This week, we were to create a lesson plan using jazz chants, songs, video, or games. Being a lyricist myself, I thought it would be really fun to create a lesson plan around a few of my favorite songs that have the same general themes. Emotions. Love. Daily activities. Something like that.
As I began to search my iTunes library, however, I found that most of the music I listen to is lyrically contextual and ambiguous. As I listened to them with a foreign ear, and an ear that has not been exposed to a lot of English, I realized that the task of finding culturally appropriate material that would not lose too much meaning in translation might be a little more difficult than I had originally anticipated. Even some of the songs that seem pretty straightforward to me, or have a lot of meaning to me, all of a sudden became too abstract and meaningless when I listened to them with a foreign ear. This is all not to mention that anything insinuating the use of drugs, sexual misdoings, or politically "hot" had to be automatically ruled out.
I have had this issue at other instances as well, when trying to begin a collection of realia to use in my teaching.
We really do say some curious things with our language.
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