Philip Kehe may be 17, but that doesn't mean he doesn't get it. For a school assignment, the Wilde Lake High School senior had to watch "Don't Know Much About History" - a recent CBS Evening News segment about whether 17-year-olds are out of touch with cultural references and historical facts. The segment included an interview with Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation.
Kehe's and his classmates' task was to write a poem about their generation and set it to music using Wilde Lake's Music Technology Lab. "We had to actually relate to current events and what's going on in the world," Kehe said. "We had to make some kind of music to describe what we were feeling" in response to the news segment.
The assignment, called "Your Words to Music," was a joint effort of two classes at Wilde Lake - English 11 Honors and Music Technology. About 100 students in two English and two Music Technology classes recently finished the project and presented their audio files to peers, teachers and administrators.
Denise Perry, who teaches Music Technology, came up with the assignment last year as a way to teach students to write lyrics. "They learn how words and music are connected and how maybe it's not so easy to meld them together," she said.
English teacher Allison Pinto, who is new to Wilde Lake, team-taught the lesson with Perry.
English 11 student Cheyenne Falat, 16, said Pinto wanted her students to have "an outlet to express their creativity in different ways than English students are used to doing."
During last month and this month, groups of five to eight students spent class time writing a poem or song lyrics "about how our generation is going to shape society in the future, what we have to offer," Falat said. "The guidelines were very loose. ... They told us just to have fun with it."
Most groups used the "Your Words to Music" project to argue that today's teens are hopeful, and that they want to confront social, environmental and political problems.
Said Pinto: "The kids really liked it because it changed up the poetry unit."
Students used rhyming dictionaries and counted syllables to match their poems with the beat of the accompanying music. "They were really thinking about it - using a lot of math skills, too," said Pinto. "It's a way for us to talk about some poetry techniques."
Jill Cleveland, 16, is one of Pinto's students. "When you're thinking about a poem to put to music, it helps you think of the meter ... and the mood you want" to create, she said.
