A Little Music Before We Begin

The class listened to Aretha when they discussed propers.

When students walk into my 8:30 a.m. linguistics class this semester, the room is no longer silent. They may hear a little jazz by John Coltrane or a classic song by Tracy Chapman or a recent hit by Beyoncé. The point is that the room is filled with music as students arrive.

The idea came to me this past spring as part of my work on a university task force focused on undergraduate education. On the task force, we’ve been talking a lot about what kinds of contexts and projects lead to the most rewarding learning experiences for students and how the pressure of grades can get in the way of learning — or certainly in the way of finding pleasure in learning.

I have long believed that rigorous study and a sense of pleasure and play with the subject at hand can go hand in hand. As a teacher, I have always tried to share openly my geeky enthusiasm about language and its history with students, and for years I have started class by learning slang words from students, incorporated stories and jokes into exams, and tried to link course material with current news, videos, memes, and the like. But I have taken as something of a given the institutional feel of the spaces in which I teach.

This summer, I thought, “Why not have music?” I am always hoping that students will talk with each other before class, as part of creating a welcoming and collaborative learning community, and I will regularly chat with them; but that time before class is often quiet — and at 8:20 am, sometimes a bit sleepy! I thought the space might feel more welcoming and warmer if I put on some music.

What I wasn’t expecting was how much fun it would be to DJ. For the first class, I played Aretha Franklin. She had died just a couple of weeks before, and I wanted to celebrate her remarkable life and music (especially given that she was from Detroit). Ben Zimmer had also written a piece in The Atlantic at the end of August about how Aretha Franklin had not received proper credit in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for her use of the word propers — and so I used playing the song “Respect” as a way, on that first day of class, to talk about the history of a word, the role of the OED in tracking language change, and all the places we should be looking for evidence of language innovation.

Since then I have sometimes been playing music that the students told me they were listening to on the introductory survey I use in the first week of class (e.g., Ariana Grande, Hayley Warner, Hall and Oates, Pharrell, Herbie Hancock, Drake). Occasionally this sparks a pre-class conversation I wasn’t expecting — for example, the question of how Ariana Grande says her last name and what it means that most of us have been saying it wrong. Other days I try to make the music directly relevant to class. The day after we talked about semantic shifts for the word peruse and the phrase sight for sore eyes, I found songs that include those words/phrases. On Halloween, I had to (of course) play Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and other Halloweeny songs. The day of the midterm exam, I played motivational music, including “Eye of the Tiger” (Survivor) and “Survivor” (Destiny’s Child).

This pedagogical experiment does require that I get to the classroom about 15 minutes early, but I have always liked having that time with students before class — to chat about how their semesters are going and to answer questions about assignments or course material. And now those conversations can happen in a room whose silence has already been broken by the sounds of music.