In the Heights is a musical by Lin Manuel Miranda (who also wrote Hamilton). It follows characters in a Latinx community (‘The Heights’) in New York. There is one character - Nina - who comes back from college for the summer. Her first big song, Breathe, is about how she has failed her classes and feels like she has let down her community (where she was the first person to go to college) by dropping out. The song is about the feelings she has immediately after returning to New York. 

Nina sings about a childhood rooted so firmly in her community. She was the smart kid, and people are proud she’s made it to college.

I smile at the faces I’ve known all my life

They regard me with pride

And everyone’s sweet

They say “you’re going places”

But their pride is part of the burden she feels. They expect a lot of her.

Hey guys, it’s me:

The biggest disappointment you know.

The kid couldn’t hack it,

She’s back and she’s walkin’ real slow.

The tenses slide backwards as the song explores Nina’s memories. “This is my street” turns into “the days when this city was mine”, the “faces I’ve known all my life” into “faces I used to know”. The intensity of the song is this gap between past and present - Nina’s dislocation from her old identity.

I am the one who made it out

The one who always made the grade

But maybe I should have just stayed home

Because she is fundamentally a child of The Heights. Her adult ambitions were built out of the night and the iron of New York, but they have taken her somewhere unfamiliar. At the same time it’s hard not to notice how her song weaves an effortless harmony through the songs of everyone around her, and how smoothly her language switches between English and Spanish, even as she worries she’s let them down

When I was a child I stayed wide awake

Climbed to the highest place

On every fire escape.

Restless to climb 

I got every scholarship

Saved every dollar

The first to go to college

How do I tell them why

I’m coming back home

With my eyes on the horizon?

Just me and the GWB

Asking “Gee, Nina, what’ll you be?”

(GWB: George Washington Bridge)

It’s great writing. The open vowels landing with the horn section when she talks about who she was (awake/place/escape, scholarship/dollar/college), and softening into a longer chain over block chords (me/GWB/Gee/be) as she considers who she is.

There is a secondary guilt about the deception Nina feels she has to maintain, too.

Straighten the spine, smile for the neighbours.

Everything’s fine, everything’s cool.

The standard reply, “lots of tests, lots of papers”

Smile, wave goodbye and pray to the sky: oh God.

The walk Nina has taken through The Heights during the song takes her to her parent’s house, and the anxiety of telling them about dropping out is the dramatic tension at the end of the music.

And what will my parents say?

Can I go in there and say

“I know that I’m letting you down?”

Just breathe.

Personal Reflection

I don’t claim to understand everything about Nina’s situation. The specific community she sits in, the particular types of racism she experienced in Stanford, the personal dynamics between her and her father as different generations of immigrants to America. And yet I feel like the song shares something useful.

Because most people in HE teach someone with some of Nina’s experiences every day. The distinctive feeling of being the first in your community to go to University is something I will never experience personally, but it is valuable to think about how it might affect my students. The dramatisation of Nina’s experience is a chance to consider some of the ideas without imposing them on real people. For the sake of four minutes, you can hear Nina say what she wants to say. You can hear how she describes others “counting on her to succeed”, and understand how this made everything much harder for her than you might have expected. You can even hear - if you invest time in the whole musical - about how racism from other students at Stanford alienated her from a place which should have celebrated her.

The sense that different people experience the same world differently the great gift of art. Modern educators often talk about aggregated demographic data and theorised models of engagement. Nina’s song holds the easy grace of the truths someone discovers by living a life, even as it deals with the difficult risks of pursuing an education. Thinking about Nina’s situation won’t illuminate every aspect of your teaching, but it will make you a little kinder and cleverer in how you help your students learn. I think that’s worth something.