Dylan, Lennon, Mayer: Change (Or the Lack Thereof) Throughout the Decades

Tomorrow, October 15, 2013, I will be giving my 10th graders a lesson about songs that discuss the need for change in the world. This is the first lesson I have been able to really come up with on my own, so I am pretty excited about it.

As I stated in our first class meeting during the appositive exercise, I am a rather passionate liberal, especially when it comes to social issues. This is part of the reason this lesson caught my eye as I was perusing the internet trying to come up with something. This website contained a detailed script of how to deliver this lesson, and the more I looked at it the more interested I was becoming in the idea. The script gave several examples of songs to use in the lesson, but I picked the three I was most familiar with: "Blowin' in the Wind," by Bob Dylan; "Imagine," by John Lennon; and "Waiting On the World to Change," by John Mayer. These three songs, representing three different decades, appealed to me the most because, not only do they have similar messages, but also because, in representing these three different decades, they show that our country has had many of the same issues for years and years.

I had been wanting to come up with a lesson about The Beatles, but this website grabbed me faster than any others that included The Beatles. Although the Fab Four's music changed dramatically with the decades, that idea was not quite as strong as the idea that there have been several events within our country that have remained consistent over the decades.

In this lesson, I am going to play each song on YouTube for the class, so they can listen while watching the singer's emotions during the video. I will have printed off lyrics for each of these songs, so after viewing the video and listening to the song, I will lead discussion over each of the songs. I will then have the students (probably) get into groups and thoroughly annotate the lyrics. Finally, I will evaluate the lesson by providing a song analysis worksheet to each of the students. This worksheet asks questions pertaining to each song, but I think I am going to have them pick just one of the songs to analyze.

As you might be able to tell from my last post ("Dead Poets Society, etc"), I am very interested in using different forms of entertainment media within my lessons. As I stated in the last post, I love just about nothing more than movies. Music is a close second. There is just so many layers in music (and movies) that it is hard to ignore, especially when teaching English.