Songs on the Radio

Let me set the scene…you are sitting in your vehicle at a red light…great song comes on the radio…feet start tapping…you play the imaginary drum set on the dashboard…perhaps the air guitar comes out…you begin to sing…louder…louder yet…then it happens…you look out of the corner of your eye and notice that the person in the vehicle next to you is enjoying the show you are putting on…he applauds…you turn shades of red never seen before and pray that the light turns green in the next millisecond. Don’t tell me this has never happened.  How many songs do you know by heart?  I bet it is in the hundreds…or thousands.  How did you ever learn all of those lyrics?  It’s simple – you played them over and over and over again.  Probably drove your parents or someone else nuts.  You learned the words through repetition. You played that song over and over and over again.   I recall wearing out not one, but two LP copies of “Frampton Comes Alive” plus one 8-track. Don’t know what those are – ask your parents.  Side question and required answer = what is your favorite song?  See you at the stop light.

Teaching involves a lot of repetition. We just don’t teach content once and forget about it. We cover concepts in multiple ways with multiple applications and with multiple connections.  We tell them what we are going to tell them. Then we tell them. Finally, we tell them what we told them.  Kids don’t just learn their multiplication facts by shifting through flash cards one time.  They work those cards so thin that resale is not a possibility. We teach advanced skills, but not without repeating the foundational work.  We teach muscle memory in Physical Education by repetitively doing the same motions. We spiral up and we spiral down.  We may bust out an old Saxon Math lesson. We return to the roots to emphasize them again.  We review before we move on. We move on and sometimes find that we should have reviewed.  We hammer home the critical information by emphasizing it, by giving it value, and by showing the kids its relevance in their lives.  We make a difference and that must be a repetitive skill.