Songs your teachers made you listen to

it was a summery 60's-ish pop song (i think - bear in mind at 12 i had little grasp on genre distinction). it celebrated the coming of summer - listing all the good things happening (i can't remember for sure but i'd guess flowers growing, sunshine etc).

the chorus ended with the the line (i think) "...all over town, old people dying".

sick fuck my 6th grade teacher.

History is awesome.

i do, however remember him talking about how he used to survive for months on end by only eating brown rice. oh, and how the acid of today was *nothing* like the acid in the 60s. pffft. what an ass. (he did require joe carducci's book, though.)

in a much better course (the name of which i've forgotten), i first heard king sunny ade.

1. Sinead O'Connor -- Nothings Compares 2 U
2. Mike and the Mechanics -- the Living Years

nothing if not inconsistent!

my 10th grade English teacher exposed us to plenty of other overplayed post-grunge on her "Music Mondays," but that's the tune that sticks out in my mind.

best part is when the singer starts getting all intense at the end so you know he's really serious: "am ah very fah now, am ah very fah now?!!!!"

the chorus ended with the the line (i think) "...all over town, old people dying".

sick fuck my 6th grade teacher.

-- mullygrubbr

Mully, did the song go 'Just bees and things and flowers' or something like that? If so, it's Roy Ayers, Everybody Loves the Sunshine. But damn, I don't recall anyone dying in that song.

We weren't allowed to contribute to quiet time after that.

Sophomore year of college, I took a "philosophy of art" class ("am I sitting in this chair? Or in the chairness of this chair?"), and the professor played Dylan's "Just Like a Woman," and tried to convey that ol' Bob was actually singing about a transvestyte.

That same year, whenever Mike Douglas had a rock group on, my physics teacher would turn on the TV and let us watch. I remember seeing Rick Wakeman, and I think I remember some kind of interview with Keith Moon.

Ummm, I guess I have given away too much about my age.

It all came to an end when a stoner named Tom Hard brought in Dark Side of the Moon, so we could all hear Money and the "bullshit" line. The teacher must have known it was coming and went over to the record player and waited. Right after the offending line she grabbed the needle and dragged it across the record back and forth a few times...she brutalized that thing! Then she announced there would be no more music at lunch, and that was that.

I also remember a slightly unhinged Vietnam Vet teacher playing us 'War, what is it good for' and getting all misty-eyed.

I also had a 10th grade history teacher who would wistfully recite the lyrics to 'The Ballad of The Green Beret.'

And this was a public school in a conservative city. Not some hippie school in San Fransisco or something. Lummi-stix. Weird.

Also, in the fifth-or-so grade, we could bring a tape to listen to in music class on Fridays. I did not have a tape - weird, again - so my dad took me to the music store and I bought "Dancing on the Ceiling" by Lionel Richie.

Other songs I remember being played that day were Heart's "All I Want To Do Is Make Love To You" (yes, really) and "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" by The Clash.

This same teacher redeemed herself when I was in 8th grade, though, by starting in-class guitar lessons with Beatles tunes instead of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or whatever.

There was also a relious education teacher that had a penchant for playing Bob Dylan on his tape recorder during lessons.And another RE teacher who had a pretty serious obsession with all things Freddie Mercury and Queen,to the extent of having pictures of the group posted up on the classroom wall.He also had a fairly dodgy Freddie style tash.

But by far the coolest teacher(oh,so everyone thought) taught Maths and had a very extensive knowledge of heavy metal (cool credentials indeed in the early 90s in South Wales anyway),she bought in a load of G N'R singles or somesuch.
Oh,and Mr.Pearce the music teacher who had been hit by a bus and as a result was rumoured to have a metal plate in his head,played us a Beatles medley once, quickly followed by the "Frog chorus",which was the only song that he played that we actually recognised of course.

and steve reich and probably a lot more i've forgotten too.

He was the guy that got me into Joy Division and Japan. He told me about brave new waves and college radio. He had a music appreciation class that introduced me to a lot of weird stuff that I never would have heard. Records from obscure new wave to tribal field recordings. One thing that made an big impression was a recording of an african tribe who completely died out a couple years after the recording was made. It was strange to hear the sound of a dead tribe at 13. Odd to think that there would have been no record of their existance if the guy had waited for a few more years. An entire culture gone except for this one odd record in a hand made sleeve. I have no idea what it was to this day.

