You're Telling Me There's Music Other Than Salsa?

This week, I taught what I felt was the most enriching lesson so far to these kids. Seventh graders were learning about musical instruments, so I told the teacher I wanted to do a lesson about musical genres popular outside of Colombia. I started the lesson by asking the kids what musical genres they knew. Of course, they started with the few that are popular here: Salsa, Cumbia, Vallenato, Reggaeton, Champeta, etc. Then I asked them about any others, perhaps outside of here that aren't so popular in Colombia. I got a few responses. One said rock, one said rap, more than one said opera, which confused me. But for the most part, that exhausted their knowledge of "world music." I put many more genres on the board and explained a bit about each one. Although it was technically an English class, I spoke mostly in Spanish. I really wanted the kids to understand and broaden their horizons, if that meant that they didn't learn much English one day. I was a bit dismayed at how unforgiving these kids were if I made a mistake in speaking Spanish. Now, I'm not fluent, but I speak decent Spanish. But whenever I made a mistake, every student at the same time corrected me, in the most condescending tone possible. Hey, at least I'm trying. Despite having 7 years of English class, these kids for the most part can't formulate a simple sentence if their life depended on it, but I'm always encouraging and non-judgmental. I definitely don't get the same in return.

I then described a bit about each genre. When I got to Blues and mentioned slavery in American, my teacher added a few interesting pieces of history. She told the class that back then, slaves weren't allowed to sit in the front of buses until Martin Luther King Jr became president and fought for their rights. After I made the longest sigh ever, I started correcting all the things wrong with that statement. After some American history damage control, I played short examples of each musical genre to the students. No matter what I played, during each song, there are at least a couple kids that get up in their seat and start dancing typical, ridiculous little kid dances, even to Beethoven. I found this fairly amusing. Next, I would call on volunteers to come to the front, where I would play a song and they would have two guesses to guess what genre of music it is. I kept it pretty easy for them, and they performed mediocre to fair in guessing the genre, which is about all I can ask for considering these kids have never heard this music before.