My Son’s Teacher Caps His Renditions of “Old Town Road” to Three per Day

[conuly]

My 5-year-old son is in kindergarten, and things are going very well overall. We like the teacher a lot, but I have a problem with one of her classroom policies, and I’m not sure how best to address it with her. My son enjoys singing and humming. He almost always sings or hums as he goes about his day. The rule in the classroom is that singing and humming are not allowed during instructional or work times, but they are allowed during both indoor and outdoor free play.

That is all very reasonable, and my son is adjusting well to this rule. The problem is that my son and several of his classmates LOVE the song “Old Town Road.” At home, he sings it all day long. At school, the teacher prohibits the number of times they can sing this particular song. They are only allowed to sing it three times per play period, and the only reason she prohibits them from singing it more is that she hates the song. To me, that seems irrelevant. This is the song that brings the kids joy, the song does not violate any other rules (language, etc.), and he is only singing it during the times when singing is allowed. I don’t see why his singing should be curtailed by her musical taste. I absolutely understand that a kid singing a song you hate 100 times in a row is annoying (I don’t like the song either), but that is the nature of kids. Our job as parents and teachers is to put our personal feelings aside and do what is best for the child. How should I approach her about this?

—Little Singer’s Mom

Dear Little Singer’s Mom,

Your son’s teacher is under no obligation to put her personal feelings aside at all times. She has a right to a workplace that is pleasant and tolerable. Frankly, I think she’s being generous. Listening to a song that you despise once is bad enough. Three is a gift.

If my own child asked me to play a song that I despised while we were driving in the car, I might agree to play the damn thing, but three times? No. It is not a teacher’s job to put aside our personal feelings so that children can live their preferred existence. It’s our job to set limits for children and let them know when their behavior is annoying.

Honestly, I think this teacher is helping your son in the long run. She’s requiring him to expand his musical palette while making him understand that the world will not bend to his cultural preferences. He doesn’t get final say on his environment. Your son will have to contend with authority figures, popular opinion, and societal norms throughout his entire life. Consider this moment a good start.

—Mr. Dicks

Comments

[conuly]

Lady, I don't know where you got the idea that what's "best for the child" is to be allowed to irritate the crap out of everybody around him, but it's not. Boy howdy is it ever not. What's best for him is to learn that other people have rights too, including the right not to listen to the same song on loop for six straight hours, sung badly by a five year old.

[ambyr]

...is there another "Old Town Road" besides the one by Lil Nas X? The one with lyrics that go:

Ridin' on a tractor
Lean all in my bladder
Cheated on my baby
You can go and ask her
My life is a movie
Bull ridin' and boobies
Cowboy hat from Gucci
Wrangler on my booty

Because, I mean, yeah, that doesn't have any profanity in it, but it seems like an awkward fixation for a kindergartner.

[lemonsharks]

Just because they like the song and sing it a lot doesn't mean they know what the song is actually about. Kiddo probably thinks it's hilarious to say "boobies".

My favorite song when I was four was "Bad to the Bone" and, which:

I make a rich woman beg, yeah
And I'll make a good woman steal
I'll make an old woman blush
And make a young girl squeal
I wanna be yours, pretty baby
Yours and yours alone
I'm…
Bad to the bone
B-b-b-b-b-b-b-bad
B-b-b-b-b-b-b-bad
B-b-b-b-b-b-b-bad
Bad to the bone

And at six I had learned the (not censored for radio) Reba McIntire cover of Fancy and sang it incessantly:

It wasn't very long after a benevolent man
Took me off the street
And one week later I was pourin' his tea
In a five room hotel suite
I charmed a king, a congressman
And an occasional aristocrat
Then I got me a Georgia mansion
In an elegant New York townhouse flat
And I ain't done bad

[azurelunatic]

I would think that a kid that age would possibly enjoy the lines that go:

Can't nobody tell me nothin'
You can't tell me nothin'
Can't nobody tell me nothin'
You can't tell me nothin'

[ayebydan]

I second that they probs don't understand it. They probably just like the beat of it.

