Personally, I think it’s a bullshit assignment. Mere busy work with a faint air of relevance and lacking even the minor virtues claimed by most other busy work. When a math teacher hands out assignments for no other reason than to assign homework, or when an English teacher makes you copy out spelling or vocabulary lists, at least the repetition reinforces some lesson or another (even if superfluously). Moreover, such assignments can often be done rather mindlessly by those who already understand the lesson.
The soundtrack assignment, meanwhile, seems to have no redeeming value whatsoever. It’s homework for the sake of homework that serves no educational value. I suspect that many teachers imagine it to be an “activity,” rather than homework, and thus somehow “fun.” The wealth of questions on Fluther and Yahoo! Answers suggests otherwise, however. Instead, it strikes me as an outgrowth of a lazy approach to multimedia education.
Multimedia education is great: it allows students who are not best engaged through traditional methods to learn at a higher level than they otherwise would. It seems to me, though, that too many young teachers fail to realize that doing it correctly involves just as much attention and effort on their part as any other approach to education. It’s the same attitude that makes some teachers think the presence of visual aids relieves them of the responsibility to teach.
Thus you get assignments like this one that look like the right kind of thing while functioning as nothing more than filler. Students will find their education interesting when their assignments go beyond merely informing them and instead begin to enlighten them. There’s nothing more galvanizing for students than the feeling that they’ve grasped something. The “eureka” moment is addictive, especially when the student is not simply handed the information. Students achieve when their education is an actual achievement. They do not learn when it is just one more hurdle in a race.
@ninjacolin Shakespeare’s work is actually plenty interesting. The problem is that it is meant to be performed on a stage, not read from a book. The common approach to Shakespeare in classrooms these days is quite unfortunate, so I do not blame you for getting nothing out of it. I encourage you to go see a Shakespeare play live sometime, though. If you can read about it beforehand, so as to get some background information about what’s going on, all the better. Understanding breeds appreciation.