Thursday, July 23, 2009

The Boys Love to Dance

Ok, ignoring how long it's been since the last post and the failed attempt to start something new at Wordpress (maybe I'll move someday, but not yet.) Let's get started with a real post!!

Right now my school is in it's summer camp season, which means I have a one class for 4 hours but as a rare treat I can do whatever I want in class. Two of my passions being music and movies I decided to make my camp on those and focus on Western, and more specifically because I know it, American pop culture.

Today I decided to compare American pop music to Korean Pop music. For those who are unaware of it the boy and girl bands live on and strong in Korea. Something that I thought I left so far behind in my early teenage years when *NSYNC and Spice Girls were popular. However, the thing about KPop is that it gets under your skin, plus there is nothing like seeing your students break out into the full dance of a song by mentioning two lines or seeing an entire club of Koreans go into this dance when it comes on. Think I'm wrong? Tell me you aren't entertained by the thought of people breaking out into this.

So, how does one compare pop music to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders who barely understand English...show them *NSYNC videos of course! Let them know that Korea is not the only place that had boy bands and I wanted to see if any of them would try to do the dance. Well a few of them did, more specifically the boys did. I found this very interesting. While I'm trying not to get horrible high school flashbacks by listening to Bye Bye Bye the young boys are standing there, studying the movements of Justin Timberlake and the other boys whose names I can't remember and trying to pull them off. Meanwhile the girls just sat there and watched.

Maybe this is because I'm thinking of my brother who wouldn't try to dance if his life depended on it but in American culture at least, wouldn't it be the girls trying to dance and the boys refusing? Perhaps it was because it was a boy band and the girls didn't want to dance to a "boy's song," but they did not move! Eventually one of the boys gave up and decided to do one of his Tae-Kwon do forms, but made sure to do it to the beat of the song, which I really appreciated and wished I had my camera for.

But now I'm definitely scouring youtube to see if I can find anymore good girl or boy band music vids from back in the day to show my students. Who knows, perhaps I'll be able to get them to learn an English dance!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That K-Pop band was very entertaining.

 
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