“Because music is a vital component of youth’s popular culture preferred over even movies and television, the teacher’s understanding and application of popular music can be a powerful tool for teaching and learning in social studies education” (p. 111). This quote from White and Walker hits right at the center of the topic of popular culture. While this article seems to focus on the social studies aspect of using popular music in education, as an English teacher, I have been able to find many different ways to use popular music in my own classroom with my future students. Since popular music is always changing, it can be hard to keep up with what is popular at the current time, so it is important to keep up on it to keep it relevant for my students as the years go on. Here are a few ways I have thought of to incorporate popular music into my English classroom:
• Poetry Unit- During a poetry unit, it would be a great idea to have each student come to class with the lyrics to their favorite popular song. The students could pair up and then find all of the conventions that we have learned regarding poetry (i.e., simile, metaphor, personification, rhythm, meter, rhyme, etc.) and analyze the lyrics together. What issues does this song bring up? How does it compare to the poems we have read together as a class over the last few days? It would probably be a good idea to do a sample one with the class and compare it directly to a poem that we have studied.
• Creative Writing Unit- Since students are constantly listening to music and are surrounded by it at almost all times (whether they choose to listen to it, or if they are shopping in a store playing music, or driving in the car with the radio on), so it would be fun to allow students to take time to write their own lyrics for a song. There would have to be guidelines as to what is acceptable, but to allow them to express themselves in a way that is already familiar to them would most likely increase their interest in a creative writing assignment instead of having them write poetry (but little do they know, us sneaky teachers are actually tricking them into writing poetry because music lyrics can definitely be seen as poetry!)
• Popular Culture Lesson- it is important to make sure that students are aware of how popular culture effects literature. When one reads older texts, often times there will be allusions to the popular music that was present during the time the story takes place. This can be confusing for some, but once they understand the importance of how popular music can tell us something about the time period, it should make them more conscious of the popular culture they read in today’s novels. Have students find music that contains references to older pieces of literature (i.e., Taylor Swift's current popular song "Love Story")



I was actually a little surprised to read that it is music that is really the number one aspect of popular culture. I was always under the impression that it would be either television or movies that would be at that number one spot (considering how many hours a day students spend in front of the television or watching movies), but now that I think about it more, I can see how music was ranked at the top of the list. I have just stared my student teaching this week, and over the last five days, I have had the chance to mainly observe and get to know the students in the classes better. I was shocked to see how many students would come into the classroom with their white earbuds connected to their iPods. I was even more surprised when I noticed that most of these students would only take out one of the earbuds, and keep the other one during class. I over heard some other English teachers in the department discussing their opinions on this phenomenon and they have taken to allowing the students to listen to their music during work time as a reward.





Regret:
Katy Perry-


Sexuality:


Race:
Chamillionaire- Ridin' Dirty

vs. Weird Al's White and Nerdy

Fake News

Before I first started to go to the University of Minnesota, I had had very little interaction with fake news in comparison to real, factual news. In my mind, fake news really only included the tabloids that were present at the check out lines when at the supermarket. The only “news worthy” articles that I saw pop up included: the end of the world quickly approaching, the coming of Jesus, or Bat Boy.

Every once and a while my dad would bring home one of these hardcore tabloids, and I would take time to look through it. To be perfectly honest, as a kid I was pretty naïve and had not ever been explicitly told that these “newspapers” were fictitious. Because of this, I found myself getting scarred at night because I really thought that the very creepy-looking Bat Boy was on the loose and that he would somehow make his way into my house and terrorize my family. My early experiences with fake news centers on the fact that I actually believed these articles and should be a warning for all future and current educators that they need to give their students the skills to figure out biases and what is true and what is not true (especially as they go on to write numerous research papers throughout their academic career).

While I lost much of my innocence concerning fake news and how to identify logical fallacies, though high school I never had to come into contact with it much, until I started my freshman year of college. Stationed at nearly every corner located at the University of Minnesota, there is a newspaper box for The Onion and after spending a lot of time waiting for the bus with nothing to do, I started reading the ridiculous articles written for this fake newspaper. My interest in the fake news increased as the political issues arose and really enjoyed reading the twisted articles for my entertainment. Over the course of the last year, I found myself really wishing that I had cable for the soul reason that I wanted to be able to watch The Daily Show and other parody news shows.

While I have never been a big fan of politics, these fake news stories really helped ease me into keeping up with what was going on in the world, because in order to be able to find the humor in the articles, I had to have a basic knowledge as to what was going on in the real world.

