A Custom Birthday Song for Your Favorite Teacher

You have a week, twenty-two kids, and a growing sense that a card everyone signs is not going to cut it this year. The good news is that the collecting is the easy part. Sit the class down for ten minutes and ask three questions. What does she say every single day. What is the best thing in this room. What would you tell her if she were not standing right there.

Whatever comes back is the song. The phrase she repeats before every test. The name of the class hamster. The beanbag in the reading corner, and the way she pretends not to notice when someone sneaks a second book at cleanup time. Hand us those answers in plain sentences, spelling mistakes included, and we write them into an original track with a chorus short enough for the class to sing along with on the room speaker.

The worry worth taking seriously here is embarrassment. She has to stand in her own classroom while it plays, in front of twenty-two children and probably another teacher in the doorway. So we keep it in the register of the room: the jokes the class already makes out loud, nothing about her age, nothing a nine-year-old would not say to her face. If there is a subject to leave alone, put that in the notes and we leave it alone. Nobody has to write, rhyme, or record anything. You just send what the kids said.

What you get is an original studio-quality song written from your class's details, $19.99, sent to your email within 24 hours.

Start by writing down the one sentence she says every day of the year. That line is usually the chorus. Put it at the top of the order form and go from there.