Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (9 page)

Explanations from Chris

Expert songwriter Tom Russell addresses issues of immigration in “California Snow,” a carefully woven tale of a border guard's experiences on the California-Mexico border. As illegal immigrants make the crossing into America, they find themselves unprepared for the cold, and the border guard in the song finds a husband and wife lying in a ditch. After the wife dies, the guard relates that the “next day we sent him back alone across the borderline” (Russell 26–27). The reader can immediately connect chapter 8 to this song as Scout and Jem were exploring the snow in their innocence. The two illegal immigrants must have had the same spirit as Scout and Jem, an innocent and pure vision of the world at that point. While the California snow crushes one vision, Scout and Jem's naïveté is first challenged by the fire at Miss Maudie's house and then by an even more sinister racism, one also spurred on by distinctions of race and class.

“If I Were You” by Chris Knight encapsulates one of the novel's central themes of empathy but does so in an unusual, unique way that relates well with chapter 15. In Knight's song, the narrator is a homeless person asking for spare change: “If I were you, I would gladly loan me a dollar or two” (line 1). As a reader, I connect this song both to the relegated social class of the angry mob attempting vigilante justice on Tom Robinson and to the desperate feeling that Scout and Jem experience seeing their father in apparent danger. Knight's character implores passersby for much more than spare change; he asks them for empathy, something Scout evokes from the members of the lynch mob through her actions when she diffuses the situation with the lynch mob.

In chapter 22 and throughout the book, Atticus Finch takes on the pain and anguish of others in a very selfless manner, a manner incredibly similar to the way Johnny Cash describes his own actions in “Man in Black.” While the novel was written eight years before the song and no evidence of an explicit connection exists, it is nonetheless uncanny how similar Cash's portrayal is to that of Atticus Finch. The crooner explains, “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down / Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town / I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime/ But is there because he's a victim of the times” (lines 5–8). Atticus wears black for the same unfortunate people in
To Kill a Mockingbird
by treating everyone as equals, representing Tom Robinson in a hopeless case, and even risking his family's well-being to do the right thing.

The Carter Family is widely considered the first family of country music, and A. P. Carter's legacy for the timeless songs such as “Wabash Cannonball,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “No Depression in Heaven” is eternal. Chapter 24 marks a point where few answers seem to quench the thirst of questions left by Tom's attempted escape from prison and death. In much the same way, the Great Depression left Americans with fewer answers than questions. Carter's words in “No Depression in Heaven” relate to both situations, “For fear the hearts of men are failing / For these are latter days we know” (lines 1–2) and are resolved by Carter's matriculation to heaven in the chorus. As both situations—the unfair racism in Maycomb and hopelessness during the Great Depression—cast a shadow over many, there is, in fact, relief in the future.

Discussion

While the example soundtracks provide two distinctly different perspectives on the novel, they also represent our thinking behind the connections we made. As students experience the process of making connections and being required to explain and defend them, they most certainly will have to perform close readings of each text—the novel and the lyrics—in order to make the connection clear to the audience. The unfortunate reality of students today, however, is that they see little relevance, if any, in what they are being asked to do and how the task will benefit them in the long term. Using the soundtrack lesson provides students the necessary relevance to utilizing and building schema and long-term comprehension. As students make connections between their understandings of music and what they may consider an archaic text, they are doing more than finding a song with a message that is similar to the chapter's. Like the different perspectives of our two example soundtracks, students' perspectives—via background knowledge—are also distinctly different from the teacher's and their peers. Oftentimes these differences contribute to what may be perceived as a lack of understanding, when in fact students are discovering, and thus learning, important facts of life. We must recognize that students see, read, and understand a simple theme differently than we do. The teacher, unfortunately, knowing the requirements and objectives of “understanding” a given theme, might interpret this difference as a failure to understand the text. However, this may not be true at all. For example, when a teacher explains (or lectures) to students the theme based on “loss of innocence,” a student who may never have had the privilege of innocence may not understand the lectured concept; however, when students connect a message in a song—they have more than likely already made a self-to-lyric association—to the text, they are using the song's message as a bridge to broaden or clarify their understanding of the text. So, while a student may not seem to grasp the teacher's use of the expression “loss of innocence” as a thematic emphasis of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, her song choice may discuss poverty, parental neglect or aloneness (abandonment), abuse, or fear; in actuality, her connection to and identification with the parallels in the story are evidence she does “get it.” As a result, by using this approach, the teacher is offering individualized instruction by relating students' understanding of the text to the required objectives. In so doing, the instructor works to bridge a gap in what may have originally appeared to be ineptitude but actually turns out to be a difference in the students' real-world concepts and their unfamiliarity/experience with educational jargon.

As teachers, we have come to understand that we teach students by way of content, but if we work toward understanding how students learn, we can be more creative by individualizing our teaching and providing students a choice in their learning style. Having such a chance is what makes TSOTN a more meaningful, purposeful, and engaging task. Using soundtracks as a connection to the text promotes a student-centered engagement where students explore, reason, infer, and problem-solve as they wrestle out their own understandings and misunderstandings in an attempt to discover what the text has to say. Eventually, they learn to read and write critically—another necessary long-term skill. Clearly, as students take an active role in their learning, such a hands-on method allows them to make connections with prior learning and personal experiences, and they consequently develop into successful learners following an instructional philosophy that is supported by such well-known educational theorists as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Specifically, this philosophy asserts that when students construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world through their unique experiences and reflections on those experiences, learning becomes both more relevant and more ongoing. By using a soundtrack learning activity, educators can facilitate a long-term purpose—preparing students for life beyond school—and, at the same time, give them an opportunity to apply what they have learned in the classroom to various situations and tasks they will face in the future.

