Yesterday, as a part of a new character-building curriculum, I played a game with my students called “Choose One.” The game gave students a choice of three items and asked them to choose one to be “gone forever.” Created as a way to provide some practice with group dynamics, discussion techniques and how to disagree with kindness, my class debated and discussed the three options on the board with their tablemates and then, as a class, we discussed which of the three we wanted to vote “off the island.”

The first slide had something like shoes, gloves or hats. The second one had yo-yo’s, kites or bubbles. The third was plane, boats or cars. Each time, the students had lively conversations with each other and we spent time talking about the group dynamics and, in addition to the virtues of each of the three choices, we discussed how to include the quieter students in our discussions and so forth. But the fourth slide made me think outside my classroom. The choice was books, TV or music. We, as a class, made the decision that TV meant anything that would show movies or videos and the class resoundingly and almost without hesitation promptly voted to get rid of music. Perhaps it was because their precious video games fell into the TV category, but some of them didn’t even feel like it was a difficult choice. One kid explained it as, “Well, at least books and movies could be educational, but music is just, well, it’s just music.”

I didn’t assert my opinion, I didn’t say anything other than to comment on the kind ways I had witnessed groups interacting with each other. But in my mind I thought of the impact that music has on me, especially right now.

Just a couple hours before this game was played, for example, a colleague down the hall was playing music in her room before the students arrived. She does this every day and it’s always great music from the 80’s that I can hear as I make my way to and from the copier before school starts. But this morning, the song caught me and gave me pause. Michael Jackson was singing, “Billie Jean,” a song that had become an inside joke between James and I. I can’t even tell you how it started but no matter where either of us were, if we heard that song, we would text each other the phrase or sometimes a short audio clip of the song to say, “Billie Jean is not my lover!” Car, grocery story, department store, no matter where we were, the song always made us turn and declared our imaginative disdain for Billie Jean as far as lovers go, or a quick text was sent for the same declaration.

Today, I sat across from my mother-in-law at lunch, talking about both of our late husbands, Sarah McLaughlin’s “I Will Remember You,” played at the restaurant. And while I waited in line at the grocery store tonight, my phone caught the title and singer of a song called, “In the Stars” by Benson Boone, which it then started playing the moment I turned my car on. Let me just say, these songs don’t hold any punches on a day already steeped with emotion.

Today, I might have voted music off the proverbial island just to get some emotional peace, but I can’t say I would agree with my students that it’s something I would want gone forever. I might struggle to listen to Katy Perry sing “Roar,” or Marc Cohn sing “True Companion” or Sarah McLaughlin sing nearly any song she wrote, but it’s because they touch me so deeply that I would never want them gone for good. I wonder at what point my ten-year old fourth graders will turn that corner with music when it becomes all-consuming and their way of feeling heard and seen in the world.

For today, we will hypothetically vote it off, but I hope it isn’t too long before they also feel the power that comes from songs.