Until recently, a Canadian metropolitan school board’s Code of Conduct banned cell phones in classrooms, yet it made no mention of headphones. Students caught onto this policy loophole and wore headphones at school. Concerned about the impact of headphone use on student learning, teachers and parents demanded a revision of the Code of Conduct, which now includes “attachments such as earbuds and headphones” in its definition of a personal mobile device.Drawing on fifteen hours of naturalistic observations conducted in a public high school “vocals” classroom in fall 2024, seven semi-structured interviews with three focal students and the music teacher, and the analysis of relevant policies and newspaper articles, this ethnographic study (Gershon, 2019) examines how Jayla, Ari, and Jay (pseudonyms), all of whom self-identify as Black girls, used headphones to navigate their everyday experiences of schooling.The three students used their headphones a) intentionally, by directing their academic focus and regulating their emotions, b) ingeniously, by customising their soundscapes in culturally relevant ways, and c) strategically, by refusing schooling’s anti-Blackness while complying with general behavioural expectations. For instance, Jayla and Jay listened to low-volume music from artists such as The Weeknd, æspa, and Billie Eilish to focus on tedious schoolwork, while Ari used pink noise to get through challenging school tasks. Jayla used noise-cancelling to tune out the audience’s hubbub while waiting to perform at a school assembly, and Ari played loud music in mono audio to manage frustration when “someone is trying to argue with me and it’s something stupid.”To interpret these practices, I draw on media studies and Black studies scholarship, including Hagood’s orphic mediation (2019), Weheliye’s (2005) sonic Afro-modernity, and Givens’s (2021) Black fugitivity in education. While headphones gave students control over their focus and emotional states, they foreclosed encounters with sonic difference. Furthermore, they helped frame structural inequities as individual behavioural problems (Hagood, 2019). In addition, headphones allowed the three Black girls to self-fashion themselves as neither completely compliant nor entirely opposed to normative—i.e., white, middle-class—sonic expectations (Weheliye, 2005). Headphones offered students a practical yet precarious means to navigate the inherently anti-Black systems of modern schooling (Givens, 2021). Ultimately, the policy revision foreclosed these students’ creative strategy of refusal and reasserted dominant white, middle-class sonic norms under the guise of neutrality and safeguarding the interests of all students.