did you ever hear that every kid who
takes music class does better in math
and science?’ They apologized, but they
said they weren’t going to fix it.”
He went on, “I came back to the
teachers and said, ‘Let’s do music his-
tory! Let’s use music as common ground
to establish communication between
teachers and students and just make
your job easier.’ ” Big applause. “Instead
of telling the kid, ‘Take the iPod out
of your ears,’ we ask them, ‘What are
you listening to?’ ”
Later, backstage, Van Zandt said, “I
call it ‘teaching in the present tense.’
We were told, ‘Learn this, you’re going
to use this someday.’ That doesn’t work
anymore. The kids are diferent. It’s a
paradigm shift.”
He explained that his method doesn’t
lean only on sixties rock. “Kanye, we
trace him back, Jay-Z,” he said. Beyon-
cé’s “Single Ladies” video is used to
prompt discussion of the slave trade.He added, “The rock-era methodol-
ogy had to do with politics and cul-
ture, which is hip-hop’s focus, to some
extent, though not as much as maybe
we would have liked.”
He concluded, “Teaching kids some-
thing they’re not interested in, it didn’t
work back then, and it’s even worse
now. We have an epidemic dropout
rate.” He waggled his scarf. “Where
are we going to be in twenty years?
How are we going to get smarter look-
ing at this Administration? You know,
we’re just getting stupider.”
—John SeabrookSteven Van Zandtthe freedom and opportunity to thrive,”
and said, “Just came for some food.”
Rosemary Ringer, a teaching assis-
tant in her sixties, who is black, said of
Abrams’s candidacy, “It means every-
thing.” She continued, “I know a woman
who’ll never go to a family picnic out-
doors, to this day, because she remem-
bers having to sit in the yard after pick-
ing cotton all day when she was young,
not being allowed in a white woman’s
house, with flies buzzing around as she
ate. Coming from that to a black fe-
male governor—boom!”
Before heading down the road to
Friendly Brothers Barber Shop and
Thankful Missionary Baptist Church,
both in Rome, Abrams made a final
pitch to the diners. “This isn’t my first
visit to Dalton,” she said. “I’ve also been
to Abbeville and Zebulon and Jesup.
As I like to say, I’ve gotten my requi-
site speeding ticket in Ludowici. I know
Georgia.”
—Charles Bethea
1
KIDS TODAY DEPT.
LET THEM EAT ROCK
W
earing his trademark silk head
scarf, an exotic blend of Barbary
pirate and Russian babushka, Steven
Van Zandt was relaxing backstage at
the PlayStation Theatre, in Times
Square, recently, before a gig with his
fourteen-piece band, the re-formed
Disciples of Soul. Van Zandt, who is
sixty-seven and is widely known as Lit-
tle Steven (he goes by that name on
his Sirius XM radio show), was limn-
ing his undistinguished career as a high-
school student. “I was only interested
in rock and roll and getting laid, prob-
ably in that order,” he said. Because
neither was part of the curriculum at
Middletown High School, in Middle-
town, New Jersey, he went on, “I had
no interest in school whatsoever.”
He learned everything he needed to
know from rock and roll, he said. His
timing was impeccable. He was thirteen
on February 9, 1964, when he saw the
Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan
Show.” “For those of us who were al-
ready the freaks and misfits and outcasts
of the future, it was literally as shocking
as a flying saucer landing in Central Park,”
he said, in a voice full of awe and Jersey.
The Beatles engaged him as his
teachers had not. “You’re responding
emotionally to something,” he said.
“Bits of information come through. So,
suddenly, you find yourself learning
about Eastern religion”—from the
Beatles—“or about orchestration.
Learning about literature from Bob
Dylan. You didn’t get into it to learn
things, but you learn things anyway.”
For the past decade, Van Zandt has
been working on a way to re-create
that dynamic, out-of-school learning
experience inside classrooms, through
his Rock and Roll Forever Foundation.
The foundation’s team, which includes
two ethnomusicologists, has crafted
more than a hundred and twenty les-
son plans based on popular songs and
videos. Van Zandt calls the program
TeachRock. For example, he said, “The
first Elvis hit single, ‘That’s All Right,’
came out the same year as Brown v.
Board of Education. And it reflects
what’s going on and provides a basic
context.” All the music is licensed and
the lesson plans are available to teach-
ers for free online.
At each of the thirty dates on the
current Disciples of Soul tour, Van
Zandt has ofered tickets to local teach-
ers, provided they arrive early so that
he and his foundation people can walk
them through a few sample lessons.
(All of the tour’s proceeds will go to
the foundation.) More than a hundred
teachers had come out to the PlaySta-
tion; Van Zandt greeted them in the
theatre’s balcony.
He picked up a microphone and
told the group that about ten years ago
the National Association for Music
Education “came to me and said that
the No Child Left Behind legislation
was really devastating art classes.”
The teachers nodded vigorously.
“And they said, ‘Can you go to Con-
gress and give it a shot?’ ” Van Zandt,
who organized the anti-apartheid
album “Sun City,” in 1985, has retained
his passion for activism.
“So I went, and I talked to Teddy
Kennedy and Mitch McConnell”—scat-
tered boos—“and I said, ‘Bit of an un-
intended consequence here. By the way,