My mum still likes to morify me by reminding me that I spent a year, aged 7 obsessed with songs such as 'I'm horny', 'sex bomb' and 'mambo number 5'

[ashbet]

My parents ALLOWED ME TO GET ONSTAGE AT THE KINDERGARTEN TALENT SHOW and sing “Let Me Entertain You” from Gypsy Rose Lee (we had a book of piano versions of showtunes), and... retroactively, yikes!

https://genius.com/Jule-styne-let-me-entertain-you-lyrics

LOL

Also, I think the teacher is being perfectly reasonable!

[ayebydan]

Right? Sometimes innocence is indeed bliss and adults coming in with their wokeness becomes the issue.

I'm sure you killed it XD

[cereta]

Well, in fairness, in the musical, the song is first sung by Baby June and Louise.

[azurelunatic]

My 5-year-old-ish nephew loved the Dead Alewives' Dungeons and Dragons sketch. The one with "I attack the darkness!" ... which also contains "If there are any girls there, I want to do them!"

We could tell he had no idea what the line meant because he rendered it "If there are any girls there, I want to do that!" We still cut down on how much he got to listen to it after that.

[lemonsharks]

I want to know why the teacher hates it. "I have heard it way too many goddamn times" is one thing--if she hates it because she doesn't think it's ~real country music~, well, that may be a racist dogwhistle and it's worth watching her like a hawk.




Please consider: A brief history of black artists in country music/"Is Old Town Road by Lil Nas X Real Country Music?" on the Say It Loud youtube channel, produced by PBS.

https://youtu.be/Bh8GZox-D3M

[minoanmiss]

I thought exactly this in the flip order. On the one hand, I have argued with too many people in my life over the artistic merits of rap/blues/any art form Black people participate in. On the other, I have endured a four year old singing the same song over and over and over and over. And a six year old singing the same song... And an eight...

[lemonsharks]

And I think one of the things that does make this particular song potentially irritating is that it's more of a "we will rock you" when the content (especially the content of the video, which gives so much more context) demands it be a "bohemian rhapsody" -- I want the extended remix. Lil Nas X! That is a great chorus you have there! A fantastic bridge! It would make an EVEN BETTER dance ballad. (It's also stuck in my head now.)

But also, kiddos are SO LOUD. and SO EMPHATIC. and LOUD.

[ayebydan]

I'm just imagining a bunch of kiddos loudly emphasising 'AiNT NO BODY TELL ME NOTHIIIIIIIIIIN' and wow please no.

[cereta]

Oh, fuck that noise. No details in public, but I am dealing with a grown-up version of, "I am the student and you are the teacher so you need to deal with what whatever I throw at you," and just...no. (1) The teacher gets to set parameters in her classroom within the rules of the school. (2) Teachers have to balance the needs of ALL students. Maybe some of the other kids are sick of hearing the song over and over. (3) Teachers are people who are allowed to have preferences ad dislikes, and three time per play period is more than reasonable.

[katiedid717]

I wonder if this parent would change their mind after being stuck listening to "The Song That Doesn't End" for half an hour.

[conuly]

It just goes on and on my friend

[cereta]

At 2AM, when that is still stuck in my head, I'm going to your journal and posting all the lyrics of "It's a Small World After All."

[conuly]

Oh, I love that song! Lemme pull up a youtube video, we can sing it together!

[fred_mouse]

It's a small world .... where the egos are big and the gene pool is small.

[eleanorjane]

Pick the person that doesn't have kids, but I can sympathise with kiddo/LW somewhat; it seems to me that if the rules are that you only get to do X in your own time, you should be allowed to do the *kind* of X you want in your own time. Otherwise it's not really a compromise.

That said, a) I don't love the STOP SUPPRESSING MY CHILD'S UNIIIIIIQUENESS whiffs I'm getting from the letter, and b) this is not a huge encroachment on your kid's human rights, lady, go find another hill to die on. Like, as Oppressive Authoritarian Rules go, this one doesn't even rate. Chill out.

[cereta]

I see your first point, but schools place all kinds of restrictions on what students can do during play periods/recess/free periods. I mean, I'm pretty sure if what the kid wanted to sing was "La Vie Boheme" from Rent, he would have gotten a hard no on singing it at all. The compromise isn't, "You can only sing during play period," because a rule that prohibits singing or humming during class activities is pretty much a necessity if all the students are going to have a positive learning experience (I've had hummers in my classes, and it's always distracting to other people, myself included). The compromise is between "you can't sing that song at all" and "you can sing that song as much as you want."

