It’s important to set the learning mood in your classroom, and one excellent way to do that is through the music you choose to play during student reading and/or work time. Here are five techniques for incorporating effective music that I have found successful in my own classroom.
Regardless of how you feel about the mega-corporation that has grown out of his studio, Walt Disney himself was an amazing creator. A restless innovator, Walt pushed himself, his employees, and the public beyond what they thought possible. Along the way he influenced the American imagination more than any other person.
Ancient cultures, obscure deities, hard-to-pronounce names are enough to deter almost any teacher, yet even though The Epic of Gilgamesh presents many challenges, it is also a great teaching tool. In addition to qualifying as the oldest work of literature in the world, the epic is a rousing adventure that presents a valuable lesson about life and death.
When I first became an English teacher, there was one subject above all others that I intended to avoid: American Literature—you know, that typically junior-level English course with everything from dry Puritan writings to indecipherable Huckleberry Finn dialect. What fun. Not only did the literature fail to excite me, but as an American myself, I deemed my country’s literature too close, too familiar. The stories of the rest of the world seemed more interesting and important. Yet, as it often happens in life, I found myself walking the very path I had intended to avoid. The assignment of teaching American Literature fell to me, and I reluctantly complied—knowing full well that it would be drudgery—a prediction that proved to be accurate during that first year teaching it. I chalked this defeat up to the subject matter and resolved to avoid it in the future whenever possible.
Although I hate to admit it, some novels are almost unreadable. It's not that you can't read them; it's just that as you do read them, you lose the will to read further. The Last of the Mohicans was always one of these books for me. The description is so overbearing and the plot so seemingly thin that I never could muster enough resolve to finish it. Yet when I pushed through, I found one of America's first great adventure stories and the birth of an American archetype.