My feelings are that I am not the only one who has had this experience with fake news (especially from when I was an adolescent), and that with today’s influx of published unreliable news articles mixed in with the real thing, the youth may be having a difficult time differentiating be what the real stories are versus the fake ones. As an English teacher, I have been thinking a lot about how I can help my current and future students sift through the correct information that they will need to get through while doing many different types of papers, and how I can use examples from the Onion to get my point across. Some areas that may be causing students trouble with fake news is that it is presented in the same format as the real news. The fake news (when paired with the real articles) can really help students realize that you cannot always take what you read for it’s face value and see that knowing the source of where the news comes from is just as important of a step in the research process as everything else. Students know that they should be wary of Wikipedia articles when digging for information about their particular topic, so they should also start figuring out what print resources are reliable and which one are not. Not only could these fake articles help students with research papers and learning about logical fallacies, it can also enhance a journalism lesson on the conventions of newspaper writing. The Onion is written in such a ways that makes it hard to distinguish what is real and what is fake because it’s conventions match that of high quality newspaper writing. An assignment that could work with journalism students (or in any class where they need to journalistic style writing) to show them the best ways to write a newspaper article is below:

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be learning what it takes to be a great journalist. At the end of the semester we will publish and distribute the school’s biannual newspaper “The Rebel Riot.” Before we can start writing stories, we need to learn the conventions of newspaper writing.

With a partner, take a look at the following news articles:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/obama_peddling_stimulus

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/us/politics/26talkshow.html?fta=y

On the backside of this paper, compare and contrast the two articles and include information regarding the conventions of how the articles were written, and the set up of the website that the article is on:
• What did you notice?
• What were some similarities?
• What were the differences?
• Find anything surprising?
• Comment on the voice of each article

After the class has finished combing through the articles, we will come together as a group and discuss our findings.

I want TOYS!!!

This weeks readings have really hit close to home for me. I have been working with younger kids ever since I was 12 years old when I started to babysit for my neighbor’s three young boys. In the last ten years, I have also worked as a t-ball coach for four, five, six, and seven year olds, as a camp councilor for kids in elementary school, a park supervisor, and most recently I have been employed as a nanny for three kids (ages five, six, and eight). At one point during my undergraduate experience, I had considered getting my teaching license in either elementary or early childhood education. Now that I have made up my mind to teach adolescents and teens, sometime I wonder how much “kid culture” can really help enhance my lessons.

In chapter 15, White and Walker discuss the importance of play in the classroom. During my foundations of education classes, we spend a lot of time learning about why it is important to let students use play to solve problems. “Toys of value enhance children’s own ideas. They help the child to engage in imaginative, meaningful play by allowing them to solve the problem” (144). As a nanny, I see this happening all of the time when they are playing amongst each other. While these kids are fortunate enough to have several toys, the most loved toy in their house would have to be the play kitchen that they have set up in the basement. Often, the kids will pretend to have their own restaurant and take their jobs very seriously. On longer days, I will take the kids to the Minnesota Children’s Museum, and while we are there, I get the opportunity to observe hundreds of kids using the toys provided by the museum to solve certain, task-related problems. In one room of the museum, the area is set up like an assembly line where blocks are moved from upstairs, to the lower level, and then moved to the “shipping truck”. As soon as the children would enter the room, in no time, they were dressed in the worker uniforms, hard hats, and begin working with one another to complete their task. I am always amazed by how quickly a couple dozen elementary aged students can come together are work with great teamwork. Also, within the museum, there is an area named "Our World". This space is set up to replicate a small town including a Chinese restaurant, a city bus, doctors office, recording studio, grocery story, etc. Here, kids are able to dress up and become little grown-ups. In the restaurant, the kids take the time to happily clean up from their "cooking" (something that they would never actually do at home). This place allows for children to practice adult roles, and by watching them, you can see how they view society and different hierarchies.

“These toys channel children into imitative play, robbing them of their own imagination, problem solving, and creativity” (146).

“Starting at birth, relatives and friends give children toys or objects to express love” (146). I feel like this is a big issue in the United States culture. Toys are loosing their purpose. I remember the days when my mom would give me the empty oatmeal container and washed out milk cartons and I would use them in a ways to help my "customers" finally get breakfast (after months of only having plastic hamburgers to offer them). What makes me almost sick is how much money parents will spend on the popular toys, instead of figuring out which new gift would have a more enduring meaning to their child. Over the holiday season, the popular television show The Office ran an episode that dealt with parents over paying for the holiday's most wanted toy, "Unicorn Princess". Unicorn Princess is what Tickle Me Elmo and Furby were like to us 90's children. These were toys that we just HAD to have, but in the long run, we just ended up donating them to Goodwill after about a year.

One thing that has left me questioning these chapters is how relevant can this be for the middle and high school classrooms? There isn't much time allowed in the older classrooms for play time, and this can most obviously be seen from the lack of playgrounds at middle and high schools. Maybe using games and the cartoons from kid culture is enough? I do realize how important it is to use kid culture to enable our students to have the tools to critique popular culture and take more charge of their social education.