By January, 1975, I fancied I might actually work out as a career teacher. After all, I started the previous September as a teacher of my own syllabus (within the constraints of the English Department’s generous reading list), rather than following the one laid down by my predecessor. I was getting into something of a groove as a teacher of journalism. I was making friends among the faculty, friends whom I’d occasionally see outside the four walls of the school. I was enjoying advising the award-winning school newspaper for a very talented, dedicated staff…

One interesting (?) thing about my English classes: in addition to teaching the reading of American literature (which was the core of the junior-level English curriculum), I was also emphasizing the writing of English. This was a nod, as I saw it, to my college major in Communications Education, vs. English Education. And the principal tool for getting kids comfortable with writing was requiring them to keep a journal. (I’d actually begun doing this in the foreshortened last few months of the 1974 school year.)

Here’s what I recall of the journaling activity:

• The entries needn’t be daily, but they needed to be at least occasional…
• …which meant that when I collected all the journals — on an every-three-weeks schedule, I think — I expected to find more than one or two entries.
• Other teachers in the department also required that the kids keep journals. But three things distinguished my form of the exercise from my colleagues’:
  • I would not critique the entries’ spelling or grammar.
  • I actually read what they said…
  • …and I wrote back to the kids — not commenting on every single entry, but commenting at least every now and then to every single kid’s thoughts as written.

I think my colleagues thought I was a bit nuts about this (as do I, in retrospect). It was a hell of a lot of work, for one thing, no matter how much I believed in its usefulness; it pretty much killed every weekend involved — which meant, since I’d staggered the schedule among my three English sections, it pretty much killed every weekend, period.

On the other hand, it sorta blew the students’ minds (in a good way): I’d promised to read, think about, and respond to what they said (and, in some few rare cases of exceptional writing, how they said it). The first couple cycles were awkward, as expected: could they trust me? if they wrote about their families, the school authorities, their friends, would I rat them out? They could and I didn’t, of course, and by January most of them had genuinely started to loosen up. Most importantly, they were getting comfortable with writing — which had been my objective from the start.

But ye gods, was it a lot of work piled on top of all the usual job requirements: preparing lesson plans, preparing and grading exams, actually, y’know, doing teaching…

About the playlist…

The drive between the apartment where my wife and I lived to the high school where I taught, Google Maps insists today, would have taken me only 15-30 minutes in either direction. Maybe that was true then; I can’t even remember. So I probably was not spending a lot of time with AM radio — in the car, anyhow — during the school year. I more than made up for it over the summer, though: I was back driving a cab.

Given the vagaries of the AM-driven pop-music release-date-to-popularity cycle, then, it stands to reason that I’d probably best remember the songs on this playlist which were released in around March or later; this translates to the songs from “Philadelphia Freedom” (released February 24) on down.

Just a handful of specific notes:

• I never owned even one physical album by the Eagles, but their music has always been pretty inescapable. (My kid sister, as I recall, was crazy about them. (Ditto about Captain & Tennille, possibly because she for awhile affected the Toni Tennille hairstyle look.)) “Best of My Love” has always been my favorite of their singles.
• As the saying goes, Linda Ronstadt could have sung the Yellow Pages as far as I was concerned. Hearing her music from the 1970s always kinda melts me; maybe she didn’t write her own songs, but I’ve never cared about that. (I’ve blogged about her at least a half-dozen times over the years.)
• Aside from Ronstadt’s songs, I notice that around now the cover versions of earlier popular songs were beginning to crop up almost as a genre in their own right…
• On the other hand, jeez, “At Seventeen”: sui generis, and a song whose covers never touched Janis Ian’s original for anyone who heard hers first. (Gawd, don’t get me started on Celine Dion.)