This article tells about how teachers with little or no background in music at Aynor Elementary School in South Carolina are using the guitar to reinforce spelling, rhyming patterns, vocabulary words, history lessons, and math and science facts. Since 2003, 24 of the school's 30-odd teachers have learned to play well enough to accompany their students through Guitars in the Classroom, a program founded by Santa Cruz, California, educator Jessica Baron Turner to help stanch the ongoing decline of music education in schools. Turner points out that such creative approaches often work wonders with "unconventional learners, anxious children, kids with disabilities, and kids who are not fluent in English"--the same students who are marginalized by the current focus on standardization. The 46-year-old educator, who has a bachelor's degree in child development and a master's in clinical psychology, started the program in 1998, largely in response to frustrations voiced by teachers in the California schools where she worked as a music specialist.