Ok, I was hesitating all this week, but I decided to go ahead and take the 50th post on this blog... I wish I could say that it was 50/50 who posted what, but I've been a bit quiet here.
Anyway, a couple weeks ago one of the teachers asked me to come up with a song about New York City that was modern and had the names of the monuments in it. At this point I was rejecting the idea of going with "New York, New York," by Frank Sinatra or the age old Broadway classic because they're kind of old. (And on a sad side note- the kids in one class didn't even know who Frank Sinatra was!) So I decided to go with a song that has been on the radio within the last couple of years, "Empire State of Mind," which has a catchy chorus and the "hip" factor I was looking for. The problem was that I only remembered the chorus and a couple of lines of the actual rap because I never paid that close attention to the song. Mistake one. Then, a couple days before I was to do the lesson, I chose to use the Glee version because 1. it's slower and 2. I thought it would be cleaner. Mistake two. As I was preparing the night before I glanced over the lyrics, saw that there were some minor parts that wouldn't be easy to explain, but I thought I could come up with an alternative translation that wouldn't be offensive. The example of this being a line that is "everyone rode her just like a bus route," I thought I could explain away that that meant she was very popular with the boys and had a lot of dates. I didn't spend too much time looking over the rest of the lyrics. Mistake three.
After all this, I knew the song would be a little difficult for the kids, but I thought, in the end, that they would enjoy it none-the-less because it's modern and still popular enough in the US. Many of them actually already knew the chorus of the song, just like I did, and sang along while I played it for them. By "knew" I mean they knew the general sounds of the words, but not really words themselves. Fine, all good. It wasn't until I was standing in front of the class being asked what things meant that I realized what a bad mistake I made. For one, there is tons of slang in it that I don't even understand which I had to pretend to know and try to explain to the kids. Here come the troubling phrases. "Took it to my stash spot," "corners where we selling rocks," and "MDMA got you feeling like a champion," to name a few. (Side note again- on the website that I just used to look up these lyrics there were some pornographic images... pleasant.) I was sweating bullets by the end of the class period, hoping that we would run out of time before we got to those specific lyrics. Thankfully we mostly did, but it was a close one. Lesson learned: read ALL the lyrics of the song well in advance to the lesson itself.
On a much lighter note, next week I'm going to teach the children to sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer- if you can think of any references to drugs or prostitution in that song, please be sure to comment and let me know, I never want to go through a class period like the last one again.
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