Chuck Klosterman

Friday was the last day of our non-fiction unit, and we read Chuck Klosterman's great essay "Me, On Shuffle."

We read it out loud, then listened to excerpts of some of the songs he talks about: Humble Pie's "I Don't Need No Doctor," Motley Crue’s “Ten Seconds to Love,” AC/DC’s “It’s A Long Way To the Top (If You Want To Rock and Roll)" (OMG if I never hear those bagpipes again it will be too soon!), Guns N’ Roses "Rocket Queen," Kate Bush's "Heathcliff," the Pet Shop Boys' "Always On My Mind," REM's "Nightswimming," and The Carpenters, "Superstar." We talked about it a little, then listened to the clips again.

The first time I did this, I made the mistake of leaving enough of the YouTube screen visible on the InFocus (go here if you haven't been in school in a while, or are somewhere without the access to technology I'm so lucky to have this year--basically, instead of an overhead, I can project my computer screen up onto where the overhead would've projected!) and of course my students said, "Let us see the videos! We wanna watch the videos!" I said, "The essay's about music, not about videos, we're not watching the videos" but yeah, damage done, huge distraction created. So the next classes got fewer glimpses, and they were especially curious about the "Heathcliff" video. So I ended my classes on the day before break with a showing of a really old Kate Bush video!