What Your Teen’s Song Picks for the School Magazine Say About Them
The request came on a Tuesday afternoon, right as I was packing up my bag. Maya, one of the eighth graders on the school magazine committee, hovered by my desk with her notebook pressed against her chest. She had that look—the one that says “I’m about to ask a favor and I’m already bracing for a no.”
“Some song recommendations for my school’s magazine, pls,” she said, all one breath.
I thought she meant I should give her a list of my own favorites. “Like, for me to write?” I asked.
“No, like—can you ask the teachers? We want to put a page in the magazine where teachers recommend songs. So students can see what you all listen to.”
I said sure, because it seemed easy. I’d ask a few colleagues, gather maybe three or four names, pass them along, and that would be it.
It was not it.
First, I had to chase people down. The PE teacher gave me “Eye of the Tiger” with a laugh, saying it was the only song that got him through lesson plans. The art teacher offered a Sufjan Stevens track, then apologized for being “that teacher.” The math teacher, a quiet woman in her fifties, wrote down “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac without a word of explanation. I turned in six songs total and felt proud of myself.
Then Maya came back a few days later, holding a printout of our list. “This is great,” she said, “but can we also add student picks? Like, a matching page?”
I hesitated. The magazine committee had a deadline. The kids were already drowning in proofreads. But she had that same hover, and I’ve learned that when a middle schooler asks for something twice, it matters.
So I told her to go ahead.
What happened next surprised me. Maya and three other students posted a question on the school’s online forum: “What song should go in the magazine—one that you’d want a teacher to see?” They got over fifty responses in two days. When I peeked over their shoulders during a meeting, I saw they were doing something I hadn’t expected. They were reading the song titles out loud and arguing.
“No, you can’t put that one next to the teachers’ list. It’s a breakup song.”
“But the teacher’s one is also sad, though. So it fits.”
“It’s not sad. It’s about a dream.”
They weren’t just collecting titles. They were thinking about what the songs meant, what they said about a person, and how the list might look to a stranger flipping through the magazine.
I stood back and watched them for a while. That was the moment I realized this whole request wasn’t about filling a page. The kids wanted to put something personal into their magazine, something that carried a heartbeat. And by asking the teachers first, they’d given us the safety screen: if we offered up our music, they would risk theirs.
Parents often ask me how to get a teenager to open up. They complain that questions like “How was school?” or “How are you feeling?” bounce off with a shrug and a grunt. But I’ve noticed that music is different. A song recommendation is a small, safe piece of a person. You can give it away without fully explaining yourself. You can test the waters: Here, listen to this—and if you get it, maybe you get me a little more.
That’s why the ordinary advice—just talk to your teen about their favorite music—often fails. Asking “What kind of music do you like?” is too direct. It puts a teenager on the spot, and the standard answer is “I don’t know, everything.” But asking “What song should go in a school magazine?” gives them a job to do. It becomes a curatorial task, not a confession.
Over the following week, the magazine committee worked on what they began calling the “Soundtrack of Our Year” page. They picked six teacher songs and six student songs. They wrote short blurbs for each. For the teacher entries, they wrote things like “Mrs. R. says this song helps her grade papers—we assume it works” and “Mr. T. chose this because it’s the only song he knows all the words to.” The blurbs were funny, respectful, light.
But their own entries were different. One girl chose a song from a video game soundtrack and wrote, “This feels like the level where you finally know the controls.” Another boy picked a hip-hop track and wrote, “The lyrics are loud but the meaning is quiet.” I didn’t fully understand all of their choices. That was fine. I understood that they were telling us something real in a language that was theirs.
When the magazine came out, I saw kids reading that page during break. Some were sharing earbuds, listening to a teacher’s pick and scrunching their faces. One eighth grader walked over to the art teacher and said, “I didn’t know you liked Sufjan Stevens,” and they ended up standing by the window talking for fifteen minutes. The music page made connections that a “Meet Your Teachers” Q&A never could have.
The practical lesson for adults is simple, but it takes some restraint. When a teenager hands you a song, don’t immediately explain what it means or give a lecture on its lyrical quality. Just say “tell me about it” or “what’s the one part you always wait for?” That kind of question gives them room. It doesn’t demand a summary or a justification. It says: I’m not going to judge this, I’m just curious.
I’ve also started borrowing the magazine committee’s trick in my own classroom. Instead of asking kids to write an essay about a character’s motivation, I sometimes ask them to pick a song that character would listen to and defend the choice. The thinking work is the same—identifying emotional truth, finding evidence—but it’s more accessible. A student who struggles to write a paragraph about symbolism can, without hesitation, explain why a song about waiting would fit a character who spends half the book lying in a hospital bed.
Music gives them a vocabulary for feelings they haven’t yet built the words for. Middle school is a time when emotions run high and language runs short. A song can say “I’m anxious” or “I miss someone” without ever using those words. When we accept those songs as valid forms of expression, we’re telling kids that what they feel is worth paying attention to. We don’t need to decode every track or write a psycho-analysis. We just need to hold the list with respect.
A few days after the magazine was distributed, Maya left a sticky note on my desk. There was a list of six songs on it with a caption that said “new songs for next issue?” She had drawn a tiny music note next to one of them. I didn’t know most of the artists. Some of the lyrics, when I looked them up, felt a little too loud for me, a little too repetitive. One was strangely gentle.
I wrote back under her note: “Good list. I’ll start asking.”
I haven’t. Not yet. The conversation is still open, and the last thing I want to do is make it a formal assignment. She’ll ask again in a few weeks, and I’ll ask the teachers, and we’ll go through it all over. The magazine will come out again. Some songs will make sense, some won’t. That’s okay. The point isn’t that we all end up humming the same tune. The point is that the kids trust us enough to show us their music—and we trust them enough to let their choices stand without too many questions. For now, that’s enough.
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