My Music Journal: January 15, 2025

 

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Time: 10:08 AM
Song: Don’t Know Why
Artist: Norah Jones
Mode of Consumption: Spotify – List of possible songs from the year 2002 for Mixtape Challenge.

Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/7f5zk7bC3XL5AuGvrg6rsp?si=20541c8383814846

This is the third post concerning my Mixtape Challenge to create a playlist of songs from 2000-2004. 

My first three years after college I worked as a teacher’s assistant in a behavioral disorder program at the local high school. It was a humbling experience, working for minimum wage while also moonlighting as a part-timer for the sports department at a newspaper.

The humbling part wasn’t only that I had gone through all those years of schooling only to be making less money than I did working at the factory in the summer, but more than that, I was confronted with my own privilege.

I was surrounded by students ranging in age from seventh grade to seniors in high school who came from chaotic home lives, had to overcome biological and psychological challenges that I couldn’t understand, and do all that while tackling most of the same teenage pressures and changes as their peers in the mainstream high school courses.

These kids were never going to go to college. They likely were going to struggle to graduate high school. Their bodies betrayed them. Their medications altered their personalities. Their parents were often inadequate sources of support. It all contributed to their placement in the program, isolating them from peers for their peers’ benefit. Many of these students struggled to maintain their behavior in classrooms, usually becoming belligerent when they weren’t already requiring excessive amounts of a teacher’s attention. That doesn’t even get into their academic and learning challenges.

Those days in that single classroom could drag. No changes of classes. Minimal changes in the teacher. Their teenage dispositions bubbling and sometimes exploding.

One of our defenses was music. Calming music, which we played whenever we were providing time for them to work individually on assignments. So pretty much daily, if not multiple times during a school day.

Our selection was limited. One CD was Norah Jones’ album “Come Away from Me.” When “I Don’t Know Why” opens that album, I feel some of the tension in my shoulders, and I think of those kids, who now are in their thirties. For those whose fate I don’t know, I wonder where they are. Did they make it in the real world? Did they age out of some of their issues? I only hope that I helped in some way.

My five choices for 2002

1. Do You Realize? By The Flaming Lips
2. I Am the Highway by Audioslave
3. Letters to God by Boxcar Racer
4. Hurt by Johnny Cash
5. Don’t Know Why by Norah Jones