(Enlarge) With youngsters of Pine Grove Elementary School dancing in the foreground, teacher Justin Pugh performs during a concert that serves as a reward for those students who completed reading goals from November to March. Pugh uses music as a teaching tool, and has self-produced three CDs about reading. (Staff photo by Sarah Nix)

A ticket to a rock concert just for reading some books or even the daily paper? Sounds like one sweet deal.

Students in the Panda Power Reading Program at Pine Grove Elementary School needed to put in 20 minutes a day reading --they can get credit for reading anything but comics -- in order to attend a reward concert performed by fourth-grade teacher Justin Pugh on May 12.

Fully half of the school's 449 students made the cut, according to principal Rick Weber.

"It's non-stop action! The kids are singing along and dancing ... he has rock star status," Weber said.

Pugh's classes know what to expect, since their teacher, who has been a fixture at Pine Grove for 10 of his 11 years in the field, has been playing guitar in class and using music as a learning tool since his own experience teaching them about American Indians.

"The class was struggling through the names of tribes and didn't do well on a quiz. I went home and wrote a song" aptly named "Native Americans," Pugh said. "The next day we learned it and I regave the quiz. The kids wrote down the exact words and got As and Bs."

Pugh, 32, said he knows that putting facts to music works: He also cites the ever-popular alphabet song, which even adults still use when asked what letters come before others.

That's what got him going composing his own songs, such as "I Want to go to the Library," "American Literate" and "Boulevard of Where I Read," later self-producing three (short) CDs about reading, "the core skill they need to know. There are so many ways it's beneficial; that's why I focus on it," said the teacher, although not a reading specialist himself.

A fourth, full-length CD, "Rock Music for Education" includes 25 songs for all subjects, even one composed at the request of a fellow teacher about writing what he called a BCR, for a "brief constructed response" found in standardized tests. Other titles range from "Compound Words" to "Mode, Median, Range" and "Family of the Sun." All proceeds from his CDs go to the Pine Grove Elementary's Parent-Teacher Association.

Pugh writes music and lyrics in as little as 10 minutes and sometimes virtually on demand, with a current repertoire of 40-45 songs.

But while his favorite band and musical inspiration is Green Day, a pop punk blend of fast guitars and drums, with vocals that are more melodious than punk, his educational model is Schoolhouse Rock!, that animated series of educational shorts set to rock music which ran between Saturday morning cartoons on ABC from 1973-86 and 1993-2001. One of their most memorable is "Conjunction Junction, What's Your Function?" Like that show, "My main goal is to make learning fun," Pugh said. "Kids today need a constant stimulus. They are bombarded by so much electronic media, such as TV, iPods, Game Boy ..."

Pugh's 2 1/2-year-old son Sawyer may like the sing-song appeal of children's music, but as for older youngsters, Pugh said, there's no real music that they would consider cool. Children sing along to the rock music they listen to, but they have no idea what the lyrics mean. They need music, he said, that is appealing and has meaningful lyrics."That's the kind of thing I'm doing," like Schoolhouse Rock! with updated music and lyrics both catchy and educational, as in the chorus of "American Literate":

Sick and tired of playing PlayStation

I wanna use my imagination

Where I can be a wizard or solve a crime

Television just can't fulfill me

A book can make me whoever I wanna be

Oh won't you read a book, too.

"It's a real hook for the kids," said principal Weber, a musician himself, noting that every teacher employs some of these stratagies. "But Justin has more than music in his bag of tricks. He has a unicycle and some wheel thing with strings ... weird little gimmicks."

From a family of educators, Pugh said he always liked watching people learn since he was a 14-year-old teaching windsurfing. He saw how his elementary- and middle-school teacher dad used entertainment to get and keep students' attention, making learning fun and interesting.

And apparently the tricks work. In 2006 Pugh was named Teacher of the Year by Baltimore County Chamber of Commerce Excellence in Education program and has since been nominated for the Maryland Council of Teaching Mathematics Teacher of the Year Award, as well.

But what if his music should find its way to the desk or iPod of some TV children's programming honcho?

"I'll go wherever it takes me," Pugh said. "I enjoy teaching the most. I didn't become a teacher to become a musician. But if it takes me near or far, that's great because it's done to help students."

And no less a personality than Howard Stern is quoted on Pugh's Web site as saying, "I see there's a whole ton of guys now who get to perform in rock bands because they do kid's music ... Hey Gary, (Stern's sidekick) give me the [CD of the] library guy (Pugh) first because he's the best."

Luckily, for everyone who isn't (yet) a Panda Power reading program success story, Pugh performs not only in his classroom and as a reward to student but in his own Rock-n-Read 2009 tour with upcoming gigs at White Marsh Child Care Center on June 4, at Cedarmere Elementary on June 7 and at parties, festivals and fairs, book stores and summer camp.

Find out all about his schedule and availability at rockmusicforeducation.com and contact Pugh at justin@rockmusicforeducation.com or by calling 443-504-8241.

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