I do definitely agree about the "oppression!" nonsense. I mean, "what is best for the child" is definitely not learning that a classroom won't have any rules or requirements that don't put his personal wants (not needs, but wants) first.

[jadelennox]

a friend told me a story about a fellow parent that she knew who started homeschooling her kids after the first day of kindergarten, because the kid showed up at kindergarten and "the first thing they learned was how to stand in line! can you believe it?!?"

To which my response (and my friend's) was "these children need to learn to live in a society, with fellow people. Learning to stand in line is absolutely a vital life skill. It's got nothing to do with oppressing their natural creativity, and everything to do with teaching them how to live in a community with other people."

That's how I feel about the singing, as well. If you are teaching your kid that their pleasure and creativity is so important that (1) it's more important than any disruption that the education professional says it is doing to your education, which is the reason you are in school, and (2) it's more important than the teacher having a functioning workplace, then you are teaching your kid wrong.

Moreover "Our job as parents and teachers is to put our personal feelings aside and do what is best for the child," um, LW is saying some correct words in a totally incorrect fashion. Leaving aside the LW's assumption that "what is best for the child" is "I can do whatever I want whenever I want", which, as you say, is ridiculous, the obligations of a parent and a teacher are totally different. While I may personally think that this parent is also doing bad parenting, that's none of my business. But the teacher is an employed member of the labor market with a job, which people seem to forget. Parents have a very different societal role than employees, who have to do their job (educating the children in a supportive and nurturing environment, etc. etc.), but absolutely don't have to "put their personal feelings aside." That's anti-labor bullshit which entirely comes from the idea that most primary/elementary school teachers are women.

[cereta]

Yeah, that line about "putting personal feelings aside" hit me where I live. I don't remember who it was, but a fellow educator wrote a comment to one of my posts about having to help a student with a paper that opposed marriage equality, and that no one seemed to care about the psychic toll that took on her. I get papers that are not just offensive to me in general, but attack something that is intensely personal to me, and I'm supposed to smile and help that student write the best possible argument that I'm not worth basic human decency. So yeah. That's a thing.

[ioplokon]

omfg like they learn to stand in line so the teacher can do a headcount and make sure there are no missing children. I mean, quelle horreur!

[onlysmallwings]

The parent likely only has to deal with one child singing the same song over and over and over. The teacher has to deal with most, if not all, of the class singing the same song at the top of their lungs over and over. Kindergartners aren't really well known for volume control, impulse control, or assessment of proper behaviors; that's all learned, and generally learned at school via rules like this one.

[cereta]

Yes. Also, the letter says, "my son and several of his classmates." There may well be kids who actively dislike the song. That's the kind of thing that could get distorted (the teacher might be taking full responsibility to avoid interkid conflict; for that matter, how does LW know what the teacher's reasoning is? Most likely from the kid, who may be oversimplifying things). The teacher has to balance the needs of all the kids.

[ioplokon]

Man not to be like, "Back in my day" but when I was in school, I literally wasn't allowed to hang out with my friends from my neighborhood during breaks because we weren't in the same grade. That I feel was unnecessarily controlling; not singing the same song more than 3 times in the teacher's earshot during breaks? Not so much. (also like, if he's doing it far away and kids hate it enough to narc on him, I feel this policy is still doing him a favor in the long-run)

[cereta]

Okay, that is harsh. I mean, we had the same thing to a degree because recess was staggered, but there were no rules except separating boys from girls.

[conuly]

Separating boys from girls?

[cereta]

Catholic school, lat 70's, early 80's. Our playground was the Church parking lot, that had two big sections connected by a small lane. Girls on one, boys on the other. Don't know if they still do it. Will have to ask my sister, whose kids are there.

[conuly]

I think that's worse than separating grades, tbh.

[cereta]

Eh, I don't think we suffered any lasting damage, but most of us also went on to single-sex high schools.

[eleanorjane]

Wait, what? Boys and girls were separated during recess?

[cereta]

See above ;).