The South meets South America

Around the festivities (five day weeked for Chilean idependence day), attendance in my classes has been really poor. Rather than teach the same thing again when everyone was there, I decided to fill the "extra" classes with a little culture.

As some of you know, I was big into country line dancing when I lived in Pennsylvania. I brought some of the music with me because I thought I might teach dance classes as an extra-curricular activity. That never materialized, but I finally got to put the music to use. In class, we read through the lyrics of a song called "I´m From the Country", then discussed vocabulary. Now, a bunch of Chilean kids know all about sawed-off shotguns and coonskin caps, in addition to folks and hay!

After we´d listened to the song, I rolled out the big surprise: we were going to learn the dance that goes with the song! My command to stand up and push back the desks was greeted with trepidation. But once we got going, they were totally into it! The guys were really great, especially considering the total lack of rhythm most guys in the U.S. have. They were skeptical when I told them they were good, so I explained that it took guys in my dance classes in the States months to dance as well as they had in a 30-minute lesson. After that, the students were beaming with pride, especially the ones who consider themselves gaming geeks!

Yee haw, y´all!