOTO PROMPTS."

It's the first real book to come from the Teacher's Brunch office, but more than that, the book is a great tool for teachers and students alike.



The book defines the eleven most-common forms of essays and provides an example for each type. Those samples are all based on the same picture, proving that any time of essay can be inspired by any picture prompt.

The book also contains an additional 50 images that students can use to inspire their writing.

There's nothing scarier than a blank page and a blinking cursor at the top of it. Hopefully our book helps your students fill those pages.

(By the way--any class with a writing component could use this book. There's no rule insisting the essays be written in English, Foreign Language teachers!)

Space: The Silly Frontier

We here at TB HQ in soggy Auburn Hills, MI love when pop culture and entertainment collide with the real world.

So we've been following the story of NASA's call to name a section of the International Space Station based on popular votes, and comedian Stephen Colbert's push to get his viewers to vote to name it after himself.

Well, he won the vote, but NASA is going in a slightly different direction.

Colbert had done a similar thing with the voting to name a Hungarian Bridge.

The lesson for students here? Voting matters (or maybe not, given that NASA sorta picked the name it liked best, anyway).

Dungeons and Dragons Co-Creator Dies

Some of us around the TB HQ in chilly-morninged but nice-afternooned Auburn Hills, MI are mourning the passing of Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson. He now joins his fellow co-creator, Gary Gygax, in an afterlife we hope is full of merry adventuring and the occasional bugbear.

Dungeons and Dragons attracted a lot of attention--mostly negative--in the 70s and 80s, but has since quietly provided many teenagers, and more than a few adults, a welcome respite from the ordinary and everyday. D&D came first in many ways, and its influence is still being felt. How many of your students play Magic? Or Pokemon? Or Warhammer? How many saw or read "The Hobbit" and already had a pretty good idea of what an elf was like?

In schools across America, teachers lament the video-gaming of our young people. Before Atari, D&D supplied kids with their daily recommended allowance of other person fun. And it was all done using books and math!

In truth, D&D has a several applications in today's schools. Why not challenge your students to "quest," in writing, for a famous historical or mythological artifact? Sort of like Indiana Jones in essay form. The more "quests" your students successfully complete, i.e. the more solidly written papers they submit, the more powerful their character becomes. What happens after that is up to you!

Here's the story about Mr. Arenson's passing. Dip your sword out of respect.

Teaching With Music Videos

Hello from Teacher's Brunch HQ here in soggy-was-warm-gonna-snow-Auburn Hills, MI.

We'll be honest up front about this blog post. First, this idea won't work in every classroom. Second, this idea won't be cool with every principal. Third, we need to say "thanks" to Mike, our tech guru, who taught us how to embed YouTube content into a blog.

This is Mike, looking dapper for Halloween:



We use YouTube to play music to help us focus in the office, and it got us thinking about using music videos in the classroom. Below are two examples of some pretty interesting videos. The first is "Handlebars" by Flobots. The second is the Linkin Park song "Shadow of the Day."













It would be pretty interesting to use these videos in a Social Studies class to spark discussion about government and media, the role of common people in a democracy, or how the First Amendment protects the right to make videos that could be interpreted as critical of the government.

In English class, students could analyze imagery, the storytelling aspects of the videos, or even write a compare and contrast paper about the videos.

A lot of acts have official YouTube channels, so high quality video is pretty accessible.

In addition to being familiar with the song, of course, we suggest you check-out the comments for video before you show them. Some folks post comments decidedly school INappropriate.

But it would be fun to use technology your students are really familiar with, along with their culture, to get them thinking about bigger concepts.



(here's an extra credit video. we don't know how to use it in class, but it's pretty funny, anyway!)