Friday, May 2, 2014

In Which We Become Choreographers

So, Monday is Children's Day here in South Korea, and our school had a party for it. The concept for the party was a singing and dancing contest, and to be quite honest, I thought it was going to suck quite a bit, especially since the songs they chose were pretty tough. The really young kids were singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (they loved the weemowhats), the second to youngest kids were singing "Kung Fu Fighting" (the old, racist version), the middle grade kids were singing a song called "Like Wow" from Shrek, and the older kids were singing "Love is an Open Door" from Frozen. Our classes were all doing either Kung Fu Fighting or Like Wow, which was a song I had never heard before, and they had a hard time picking up the lyrics, because they're really fast. Nancy and I both thought that the actual party would be a pretty major bust. However, it turned out to be just the opposite. Most of the students had a great time, and I found myself having tons of fun, too.

I had a hard time thinking up dance moves for my first class and we hadn't really practiced the song, so they didn't do that well, though one of them had plenty of energy. With my second class, we went to practice and I asked them, "What dance do you want to do?" and they said, "You make, you make!" I said, "Well, okay," and proceeded to make up an AWESOME dance! The result can be viewed in the following video:


I'd never choreographed anything before, but I thought I did a fair job, and my students LOVED it. I was surprised that even the shy boys and the quiet girls were getting into it. The other classes were really fun to watch, and overall the whole activity was a success. The class shown in the video got second place. I thought they deserved first, but I was the judge and I was afraid that all of the other teachers would say I was nepotistic if I gave it to them. So, there you have it. If you're ever working at a Korean private school and they say they're going to have a song and dance party, don't nix it, totally go along with it, because it will be a blast. That's about all I've got for the day. We're heading off on our vacation tomorrow! This is Captain Danger out.

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