Using Songs with 'The Great Gatsby'

A few years ago I was at a two-day workshop for AP Language, and my presenter walked us through a few things she did with The Great Gatsby. This excited me because I love teaching that novel, and I am always looking for ways to improve what I am already doing with my students. In her session, she talked to us about how she uses Coldplay’s “Yellow” at the novel’s conclusion.

I loved this idea, and it encouraged me to think about how to incorporate songs into more of my lessons. I took her idea, I used it, and added a couple of my own songs to the teaching of the novel. And today I’m going to share those songs and how I use them in my classroom.

First, let me share how I use Gatsby in my class - I use this novel to meet students where they are comfortable (with fiction) and I use it to evaluate where they are in their annotation skills as well as analysis.

With the recent movie version and with Jay-Z as executive producer of the soundtrack, I turned to it for inspiration. (Side note: this is one of my favorite soundtracks, hands down, so narrowing it to just a couple of songs to use proved daunting.)

I use a song for the first time with chapter three. It is the first time readers meet Gatsby, and it is the party scene. How fun can pairing a song here be? “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got)” with that chapter seemed like an obvious choice for me.

How I set it up (one class meeting, on block schedule)

1.      The class meeting after they are assigned to read Chapter three, they are given a copy of the lyrics.

2.      I have students draw a line from left to right between each stanza of the song.

3.      On the left side of the page, I have students read each stanza and write a small phrases that summarizes what the song is literally saying.

4.      On the right side of the page, I have students connect the lyrics to the novel, working with anything they have learned between chapters one to three. They cannot use anything past chapter three in their connections.

5.      Once they have completed this part of the assignment, students move on to the graphic organizer. The organizer asks students to think about their five best connections to the novel, write them, and then build on their use of commentary.

This allows me to see if students have been reading while allowing me to offer feedback on their annotations, their connections to the novel, and their commentary. It gives me a place to start building future lessons for them.

Students always ask to listen to the song as they’re working through lyrics, but I tell them I want them to embrace just the words on the page. If time allows, we will listen to it, but by the time they have worked through the song and graphic organizer, there is not time.

Note: Last year I included a sheet to help students think about their annotations. My students sit in groups of 4 to 6, depending on class size. Last school year they sat in groups of 6 to accommodate my class of 36. I created the annotation help sheet so I could move around the room, answer basic questions for students, offer encouragement, but still have something to guide those who were either too shy to ask for help.

My next use of songs happens the class meeting after the assigned final reading. Since my presenter used “Yellow” at novel’s end, and that’s where I started with using songs with Gatsby, that’s also where I started; however, with the soundtrack release, I added a second song as well, and I have loved the results, “Young & Beautiful.”

How I set it up (one class meeting for songs, on block schedule)(video start of next class)

1.      Each song has a graphic organizer that accompanies it. I photocopy the song on the left side of the page with the graphic organizer on the right; I photocopy this assignment front and back.

2.      I ask students to work with “Young & Beautiful” first; however, we view this song as a farewell letter from Daisy to Gatsby. I ask students to draw lines from left to right between each stanza. On the left side of the page, I ask students to write small phrases to tell me what Daisy is literally saying to Gatsby. On the right side, I ask them to connect the stanza to the novel as a whole.

3.      This is fun for me because it results in a lot of interesting conversations among the students. They have great ideas, and it is a way for me to tell almost instantly who has done their readings and who has not.

4.      For the graphic organizer, I want students to work with text evidence and commentary. This time I ask them to pull lyrics from the song to place in the left column; the right column is for their commentary.

5.      Students repeat the entire process above with “Yellow,” except this time they read it as a farewell letter from Gatsby to Daisy.

6.      At the conclusion of this assignment, we watch Coldplay’s video. I ask students to imagine Chris Martin as Gatsby singing to Daisy. We watch the video with no comment, and at video’s end, I ask students what they noticed about the colors, about his body language, about the rain, about looking over his shoulder, etc. It becomes a very interesting conversation.

Ladies and gents, this is how I use songs with The Great Gatsby. If you are interested in having a copy of either of these two lessons, please email me and I will be happy to send them to you as PDFs. 

UPDATE: You should be able to click on the link and it should take you to the assignment now. If you use it, I would love for you to revisit this post and share how it went.

There are so many ways to incorporate songs into our lessons in AP Language. I love using songs because songs define who we are as humans, and it is a common language that goes across generations.

I assign a song project with The Things They Carried as well. This project can be found in our #APLangChat Google folder. I included the assignment, the song list, and pictures of sample projects.

Last school year I used “Man in the Mirror” to teach my students how to notice shift, and this year I have written two lessons from the musical Hamilton, and each lesson ends with an argument prompt.

I would love to hear from you - do you use songs? If so, what do you use and how?

Happy Teaching!

          - The Hodgenator