Malaysian High School Musical

Jackie shared a successful lesson plan with the rest of the ETAs that I thought I'd try out. Play the students a song from High School Musical and give them a worksheet of the lyrics with some deleted words that they had to fill in. I had, um, mixed results at best.

For the first class I had forgotten Murphy's law, which clearly states that I will not be able to play a song from a laptop when I need to. Basically not only did the speakers not plug into the outlet (that's right, Malaysian plugs sometimes need converters to work in their own outlets), but the laptop I rented from the school didn't have any audio drivers on it, so that was a bust too. If you ever want to break your heart a little bit, tell a group of 16 year-old girls to pass back their High School Musical worksheets. On an unrelated note, if you ever want to make someone's day, tell a group of 16 year-old boys to pass back their High School Musical worksheets.

Noticing an opportunity for discussion when I saw one, I turned the conversation to the nature of disappointment. I asked them for their most disappointing moments and after a short discussion I got answers from the entire class which ran the gamut from:
"My sister broke my teddy bear" to
"My mom passed away" to
"Arsenal lost to Manchester."

I would've though it was impossible to follow up the death of a parent with an unfavorable result from a football match, but then I would've been wrong. Still, you don't really know what to say to that, do you? The crazy thing was how unfazed the girl seemed about saying it. I pointed out to the class that from this, we can take away:
1. Bad things happening seem to be a part of life.
2. Not getting to hear High School Musical didn't make the list.

Since we had a few minutes left, I asked them to say their happiest moment, many of which were related to their previous disappointments, and many others ("getting a new teddy bear") could just lead to future disappointments. So in that way I tried to teach them about cyclical nature of disappointment and happiness.

After fixing all of the problems with the laptop, I was ready to play the High School Musical song for the next class, which, much to the disappointment of the 4 boys in the class and myself, suffered from no difficulties, other than the ones inherrent in the song itself.

On the plus side, I got to teach the students the valuable phrase "I died a little just then" in order to accurately describe my feelings after listening to Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens twice in a 7 minute time-span. Plus, since it was clear that the guys were just as unhappy as I was, I asked them what kind of music they did like (very little of which I would've been allowed to play in the class), which quickly became a discussion about what made music good. And given my background in philsophy, I couldn't help but turn the conversation towards the idea of objective versus subjective goods, teaching them the difference between "It's great" and "I like it." As always, I think I enjoy myself more than the students do, but I'm pretty sure they're having fun. And if they hate it, I can always get them new teddy bears to make it up to them.