I would say that he probably was the teacher that most influenced the course of my life. I would love to have a coffee with him sometime, to see how life had treated him.

Probably the worst thing I ever had to listen to in school was the same year when Bush The First went to Kuwait. We had this naff rally where we were supposed to disscuss our feelings about the war. It was complete bullshit, I mean even as a 13 year old I could see how completely rediculous and ineffectual the whole exercise was. The event cresendoed with a forced hand holding circle in the gym with the entire school and we had to listen to From A Distance by Bette Midler. terrible stuff.

in 10, my English teacher brought in a karaoke DVD and sang along to "Daydream Believer." Highlight.

now, my art teacher plays Kind Of Blue incessantly, and my English teacher has integrated Muddy Waters/Bill Frisell/Duke Ellington into the curriculum. There was a really shitty musical version of Lorca's "Verde Que Te Quiero Verde" that we listened to in Spanish class.

Goodbye Michelle my little one
You gave me love and helped me find the sun
And every time that I was down
You would always come around
And get my feet back on the ground.

Goodbye Michelle it's hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky
Now that the spring is in the air
With the flowers everywhere
I wish that we could both be there

We had joy we had fun
We had seasons in the sun
But the stars we could reach
Were just starfish on the beach

etc etc.. I always found that a bizrre song.

We had to listen to a lot of things over and over in music classes, to analyse them. The worst was that fecking awful version of "Lean on Me" that came out in the late 80s. Also in English some sub teacher played "Vincent" for no discernable reason (he kept going on about the genius of van Gough, but it was an english class. Baffling).

except if you count my seventh grade science teacher who played us classical music.

"Imagine" - John Lennon
"Wild Fire" - some cheezy 1970s folkie
"Eleanor Rigby" - The Beatles

also, in grade school we had to sing "Yellow Submarine" at an assembly and "Heal the World" by Michael Jackson in Mass (i'm not going to touch the whole pedophilia issues.....in fact, "touch" was probably a bad choice of words...)

Songs I've used in class include "Rosa Parks" by Outkast and various Tupac songs. For background music I play a lot of Temptations, Miles Davis, Alicia Keys, Erakyh Badu, Hank Williams, Ray Charles, etc. I used to let them play the local hip hop station but can't hack it anymore.

In high school, it was 'Waterfalls' by TLC and 'A whole new world' from Aladdin. Ewww

In elementary school, probably 4th or 5th grade, we used to get Barry Manilow cranked at us in Gym class. I remember Daybreak in particular would get us amped.

Also, in 2nd or 3rd grade music class we learned Stevie Wonder songs, specifically "I Wish" and "Sir Duke". That's cool, I wonder who that teacher was...

In French class in 7th grade, among the typical French stuff, our teacher played Plastic Bertrand "Ca Plane Pour Moi" - she was very excited to play something "hip" and "new" at the time.

In elementary school, though the music teacher played us Mamas & Papas "California Dreaming". Words can't really express how utterly bizarre that song sounded to me as a child. And as far as trying to figure out what the hell it was about, well...

i thought it was pretty brilliant when i was 13 though

I remember a teacher when I was 10 used to listen to really bad Irish music like Phil Coulter and stuff. Another one was a big Simply Red fan.

When I was older few of the teachers played anything, although I remember one playing Pink Floyd on his guitar on a trip away. It was all kind of embarassing.

The only time I ever wish I could be a teacher is when I think how great it would be to play mad acid house and weirdo techno to the kids and say "THIS IS WHAT MY LIFE WAS LIKE IN THE 00S, EVERY FUCKING WEEKEND!"

Ken, was that Lorenzo?

Hahah. It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate...and it's REALLY EASY when it's Bono that's the target!

Let's see...my Creative Writing teacher thought Counting Crows and The Police were poetic. She did play The Cure, though, so that was great. My ninth grade English teacher made us analyze the lyrics to Rush's "Limelight" but I don't remember why. We never heard him play it, either. My current maths instructor just listens to internet radio while at school...and the instructor she replaced (he died scuba-diving in a spring the week school started) nailed a whole slough of LP sleeves around the back wall of the classroom, from Bruce Springsteen to Kraftwerk to Olivia Newton-John to Rick James.

I also had an astronomy teacher play us Dark Side of the Moon once while we constructed moon charts with scissors and paper. This was senior year of high school, strangely.

I was very popular.