Teaching Idea #1: "Music is good for the history soul"

I always had a fascination with the relationship between music and history. It seems like most people don't realize that music has a great influence with events throughout history. Music has been a major component to some major political riots like when Rage Against The Machine played at the Democratic National Convention in 2000. Music is with us in the good of times and the bad. As a future teacher, I would like to incorporate this idea into an assignment.
For the start of a new decade in class, I would assign students to write a three page paper on a song from that decade and relate it to any kind of historic event. I hope that this wouldn't be a boring assignment since the students will have the freedom to pick their own song and event instead of being assigned one. It also gives a chance for the student to be a little creative. Creativity in a high school history class is rare (at least in my past experiences) and as a future teacher my goal is to do projects and assignments like these to get the students genuinely interested.

Introduction

For this blog I'm going to try my best to come up with original teaching ideas and concepts. There are millions of ways to approach a single topic and I want to approach it in such a unique way that the student will remember it years after. It's going to be quite a challenge to come up with original ideas, but I am going to try my best.