blog 36

This blog is about a hypothetical situation as well as a personal anecdote relative to our commonplace paper. My commonplace paper is about history told through music. For my personal connection I think I’m going to talk about how the song We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy Joel. The song quickly rattles off important events in chronological order that took place from the 40’s, when Joel was born, to 1989, the time when Joel wrote the song. This song contains 119 references to events that were current during those years and by dissecting the lyrics you can easily see America’s history during that time period. As for my hypothetical situation I may compare learning with music to learning through a textbook. Numerous studies suggest that when subjects such as English are taught through song they are not only easier to learn but they are retained better than things learned the traditional way. Hypothetical situation idea number one: What if, instead of having traditional worksheets for homework, students were required to listen to certain songs that taught the students about history. This would take less time for students to complete and there would be less work on the teacher’s part. Also because of the simplicity of the assignment more students may do the work and in theory would learn more from the songs than they would from completing worksheets. I don’t really like that hypothetical situation and I would appreciate any suggestions that you may have on either how to improve my current one or ideas for a new hypothetical situation.