Using Songs in the Classroom & The Browning Version 2014

          I'm now working on The Browning Version 2014, which I want to focus not so much on the play itself as on the process and reflections of writing it.  In my latest draft of the first scene, Taplow,  an ESL student instead  a privileged English school boy, does an  imitation not of Crocker-Harris's pronouncement but of his singing "To Dream the Impossible Dream."  I'm going to have him try to "reach" the kids through songs, which once were well-received and now are just part of  the  scathing online teacher reviews he gets from anonymous critics. "And he makes you sing with him!"

          Then, while looking through pieces I wrote over the years, I came across this, which I wrote for the ESLetter back in December 2005:

Using Songs in the Classroom

Recently the daughter of a former student told me that her mother used to come home and teach her the songs that I taught her class at John Adams in the early nineties.  One of the songs she remembered was “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree.”  I laughed because in recent years, I’ve learned that that song is used as part of music aversion therapy to punish and “rehabilitate” people who have gotten citations for disturbing the peace with their hard rock blasting.   The song is such torture to them that they shout, “Stop and we’ll offend no more.” 

But that won’t stop me from being a noise ordinance offender.   I think that phrases with melodies stay in our minds and come to our lips when all else disappears.  I’ve used “If I were a rich man” to teach the unreal conditional because “Si yo fuera rica” served me so well in Spain, and the always-sung dialogue in  Les Parapluies de Cherbourg helped me order black umbrellas and gasoline, not to mention declaring my love to any man named Guy.  Even teaching credit, which isn’t supposed to be any fun at all, I’ve used “The Colors of the Wind” for content with our unit on the environment, and I think songs can be used for intonation and fluency in speaking.  

I use songs for almost every purpose, and looking back at my Peace Corps diaries, I see that I was doing that on the Tonga Isles, too, back in the early seventies.  I taught songs that nuns and governesses teach (“Do Re Mi” and “Getting to Know You”), but the most popular song I ever taught was The Mickey Mouse Club Song,  for which the students even made a banner to hold high, high, high.  But music aversion therapy and cultural imperialism don’t cover it. 

Snatches of songs come in handy.  Some children hanging out in my Tongan hut learned a song from Camelot, “Only you, only I.  World farewell, world goodbye.”  Then one day when they asked me who was going to the beach with us, I said “Only you,” and a little girl named Kiki started singing, “Only you, only I!” 

          It  was in Tonga that I started changing words to songs when I decided that the “Twelve Days of Christmas” didn’t quite fit the Polynesian culture and changed the items to a flying fox in a toi tree, women beating tapa, men drinking kava, etc., and I’ve been doing that ever since—mostly as mnemonic devices for remembering grammar points and vocabulary, but also for anxiety as the students face their final composition. (To decrease it, not to heighten it.)   At the end of the semester I use holiday melodies for verses giving tips on how to write a good composition, and the words do give pointers.  But the songs are really intended to help the students laugh and relax, so I hope they aren’t really more appropriate to music aversion therapy. 

But of course Crocker-Harris will find out that they are in my 2014 version of  Terrence Rattigan's play .