Teacher makes music covers to help students remember lessons

On her 45-minute commute to and from her home in Fayetteville to teach health and physical education at Lee County High School, Amy Todd turns on the radio.

When music plays on FOXY 99, one of Fayetteville’s hip hop and R&B stations, she pays close attention to the lyrics. Every once in a while, she’ll scoff at their absurdity.

“I’ll be like, ‘That’s ridiculous,’” she said, sitting in her classroom one recent Tuesday afternoon. “Let’s just take the lyrics out of that and call it something else.”

So she took the songs and made them into her own, rewriting the lyrics of popular hits with words and phrases that would get difficult lessons across to her students.

Because her classes are required electives, Todd, who’s taught at Lee County High School for 15 years, only sees her students 90 days of the school year. The information she teaches is only delivered to them once.

Making the lessons into song, Todd said, is a way to get her students to remember and make better decisions in the future.

Since 2014, she’s recorded well over 100 songs of her own in the name of getting her lessons to stick.

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