I am the Walrus

A very interesting turn of events occurred last week in one of my Senior 2 classes. We were engaging in an activity dealing with the tenets of procedural writing. I had assigned each student to create a brief work of procedural writing (3 or 4 instructional steps) in which they were to explain how to complete a specific task, and then I asked a few students to come to the front of the class and share their writing with the rest of us by writing the steps they had devised on the chalkboard and then explaining them orally. The students seemed excited about this assignment since they were able to incorporate topics of personal interest and share their interests with their classmates. The first two students who shared their writing with the rest of the class chose to explain how to complete the tasks of “caring for a pet dog” and “writing a composition”, and they both did an excellent job.

The third student who volunteered to share her procedural writing had something altogether different in mind for this assignment, however. The task she chose to explain was “how to sing to your students”. As soon as she wrote her topic on the chalkboard, I remembered that during my first meeting with this particular class (two weeks earlier), one of the students had asked me to sing a song for the class. In an effort to forestall such a task (or perhaps even avoid it altogether), I promised the class that I would sing to them during our following class-meeting. I had forgotten about that exchange entirely, but apparently the students had not.

The girl sharing the procedure that she had outlined for “singing to students” listed the following necessary steps on the chalkboard:
1.) Choose a musical style
2.) Choose an artist of that style
3.) Choose a song performed by that artist
4.) Sing the song as best you can
5.) Thank you for singing to us – you are a great singer!
Having been thoroughly reminded of the promise I had made two weeks prior and provided with such a helpful list of specific instructions, I had no choice but to oblige my students. ‘Twas a command performance, truly!

With my students’ assistance, I carefully followed the steps outlined in the provided instructions: I chose a musical style: rock n’ roll. I chose an artist of that style: The Beatles. I chose one of my favorite songs performed by The Beatles: Let It Be, and I shamelessly belted out two verses and a two choruses of that song, much to the delight of the roughly 65 students on-hand. I received an enthusiastic round of applause afterward, and thanked the young lady who had composed my instructions for creating such a useful, easy-to-follow piece of procedural writing.

Judging from the level of active engagement in this procedural writing lesson that resulted from the involvement of popular music, I think that a similar inclusion would benefit other lessons dealing with poetry, creative writing, literature and so forth. I plan to devise at least one other lesson for my Senior 2 classes that includes some utilization of pop-music as an instructional instrument.