In addition, a central factor in creating relevance and maintaining an instructional purpose of the canonical text
To Kill a Mockingbird
is that educators ensure that their students have access to and learn from the content that has previously eluded them. TSOTN provides learning experiences and instruction that motivate students to learn in the ways that suit them best and simultaneously empowers them to take responsibility for their own learning. As students, with a cacophony of perspectives and musical backgrounds, connect ideas to the text, they learn not only to develop and defend their own points of view but also to subject their viewpoints to the analysis of others—a real-world consequence. Furthermore, instead of students being passive and powerless vessels, waiting to receive great shards of wisdom, the soundtrack activity teaches students to actively seek out answers about inevitable dilemmas, confusion, and contradictions found in the text. As they find answers and connect these issues to music, they “uncover” unique understandings as they attempt to make sense of their world. In such classrooms, students experience the stimulation of belonging to an intellectually challenging community—a group that formulates the necessary ingredient for transforming reading and writing connections into a lifelong skill.

Implications for Practice

Teachers planning to implement TSOTN in their classrooms should consider several characteristics of the assignment. We do not offer it as anything other than something that worked with our students. Certainly, adaptations and modifications can and should be made to fit a particular classroom or group of learners.

While the NCLB Act, formative and summative assessments, and state mandates and testing dictate a departure from “traditional” teaching, teachers and students are nonetheless held to measurable standards, and, therefore, teaching and learning must adhere to such requirements. In our implementation of the soundtrack-to-text lesson, we found that we had, in fact, redirected our teaching and thinking to look at what students are and should be learning—a necessary mandate. The need for the shift in thinking about traditional teaching practices is related to the shift from activity-driven curriculum to one driven by its desired end results for learners. For example, in the early 1900s, writing instruction focused on mechanics and grammatical preciseness. Students learned writing rules and rote memorization as a means for writing—an example of traditional activity-driven writing instruction. However, when writing instruction begins with desired end results—what the teachers want students to know and be able to do at the completion of a lesson—then writing instruction begins to shift from activity driven (with a focus on the teaching) to desired results driven (with a focus on the learning). For instance, in a traditional writing assignment, students might be asked to write a book report on
To Kill a Mockingbird
to check whether or not they read the text and could write about it in a grammatical fashion. A modernized version of that assignment might ask students to write a short summary that indicated their understanding of a specific theme or topic from the novel. Students might be asked to make connections in various writing modes to determine comprehension of content, thus the assignment becomes critical and/or analytical, more than a basic skills check (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 24).

A major shift and departure from that traditional instruction focuses expectations on students' learning as they are acquiring an ability to analyze and interpret what is read with a critical eye and to respond in various genres and levels of writing. Such goals are exactly the premise of TSOTN. In responding to the reality that educational goals are very different for the twenty-first century, the use of soundtrack lessons serves to enhance instructional practices and to ensure understanding takes place on multifaceted levels. Teachers must realize though that such changes from traditional activity-driven instruction to more of an ends-results focus utilizing methods and lessons, however, require a deliberate and focused instructional design that will make an important shift in thinking about teaching. As advocates of such innovation we believe that when teachers implement TSOTN, they engage in a deep, broad study of the learning process they are charged to foster and encourage; as a result, they will hopefully become aware of the need for essential questions that should drive all instruction in this new era of educational accountability: What works? What doesn't? Where is student learning most successful, and why? How can we learn from that success? Where are students struggling to learn, and why? What can we do about it? We believe that utilizing the soundtrack-to-text lesson will allow the teacher to discover answers to these questions and in so doing, to address and respond to the individual educational needs of the learner.

Frameworks and testing standards require teachers to identify the desired results from what they find worthy and assessable in student understanding. But when teachers consider what the “big ideas” are that need to be uncovered, they ask if the targeted understandings are “framed by essential questions . . . provoking, arguable, and likely to generate inquiry around the central idea?” (Wiggins and McTighe 28). And, are the goals—content standards and objectives—
appropriate? Teachers and curriculum designers then begin to move away from content coverage (implying a march through vast amounts of material)—as the traditional tendency in response to state curriculum guides and frameworks and more toward an uncoverage, in-depth teaching that focuses on the learning instead of the material (Wiggins and McTighe 28).

Furthermore, because content standards and text do not explicitly highlight the key concepts behind the content of reading or writing instruction, we must “unpack” the standards and, consequently, uncover the key, or big ideas within the content and then develop essential questions that explore these ideas (Wiggins and McTighe 35). Numerous researchers have demonstrated the fact that when students understand the key ideas embedded in the content standards, they learn specific facts, concepts, and skills that help them to be better readers, writers, and learners. As we reflected on our soundtracks for the novel and as we made our text-to-song connections, we were reminded as literacy teachers of the importance of teaching for understanding and of remembering ourselves that instruction works best, and students learn best, when it concentrates on thinking and understanding rather than on rote memorization. As we sought out methods to achieve this end, we began to see a greater coherence among teaching and learning experiences, desired results, and key performances, which resulted in better student performance—the stated goal for NCLB and for education in general.